1 - They are often cheap, hot, and easy. When I was scraping by and working long hours chain pizza was a saviour, and so much a step up from frozen grocery store pizza.
2 - I have very, very rarely worked what anyone would call “normal” hours. That is also true of a lot of low-pay shiftwork or folks working multiple jobs to make ends meet. The chains usually have much longer hours than local joints (plus the benefit of #1 above)
3 - For folks with actual allergies or food sensitivities (as in, people who really truly need to be careful about this stuff) often these chains may be the only place who will put in the effort to ensure your meals are allergy-friendly consistently, since “a Dominoes caused anaphylaxis” is a lot worse than “soandso local joint” did)
I am all for local pizza. Austin has an amazing place (in a gas station no less!) that also has a “pay it forward” system where they literally feed the underprivileged that come by from customer tips. I love supporting them. But that doesn’t mean my local chain pizza places don’t get ordered from from time to time when I don’t have time to go pick up my pie or because it’s midnight and I haven’t eaten dinner yet because people are angry on the internet and I’m not done moderating yet.
My best-ever chainstore pizza was at Domino’s – in Antigua Guatemala, with a crunchy wheat+cornmeal crust and tangy toppings. Alas, that’s a long drive from our central California locale. A good but pricey local pizzeria is nearby but the closest chainstores are 1/2 hour away on mountain roads
Nobody delivers pizzas by drones in our forest so we manage with cheap CostCo frozen Kirkland ten-inch cheese pizzas, a four-pack for ten bucks US, which we top-off as desired. Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads, eat them up, yum. Ya can’t get that at Domino’s.
You don’t live in Western Massachusetts, which has been mentioned on Serious Eats pizza comments as having the worst pizza in the country. And it is true.
Chains aren’t better, but local is terrible.
The style is referred as greasy Greek pizza. It turns the box yellow/orange, shifts around by the time you get it home, and the dough is usually undercooked (it also induces bad heartburn due to lousy acidic sauce and burnt oregano)
My local pizza shop is happy to sell me a dough ball to make at home, and most of the supermarkets I go to also have pizza dough in the refrigerator section. Easy and fast.
To make a decent pizza you should have an oven with some peculiar characteristics.
Basically the temperature should be in the 450 C range and have a refractory stone base.
So you keep the cooking time short.
On a regular oven you could do a focaccia, that look like a thick pizza, but it’s a different recipe.
