Max Beatty

On Fri­day, I finally got back to Bloom­ing­ton to pick up a stack of cups with my Lit­tle 500 logo from Piz­zaX (for­merly Pizza Express) that they had set aside just for me and wanted to thank them pub­licly for their small effort that meant a lot to me.

Logo on Piz­zaX cups (for­merly Pizza Express)

If you read my blog, you prob­a­bly know a logo I designed was selected for the IU Lit­tle 500 race this year. One of the many places it ended up was on the side of cups from Pizza Express. Any time any­one in Bloom­ing­ton ordered a drink from Pizza Express they also received some of my art work. As soon as I found this out, I was order­ing their Big X Bar­gain every cou­ple of days so I could col­lect as many cups as pos­si­ble to give to friends and family.

The week after the race Pizza Express under­went a name change to Piz­zaX which was reflected on their new green cups. I was bummed my cups weren’t being deliv­ered any more but then had a thought they might have extras lay­ing around. I sent @PizzaX a mes­sage on Twit­ter ask­ing if they had any extra cups and if I could have them. A few days later, they sent me a DM say­ing they had a stack set aside for me at their office and I could come pick them up at my convenience.

This isn’t the great­est story ever told about the gen­eros­ity of a com­pany, but I thought it was very cool of them. It didn’t cost them any­thing to set aside some extra out­dated cups, and it didn’t take me any­thing but my spare time to write up a lit­tle free press for them (how­ever min­i­mal it may be).

It was also very cool this was all set up via Twit­ter. We never emailed each other, exchanged phone calls, or met face to face. I hope more small busi­nesses use Twit­ter to inter­act with their local cus­tomers (and not just to give away free stuff). I would have been just as con­tent if they replied that they didn’t have any extra cups. It was more impor­tant that they reached out and com­mu­ni­cated with aver­age lit­tle me. Thanks PizzaX!