Kaiju Preservation Society
John Scalzi
To Alexis Saarela,
my favorite publicist;
and to Matthew Ryan,
who writes the songs
CHAPTER
1
“Jamie Gray!” Rob Sanders popped his head out of his office door and waved at me, grinning. “Come on down. Let’s do this thing.”
I got up from my workstation and grabbed the tablet with my notes, grinning as well. I glanced over to Qanisha Williams, who gave me a quick fist bump. “Knock him dead,” she said.
“Stone dead,” I said, and walked into the CEO’s office. It was time for my performance review, and I’m not gonna lie, I was going to crush it.
Rob Sanders welcomed me in and motioned me over to his “conversation pit,” as he liked to call it, which was four massive, primary-colored beanbags around a low table. The table was one of those ones that had a magnetic bead that dragged around blinding white sand under the glass, making geometric patterns as it did so. Currently the bead was making a swirly pattern. I picked the red beanbag and sank into it, only a little awkwardly. My tablet briefly flopped out of my hand, and I caught it before it skittered off the beanbag and onto the floor. I looked up at Sanders, who was still standing, and smiled. He smiled back, rolled over a standard desk chair and sat in backward, arms crossed over the back, looking down at me.
Oh, I see, CEO power move, very nice, I thought. I wasn’t worried about it. I understood how CEO egos worked, and I was prepared to navigate my way through this one. I was here for my six-month performance evaluation from Rob, and I was going to, as previously stated, knock him dead.
“Comfortable?” Rob asked me.
“Supremely,” I said. As discreetly as possible, I adjusted my center of gravity so I was no longer listing ever so slightly starboard.
“Good. How long have you been here at füdmüd, Jamie?”
“Six months.”
“And how do you feel about your time here?”
“I’m glad you asked, Rob. I feel really good about it. And in fact”—I held up my tablet—“I’d like to spend some time in this session talking about how I think we can improve not just the füdmüd app, but our relationships with restaurants, delivery people, and users. It’s 2020 now, and the food delivery app space has matured. We really need to go all out to distinguish ourselves if we want to genuinely compete with Grubhub and Uber Eats and all the others, here in NYC and beyond.”
“So you think we can improve?”
“Yeah, I do.” I attempted to lean forward in the beanbag and succeeded only in driving my ass farther into its recesses. I rolled with it and just pointed to my tablet. “So, you’ve heard about this COVID-19 thing.”
“I have,” Rob allowed.
“I think it’s pretty clear we’re heading for a lockdown. Here in the city that means people will be getting food deliveries even more than usual. But it also means that restaurants are going to be pinched because they won’t be able to do table service. If füdmüd offered to lower our fees in exchange for exclusive listings and delivery service, we’d both make friends with restaurant owners and get a leg up on the other apps.”
“You want us to lower fees.”
“Yes.”
“Decrease revenues during a possible pandemic.”
“No! See, that’s the thing. If we move quickly and lock down, pardon the pun, the popular restaurants, we’ll see revenues go up because order traffic will go up. And not just our revenue. Our delivery people—”
“Deliverators.”
I shifted in the beanbag. “What?”
“Deliverators. That’s what we’re calling them now. Clever, right? I thought up the term.”
“I thought Neal Stephenson did.”
“Who?”
“He’s a writer. He wrote Snow Crash.”
“And that’s, what, a Frozen sequel?”
“It’s a book, actually.”
Rob waved his hand dismissively. “If it’s not Disney, we won’t get sued for it. You were saying?”
“Our, uh, deliverators could also see an uptick. We could pay a higher delivery fee to them—not too much.” I saw Rob starting to frown here. “Just enough to differentiate ourselves from the other apps. In a gig economy, just a little boost goes a long way. We could actually build some loyalty, which would improve service, which would be another differentiator.”
“You want to compete on quality, basically.”
“Yes!” I made a pointing gesture, which sank me farther into the beanbag. “I mean, we’re already better than the other apps. We just have to drive the point home.”
“It’ll cost us a little more, but it will be worth it, is where you’re going with this.”
“I think so. I know, wild, right? But that’s the whole point. We’ll be where everyone else in the food delivery app space isn’t. And by the time they figure out what we’re up to, we’ll own New York City. For starters.”
“You have bold ideas, Jamie,” Rob said. “You’re not afraid to take risks and move the conversation.”
I beamed, and set down my tablet. “Thank you, Rob. I think you’re right. I took a risk when I left my doctorate program to come work at füdmüd, you know? My friends at the University of Chicago thought I was nuts to pack up and move out to New York to work for a start-up. But it just felt right. I think I’m really making a difference in how people order food.”