Mike Ilitch, 84, and Tom Monaghan, 77, are Detroit’s unlikely pizza barons, and their stories are drawing to a close, reports Bryan Gruley in BloombergBusinessweek in an article titled "Twilight of the Pizza Barons."
Comparing and contrasting the careers of the two pizza visionaries who happened to come out of the same part of the world, Gruley -- who grew up in Detroit and worked at the Detroit News for 11 years -- writes:
Detroit is never confused with Chicago or New York as a pizza town, but Domino’s, the nation’s No. 2 pizza chain behind Pizza Hut (YUM), and No. 3 Little Caesars together claimed 20 percent of the $34 billion in sales at U.S. pizza restaurants in 2013, says research firm Technomic.
Monaghan and Ilitch barely know each other. The Domino’s founder says in an interview he can’t recall ever tasting a Little Caesars pizza, “though I must have a long time ago.” A sculpture hanging in the archives at Little Caesars’ headquarters makes fun of a Domino’s slice as having “hard, tasteless crust, topped with artificial, flat, and runny cheese.” It’s a fluke that the chains emerged from the same corner of Michigan at roughly the same time more than 50 years ago. Yet, in different ways, Domino’s and Little Caesars changed the way Americans eat pizza, helping to make it one of the country’s most popular foods. The pizza barons were great at selling pies. Now one wants to save Detroit, and the other wants to save everything else.
Monaghan, writes Gruley, rises each day at 1:50 a.m. After prayer, reading, exercise, and Mass, he goes to work in his cubbyhole of an office in the building that houses his old company, surrounded by milky glass statuettes of the Virgin Mary. Monaghan says his ultimate goal is “to get into Heaven and take as many people as I can with me.”
Ilitch, who is rarely seen in public, declined requests for an interview.
