Of Pizza And Politics
Papa Johns comes to esports and there's much rejoicing. Shouldn't we really be more mindful about who we get into bed with?
The 24th May was another great day for e-sports. A big sponsor had waded in and tested the marketability and reach of partnership companies and they had passed with flying colours. For a week the North American fans of Evil Geniuses, ROOT Gaming and Team Liquid were told to guzzle down as many Papa John pizzas as they could, with an impressive 50% discount on all orders if they used a certain code, and guzzle them down they did. If they achieved a certain amount of sales Papa Johns – a company with a $1.126,397 billion annual revenue in 2010 – would consider investing in the e-sports market. Each of the landmark targets, split into ten tiers, were achieved in a surprisingly fast time and there was much rejoicing. E-sports had won again.
This is nothing new. As e-sports clambers out of being the closet labelled “niche” and into the mainstream more and more big businesses are dipping their toe in the water. They look at the key demographic of e-sports and realise that it’s worth spending a relatively small amount of their marketing budget to try and reach that group and also understand that it doesn’t take a lot to eclipse the efforts of the businesses we’re used to. With a few notable exceptions of greedy individuals killing the golden goose and driving big investors away, we generally pass the test because everyone wants it. Fuck it, let’s be honest… Most people need it. No-one in e-sports, from players, to commentators, to managers, journalists and everyone else wants to go back to – or go into for the first time if you’re young enough – a dull nine to five job and work in the sort of environments that destroy souls all around the Western world (worth specifying that point given the standard of working practices in the third world countries we exploit, but let’s really not get into that.) To keep the e-sports dream alive we need money. Lots of it.
I’ve definitely got no issue with that. It’s an ugly fact of what we do and if I ranted too much about it I’d be a massive hypocrite because the company I work for also does some of its business in a similar fashion. If they didn’t could they afford to hire a full time e-sports editor? Maybe, maybe not but it’s not something I want to think too much about because I’m like everyone else – this is what I want to do with my life right now. What I can say is that we definitely need to think a lot about who we take money from and what that means. Accepting money is, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, an acceptance of the politics of who provides it.
Which brings us to Papa John’s and their CEO John Schnatter. As a company they’ve never been too far away from some for of controversy, be it in the 90s when they were successfully sued by Pizza Hut for a questionable advertising campaign (This was later overturned but not because the jury disagreed with their adverts being misleading but because Pizza Hut couldn’t prove it had impacted on consumer decisions) or as recent as last year when they spammed half a million customers with unsolicited texts, leading to a $250 million lawsuit. In short, they don’t mind playing dirty in their bid to be successful and make money.
You may or may not have views about the ethics of false advertising to make your products sound superior, or intrusive marketing on existing customers. However, one thing most people would be in agreement with is the concept of worker’s rights and the right to health care for all, even those said to not be able to “afford” it. It’s certainly a reasonable expectation we all have that if we work, we get a fair remuneration for the labour we sell and that we are treated fairly and with diginity while we do it. It also should be a fundamental right that if you’re in need of medical care that it can be obtained, free of charge, because we’re all in some way or another chipping in to the system and those with more can look after those who have less.
John Schnatter doesn’t believe in any of this, he has made that abundantly clear this year. Even if you think that President Barack Obama has been something of a lame duck in his time in office, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly referred to as Obamacare) will be the one resplendent part of his legacy. It costs companies more to ensure that their employees get free healthcare benefits, the kind that most people in Europe take for granted. Schantter said that if Obama was re-elected and the his healthcare bill upheld he’d not only have to increase the cost of his pizzas – lord forbid – but he’d also have to cut workers hours, lay off staff and close whole stores just to deal with the sprawling costs. It was a scare tactic, a businessman trying to influence voting and it didn’t work. The president was re-elected and the bill continues to overhaul the American healthcare system.
Schnatter didn’t once think, like small business owners dealing with the same additional costs of the big business has to, about trimming his own sizeable salary. Nor did he think about cutting back on the huge amounts of money spent on advertising during the football season, which amounts to $350,000 per 30 second advertisement. He’s still happy to pay athletes exorbitant fees to endorse his products. Hell, he even sold Peyton Manning 21 franchises for multi-millions, which you think might just have offset the balance of the extra he has to pay to ensure his workers will be looked after should they require medical treatment. This is a company that pays its workers an average of $6.26, continues to post profits, has a CEO with a personal worth of $200 million and somehow wants you to believe they could suddenly be plunged into a financial crisis for simply doing the right thing by their staff.
For me there is something of a savage irony in all of this, that a company who contributes to the dietary problems of the nation with the highest levels of obesity not wanting to pony up and enable their own people to get healthcare. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes and all the other health problems that come with it are a massive drag factor on any healthcare provider, let alone one going through radical upheaval. While it’s unlikely the idea of “free” healthcare will ever be embraced by an American population who truly aren’t used to it after decades of being shafted by big business, anyone can see that if you take with one hand it is only fair you give something back with the other. It’d be like a tobacco company saying they objected to a new bill stating they have to ensure that a chunk of their vast profits went into cancer research. If we read that story we’d be outraged.
Not only that, but let’s think about that e-sports demographic. A significant portion of us are at college or university, maybe just graduating or maybe entering the job market for the first time after completing apprenticeships. Still coming out a global recession how many of our American friends will be taking summer jobs or full time work with Papa Johns? Do we not have a responsibility to look after our own? If that seems like a big leap to make understand that all our e-sports fans have a life outside of the industry. They live most of their lives there and e-sports for them is the escape, one of the things they enjoy doing as they struggle with the great conflict that is work / life balance. If we as an industry are actively contributing to the success of businesses that then go on to mistreat the people they work for, that openly object to ethical policies that benefit society as a whole at the expense of profit margins, then we’ve let them down. That is just as profoundly true even if we do get to show them some great matches, or some high quality streams, or run a tournament with a nice prize fund. There is more to the bigger picture than that alone.
Perhaps the most objectionable thing is that the people who have successfully peddled Papa Johns wares, while at the same time peddling the idea that this company deserves your trade, have neglected to pass any form of comment about the whole situation. There hasn’t been a balanced or rational write up about why we’ve had to make this difficult consensus. Simply, as far as the e-sports business is concerned, there is no consensus. They were all too busy frantically muttering “gimme gimme gimme” and spamming discount codes through every medium possible. And it worked too, which just goes to show how easy it is to make someone indifferent to politics and, most important of all, ethics. A little bit of money paid, a little bit of money saved and we can turn a blind eye to the most heinous of transgressions. The grim reality is while there was plenty of support for a boycott of Papa John’s across America, the e-sports world bent over backwards to line their pockets in the hope of getting some of the trickle down cash.
Schnatter has since said he was misquoted on a lot of it. I guess you can make your own mind up on it. However, there was none of this information presented at the time of this promotion and the people who did try and draw attention to it – just so we could have the discussion – were told to shut up, be it directly or through the less personal medium of block downvoting. Simply put, no-one wanted to have the discussion just in case it angered the gods and their golden chequebook.
A big part of maturing as an industry is being responsible about who we work with. We can’t eschew ethics on the basis of us being a fledgling industry that needs all the help we can get. There’s a responsibility not just to the fans that support organisations and by extension what they choose to stand for but we also have to think about the impact our actions within this bubble in which we choose to exist can have outside of it. Do I want companies like Papa John’s involved in e-sports, profiting from the wider community? No I don’t and I don’t care what they are paying. I don’t believe the organisations so quick to endorse the company and their political choices by proxy really need the money half as much as they want it. I see a lot of people taking Papa John’s money also talking intelligently about professionalism and expectations. I wonder what those same people think about the apartheid era South African trade embargo.
You don’t ever need to do business with people that don’t stand for the right things, whatever you may deem those to be. After all, there are plenty of other big companies out there that don’t want to abuse their workers out of some protracted form of political spite when Obama was re-elected, many of them who make fast food. You didn’t see Pizza Hut, for example, complaining in this fashion about the reforms. Maybe we should be making them aware that e-sports exists. Like Papa John’s themselves say, “better ingredients make for a better pizza.”