Customer Loyalty & Pizza

In timely coincidence, we were talking last week about customer loyalty and discussing this week top-of-mind and consideration of pizza joints. My family tends to alternate between Pizza Hut and Pagliaccis, because the kids like PH better and my hubby and I like Pagliacci's better. In the several years that we've been ordering pizza for delivery in our current home, on average we have probably been good for an order from one or the other once every ten days. Because we all like different toppings, this isn't the cheapest habit! Our typical order from Pizza Hut is $25-30 and our Pagliacci order is regularly over $32. Due to various reasons, when we placed our order with Pagliacci last week, it had probably been a good four months since we had last ordered from them. When the pizza order arrived (early and correct), I was surprised to hear what the delivery guy had to say - "This one is on us!" He then handed me a "Thanks!" card with several staff member's signatures. This was only the second time this happened in almost five years, but boy is it effective. I'm sure we'll only order Pag's for the next several orders, so it will pay off for them. They have made us loyal. After I tipped the man and closed the door. I thought to myself how there's probably no chance that Pizza Hut would ever do that, and how cool it was to have such nice surprise!