Domino’s Pizza impresario, Tom Monaghan had his “Aha” moment, so the story goes, after digesting the results from his surveys of pizza customers. He learned that for many, having the product brought to them was more important than whether the product was any good. And so began the thirty minutes or it’s free Domino’s delivery promise. Enough people were killed or maimed by Domino’s delivery drivers trying to beat the deadline, that the company no longer makes that guarantee.
After buying the Detroit Tigers baseball franchise, winning the World Series and then selling the Tigers, Tom Monaghan sold Domino’s to the estimable Bain Capital in 1998.
In 2005, devoted Catholic Monaghan took the no-effort pizza consumption concept to religion. He founded the town of Ave Maria, a planned community in southern Florida, with the Ave Maria Oratory church at its center. He also founded Ave Maria University. Ave Maria struggled through the recession of 2008, but is still expanding and selling homes. The town is also home to mosquitos, in spite of thirty aerial sprayings in 2015.
The Disney Company took a non-religious approach in the 1990s, when it developed its unincorporated town not far from Orlando, the epicenter of all things Disney. They built the town of Celebration, where residents can feel safe and comfortable knowing their neighbors are all just like them. As a “Community Development District, voting in Celebration is limited to landowners. By coincidence, the majority of land is owned by entities controlled by the Walt Disney Company.
A century earlier, on the other side of the U.S., Thomas Lake Harris founded his utopian community in Santa Rosa, California. Harris built his sect’s foundation on immortality and celibacy. And wine. The Fountain Grove Winery was the economic engine keeping the community solvent. A San Francisco Chronicle expose in 1891 revealed that like most cult leaders, the celibacy part did not apply to Harris. His death a few years later undermined the immortal part. Kanaye Nagasawa, Harris’s second-in-command took charge. Nagasawa was an early Japaneses immigrant and a pillar of the Japanese-American community in Sonoma County. The utopia dissolved in the mid-twentieth century. Fountaingrove is now a desirable and affluent neighborhood in Santa Rosa. The derelict winery was recently demolished.
