Papa Johns: Delicious? Maybe. In Violation of the TCPA? Definitely

I don’t know if it’s too late for Papa Johns to back away from it’s 2! Million! Pizzas! Giveaway! — because it’s looking like the pizza franchise that alleges it has both “better ingredients” (?) and “better pizza” (???) might very well get saddled with a $250 million dollar lawsuit for TCPA violations.

Usually on insideARM.com, if we’re writing about TCPA violations, we’re covering an agency that may have fell afoul of the confusing 1991 law. What had once been a piece of legislation to protect consumers from unwanted telemarketing calls (i.e. ALL telemarketing calls, amirght?) has instead become one of the new go-to suits against the collection industry.

So we were surprised to see Papa Johns Pizza on the wrong side of the TCPA.

A class action suit is alleging that Papa Johns Pizza — pizza for when you just don’t care about taste or flavor — sent out text message blasts to customers through the mass texting service OnTime4U. According to the story on the Atlantic Wire blog, “Plaintiffs say they sometimes received 15 or 16 text messages in a row, sometimes in the middle of the night, for a grand total of 500,000 unwanted texts.”

That’s the equivalent of three grounded teenagers’-worth of texts. And some plaintiffs have complained of getting between 15 and 16 texts in a row.

The plaintiffs in the class-action suit are hoping for $1,500 per text — that is, if the judge agrees that the pizza chain knowingly and willfully broke the law. If you’re a betting man — and if you’re eating Papa Johns pizza, you’ve already shown yourself to be a risk-taker — the safe money is on the courts finding for the plaintiffs in this matter. “Courts are notoriously unsympathetic to companies that spam their customers.”

Mike Bevel is an editor at insideARM.com. When not obsessing over the novels of Henry James, he is available to judge all of your food choices. Email him at editor@insideARM.com.