Pizza for books? Not a bad deal, if I say so myself

I was recently looking through some boxes of stuff from when I was a kid and amongst participation medals for youth soccer leagues and the one year I played CUDA football, there was a medal for the Pizza Hut program “Book It!” and I couldn’t help but smile at the memory.

I don’t know if “Book It!” still exists anymore, but it feels hard-coded as something purely ‘90s or early 2000s. It’s hard to place it in a world of smartphones and AI when it feels so at home in the era of CRT TVs, Avril Lavigne songs and renting a VHS at FamilyVideo on a Friday night.

For the unfamiliar, “Book It!” was (or maybe still is?) a reading program run by Pizza Hut. As an incentive for reading books, one could earn a personal pan pizza from the chain pizza joint every month. A pretty simple concept, but somewhat genius in that simplicity. For Pizza Hut, you get the PR of encouraging reading and you also bring in extra business, because while the kids get their little pizzas for free, the parents are still going to want to eat something too, so you end up selling an extra normal-sized pizza that you probably wouldn’t have normally.

Earning the monthly personal pizza was always a must for me. I can’t really remember what exactly you got the medal for, but I think you got one if you successfully read enough books to earn the pizza every month of the school year, or something like that. All I know is that we had a ton of these medals when my brothers and I were kids, commemorating our awesome achievement of having read so many books.

Strangely enough, the topic of “Book It!” randomly came up in conversation with some friends a few days after I had unearthed the old medal. Some had no recollection of the program but others seemed to have the same fond memories of the personal pizzas that I had.

But then someone shattered the rosy childhood illusion I had built up. They remembered the program, but also remembered that they had essentially lied about the amount of books they had read, in order to get the free pizza.

What? But…no…that was borderline sacrilegious, wasn’t it? You couldn’t lie about “Book It!” could you? It was far too important of an institution to allow something so insidious as that to occur, right?

But, how would anyone know if you had read a book or not? What guardrails were established to actually ensure that you were being truthful?

The reality was that there were none. It would have been extremely easy to claim you had read the required number of books each month, got your card punched, and be rewarded with the same pizza as those who had actually read the books. There was no system of confirmation, and why would there be? All Pizza Hut cared about ultimately was bringing more customers into their restaurants.

It’s funny, because I think I took some pride in being able to earn the “Book It!” pizza every month as a kid. It was a goal to shoot for on a regular basis and I took the ability to reach that goal as some sort of big achievement. And here, someone else had just as easily done the same thing without any effort whatsoever.

That being said, I really did not put much effort into it either. I was always going to devour all of those Magic Tree House and The Secrets of Droon books, regardless of whether or not there was a pizza in it for me or not. It was more of a happy coincidence that I was rewarded for something I was going to do anyway than any sort of real motivation.

Still, I suppose it made me feel like there was an external approval of all the reading I was doing. Plus there are plenty of great memories of sitting down with my family, eating my personal cheese pizza (because toppings were gross and scary) and watching the animated Lord of the Rings movies or Dink, the Little Dinosaur that we rented from the video rental place in Colby.

As I said, I’m not sure if “Book It!” still exists or not, but if it has gone the way of Walkmans and Blockbuster, that’s too bad. Kids are definitely missing out if so.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW