Chuck E. Cheese is the center of a new conspiracy hypothesis making the rounds all over the internet thanks to popular YouTube personality, Shane Dawson. The basic idea is Chuck E. Cheese employees are putting together leftover slices from various tables, reheating them, and then serving them as a new pizza.

The evidence for this is pizzas often come out with rough edges and slices that don’t appear to match up. Any number of pictures displaying this are readily available. The explanation put forward by various Chuck E. Cheese employees is pizzas are sliced and then put on a larger pan where they shift about haphazardly on their way to the customer. It is also put suggested that sometimes the slicer miscounts and makes five cuts instead of the required six, Chuck. E. Cheese insists each pizza have twelve slices, and kitchen workers then slice the two largest pieces in half to make up the difference.

I’d like to go after this conspiracy hypothesis with a line of critical thinking that I’ve had success with in the past. When discussing these ideas with believers I think it’s quite useful to point out what would have to happen in order to make it true. I’m of the opinion this forces the person advancing the hypothesis to walk it through in a rational fashion. In this case, the question is how would Chuck E. Cheese employees go about making such a pizza.

Basically, the bussers would have to collect every slice of uneaten pizza left on each table. These slices would then have to be arranged in the kitchen by pizza type until exactly twelve slices remained of a particular type. Then they would have to put those slices back in the oven and reheat them. The first problem becomes actually finding twelve slices of a particular kind of pizza. This seems to me to be a rather difficult task considering people generally eat most of their pizza leaving crusts perhaps but not entire slices.

The next problem is where you would store the uneaten slices waiting for an entire pizza to be assembled. Space restrictions in a kitchen would seem to make this not particularly easy.

A third problem would be keeping the entire thing a secret from the outside world. In order to make this work every employee at every Chuck E. Cheese would have to be part of the conspiracy. This particular hypothesis has been around for at least ten years, likely because of the various misshapen and oddly sliced pizzas as discussed earlier. I find it all but impossible to believe every employee of the franchise is loyal enough to keep this a secret.

Is it possible the slices are being collected, stored, and assembled while all the employees are keeping the secret? I don’t argue that it’s impossible, just incredibly unlikely. Therefore, I choose to accept the explanations offered by former employees and the company itself.

And you?

Tom Liberman