Pizza was 42 minutes old when it was sold to me. The cheese was dried and darkened and the pizza was not hot at all. Very disappointing experience when you can't wait to eat after a long day. Normally this location is good, but they let this one slip through the cracks.
I am a former Little Caesars GM, so I understand how the markings on the box work. Each pizza has a 30 minute shelf time from the moment it comes out of the oven until it expires and needs to be thrown out. They are marked 30 minutes ahead of time so the crew knows when to trash it. My box was marked "4" which means it expires when the minute hand reaches the "4", or in this case at 8:20. My receipt has a transaction time of 8:32 so this pizza was 42 minutes old and expired by 12 minutes when it was sold.
I understand the want to not have a high nightly waste, and it sucks when you make too many pizzas and nobody buys them. But the answer is not to sell expired pizza to customers, all that will do make us not want to come back. Crew and assistant managers should be retrained on expiration procedures. This pizza was bad enough that I don't know if I'd go back.