Domino’s Pizza

One year and twenty miles from where Little Caesars began, the other Michigan pizza giant was born. In 1960, brothers Tom and James Monaghan — raised largely in an orphanage — bought a small Ypsilanti pizzeria called DomiNick’s for a few hundred dollars. James, a mailman who didn’t want to quit his day job, soon traded his half of the business to Tom for a used Volkswagen Beetle (one of history’s more lopsided deals).

Tom renamed it Domino’s in 1965; the three dots in the logo stand for the first three stores — he’d meant to add a dot for every new location, but the chain blew past that idea fast. Today Domino’s is the biggest pizza chain on earth, with 20,000-plus stores in 90 countries, still headquartered just up the road in Ann Arbor. It started in a humble brick storefront near Eastern Michigan University — proof that a world-conquering idea can come from anywhere.