4 ms·

How are any of these businesses thriving? The price of restaurant food has gotten ridiculous on its own, even without the middleman. Add the markup on these pla

How are any of these businesses thriving? The price of restaurant food has gotten ridiculous on its own, even without the middleman. Add the markup on these platforms, then the delivery charges etc. How and why are so many people who aren't financially secure throwing their money away on something so unnecessary?

karaterobot 2y ago
Enough people have the money and don't cook, I guess. I know people who say they did not turn on their ovens the entire term of their lease. I think it's probably a bad way to move through life, but that's only my opinion.
duxup 2y ago
I'm going to hope to avoid a generational bickering fest here but I'm going to note that I notice what I think of as strange default consumer behavior even in my own office.... The younger folks getting lunch delivered every day, they got new cars and not just new the better packages on those cars, their apartments have all sorts of amenities, great locations. I'm the "old guy" not just because of age but because I made my own sandwich and brought lunch. It's like all this is the default for them, they don't seem to notice. They're 100% not wrong that opportunities are different compared to when I was their age, but at the same time, when I was their age I lived in a crappy apartment, drove a 15 year old basic car. My idea of going out was to some cheap place for dinner and paying for nosebleed seats on a weekday at the ballpark... these guys show up at the same fancy places I do / didn't eat at until much later in life. I don't say this to ridicule them, but it seems like their concept of just sort of default consumerism is pretty heavy on the consuming.
- diab0lic 2y ago
  Similar experience. I’m in my 30s and many peers in the same age group (add a standard deviation in each direction, but skew to the left) “don’t know how to cook” and door dash daily, sometimes dessert is a separate order made later. When I mention that it sounds wildly expensive it doesn’t even register. There’s a pretty large gap in the assumed baseline between people who don’t use these services and people who rely on them.
  - duxup 2y ago
    Yeah it might not even be entirely an age thing, it's the "many folks who use these services .... REALLY use them". There might be other factors at play to match up who is how.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  Where do you work, exactly? This isn't the behavior I've witnessed with the younger generation, at all, unless they came from money or working in a well to do job. I don't think we can extrapolate this one.
  - duxup 2y ago
    I don't want to go much farther down the road than "I work in tech" ;)
  - itslennysfault 2y ago
    Personally, I've seen glaring examples of both extremes when it comes to living above/below your means. However, I don't know that this is generational. Back when I was in my 20s I knew plenty of people (in my age group) buying expensive cars/housing and being cash broke. An example to the contrary... a few years back I worked with a college hire who got a super fat signing bonus and made a plenty hefty salary for a first job, but he rented his friend's walk-in closet and almost never ate out. Within just a few years he had enough money for a downpayment on a home in one of the most expensive housing markets in the US. I don't think this type of frugality has ever been the norm, but it does exist in all generations.
- kthartic 2y ago
  As someone who you'd probably refer to as one of the "younger folks", I think part of it is a coping mechanism. The outside world looks incredibly bleak. Most of my friends and housemates appear burnt out or have a depressed outlook on the state of the world - politics, global warming, house/rent prices, crumbling healthcare, dating (which in today's world means swiping on an app), competitive work life, social pressures (exacerbated by instagram, tiktok, etc), gym, seemingly no time in the world to do anything. Perhaps it's just because I live in London, but this a snapshot of my social circle right now. It's also no secret that the West is suffering from a mental health crisis. With the weight of the world looming over me, a nice meal for lunch is about the only thing keeping me together (being slightly sarcastic here). I do wonder, was it always this way? Genuine question - did you ever feel this way in your 20s/30s? Did your friends?
  - duxup 2y ago
    We didn't have the same ... internet selling us on doom and gloom. Not saying that there aren't legit concerns, but I think the internet and its citizens certainly promote, reward, and consume negativity more than anything else. It skews things. I worry a lot of folks just sort of live in the reality they consume on the internet, don't make their own space of sorts.
    - kthartic 2y ago
      I would definitely agree with you there, but I also can't blame people for consuming such media. It's incredibly difficult to bury your head in the sand/avoid all media in today's ultra-connected world. Even if I were to ditch my phone, my friends would still be talking about it. I hope though my perspective in my earlier comment might give you some insight into the general psyche of (at least some) younger folks.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Yes, young people feel the future is uncertain and that can be scary. It has always been this way. It might be worse today because you have a device in your pocket that is interested in keeping you anxious and clicking/swiping/scrolling compulsively. If you don't make an effort to control it, it will just suck you down a dark path. My approach to this is: - Stop watching the news, or paying attention to politics. You have almost certainly no control over anything they are reporting and almost none of it affects you in any way. I didn't pay any attention to the presidential race, for example. None of it was going to change my vote. I didn't watch the election night coverage; I watched a ball game and went to bed. I figured I'd hear the outcome the next day, I had zero control over it anyway so why stress about it? - Cut down on social media. It's unnatural and unhealthy. Do more stuff that requires face-to-face interactions with people. Use social media as a communications tool to set this stuff up, but don't follow celebrities or people you don't know personally. Turn off all alerts that are not from your personal contacts. Don't like or forward memes. Try going places without your phone, to build up comfort at being without it or not constantly checking it. You know that until 15-20 years ago almost nobody had a phone when they were away from home.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I'm more than halfway through my fifties, I make a good living, but I still drive a 15 year old car and I live in a fairly modest house that isn't in a great location (not dangerous, just not centrally convenient to a lot of things). I rarely eat out. I guess I live like this as my parents lived like this (though they didn't really talk about it, I just followed their model I guess). As a kid we had one car, we almost never ate out, we bought our clothes at Sears. My parents both had graduate degrees and made a good living but just didn't spend money unecessarily.
rmk 2y ago
It puzzles me too. But as the other commenter here has said, it appears to be a habit of the yuppies. If you are time-poor but cash-rich, I suppose this is a good solution. However, in my experience, people do not use their time saved by doing this in high-leverage activities!
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Right, I'm just thinking these services wouldn't survive if the only people using them were the ones who could afford to vastly overpay for food.
Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
> How and why are so many people who aren't financially secure throwing their money away on something so unnecessary? I challenge the premise of your question. I don't think financially insecure people are buying food delivery. At least not nearly as often as you might think. I could be wrong, though. I have read that studies have shown that the majority of people buying lottery tickets can't afford to be buying them.
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
They have a weird priority in google and that’s their value. Unless you know where to look you will not find your local restaurants website via google. You will be redirected to grubhub or equivalent by many dark patterns on your way to the direct website. Try it yourself. Google ‘Thai spice’ (there’s a several thousand independent Thai restaurants by this name so it’s a good example). Scroll down past the door dash promoted adverts and such till you get a result for the actual nearest restaurant by this name. Usually under a ‘places’ section. Click ‘order’. See that this is just a redirect for door dash, grubhub etc that add a markup to the restaurant direct ordering system. In fact try to go to the actual website. Click the name of the restaurant in the places section after a google search. On mobile you now have a new google presented summary page with a prominent order online button which is again just a redirect to grubhub/doordash/etc. On a computer it’s slightly better. You can see a website button to order directly under the places section but it’s still second rated prominence compared to the prominence of the above services. On Mobile the pattern is dark as night. Basically that’s the revenue source. It’s a link that’s overly prominent in google that ultimately simply orders via the restaurants website with a markup. It’s free money. People will always have a reason to order online. Restaurants themselves bear the brunt of inflation more than anyone but essentially stealing a direct link to the restaurant, capturing all those online orders and added a markup is very easy and low risk money.
tokioyoyo 2y ago
All I can say is, internal dashboards in delivery companies show a completely different picture than I would’ve imagined. A lot (and I mean, A LOT) of people order in almost every single day. Convenience is hell of a drug.
- buggeryorkshire 2y ago
  I'd say a lot more but people from JET know me (fuck you, btw) but yeah it's depressing. People ordering the same pizza multiple times daily, for months. I don't understand it personally but did get an insight a few years ago. I had to move out of my house whilst I was renovating it for 6 months or so. Looked at the cheapest place I could that was somewhere nice in my town. It was fine for a single man, but the kitchen - Jesus, once you stood in it you could reach every surface and cupboard from being there. I couldn't believe how shit it was. The estate agent just said "that's how kids live these days - they eat out, or order in" (it was a few years before lockdown)
SheinhardtWigCo 2y ago
The markup’s not too bad and the delivery charges are substantially lowered by signing up for a membership, which is around $10/mo (or free with higher end credit cards)
morkalork 2y ago
It's weird when you can read articles about how half a country is living paycheck to paycheck but then as you see, these businesses are thriving with the other half of the population.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Are they thriving? DoorDash, instacart, grubhub, and uber all lose money.

karaterobot 2y ago

Enough people have the money and don't cook, I guess. I know people who say they did not turn on their ovens the entire term of their lease. I think it's probably a bad way to move through life, but that's only my opinion.

duxup 2y ago

I'm going to hope to avoid a generational bickering fest here but I'm going to note that I notice what I think of as strange default consumer behavior even in my own office.... The younger folks getting lunch delivered every day, they got new cars and not just new the better packages on those cars, their apartments have all sorts of amenities, great locations. I'm the "old guy" not just because of age but because I made my own sandwich and brought lunch. It's like all this is the default for them, they don't seem to notice. They're 100% not wrong that opportunities are different compared to when I was their age, but at the same time, when I was their age I lived in a crappy apartment, drove a 15 year old basic car. My idea of going out was to some cheap place for dinner and paying for nosebleed seats on a weekday at the ballpark... these guys show up at the same fancy places I do / didn't eat at until much later in life. I don't say this to ridicule them, but it seems like their concept of just sort of default consumerism is pretty heavy on the consuming.

diab0lic 2y ago
Similar experience. I’m in my 30s and many peers in the same age group (add a standard deviation in each direction, but skew to the left) “don’t know how to cook” and door dash daily, sometimes dessert is a separate order made later. When I mention that it sounds wildly expensive it doesn’t even register. There’s a pretty large gap in the assumed baseline between people who don’t use these services and people who rely on them.
- duxup 2y ago
  Yeah it might not even be entirely an age thing, it's the "many folks who use these services .... REALLY use them". There might be other factors at play to match up who is how.
no_wizard 2y ago
Where do you work, exactly? This isn't the behavior I've witnessed with the younger generation, at all, unless they came from money or working in a well to do job. I don't think we can extrapolate this one.
- duxup 2y ago
  I don't want to go much farther down the road than "I work in tech" ;)
- itslennysfault 2y ago
  Personally, I've seen glaring examples of both extremes when it comes to living above/below your means. However, I don't know that this is generational. Back when I was in my 20s I knew plenty of people (in my age group) buying expensive cars/housing and being cash broke. An example to the contrary... a few years back I worked with a college hire who got a super fat signing bonus and made a plenty hefty salary for a first job, but he rented his friend's walk-in closet and almost never ate out. Within just a few years he had enough money for a downpayment on a home in one of the most expensive housing markets in the US. I don't think this type of frugality has ever been the norm, but it does exist in all generations.
kthartic 2y ago
As someone who you'd probably refer to as one of the "younger folks", I think part of it is a coping mechanism. The outside world looks incredibly bleak. Most of my friends and housemates appear burnt out or have a depressed outlook on the state of the world - politics, global warming, house/rent prices, crumbling healthcare, dating (which in today's world means swiping on an app), competitive work life, social pressures (exacerbated by instagram, tiktok, etc), gym, seemingly no time in the world to do anything. Perhaps it's just because I live in London, but this a snapshot of my social circle right now. It's also no secret that the West is suffering from a mental health crisis. With the weight of the world looming over me, a nice meal for lunch is about the only thing keeping me together (being slightly sarcastic here). I do wonder, was it always this way? Genuine question - did you ever feel this way in your 20s/30s? Did your friends?
- duxup 2y ago
  We didn't have the same ... internet selling us on doom and gloom. Not saying that there aren't legit concerns, but I think the internet and its citizens certainly promote, reward, and consume negativity more than anything else. It skews things. I worry a lot of folks just sort of live in the reality they consume on the internet, don't make their own space of sorts.
  - kthartic 2y ago
    I would definitely agree with you there, but I also can't blame people for consuming such media. It's incredibly difficult to bury your head in the sand/avoid all media in today's ultra-connected world. Even if I were to ditch my phone, my friends would still be talking about it. I hope though my perspective in my earlier comment might give you some insight into the general psyche of (at least some) younger folks.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Yes, young people feel the future is uncertain and that can be scary. It has always been this way. It might be worse today because you have a device in your pocket that is interested in keeping you anxious and clicking/swiping/scrolling compulsively. If you don't make an effort to control it, it will just suck you down a dark path. My approach to this is: - Stop watching the news, or paying attention to politics. You have almost certainly no control over anything they are reporting and almost none of it affects you in any way. I didn't pay any attention to the presidential race, for example. None of it was going to change my vote. I didn't watch the election night coverage; I watched a ball game and went to bed. I figured I'd hear the outcome the next day, I had zero control over it anyway so why stress about it? - Cut down on social media. It's unnatural and unhealthy. Do more stuff that requires face-to-face interactions with people. Use social media as a communications tool to set this stuff up, but don't follow celebrities or people you don't know personally. Turn off all alerts that are not from your personal contacts. Don't like or forward memes. Try going places without your phone, to build up comfort at being without it or not constantly checking it. You know that until 15-20 years ago almost nobody had a phone when they were away from home.
SoftTalker 2y ago
I'm more than halfway through my fifties, I make a good living, but I still drive a 15 year old car and I live in a fairly modest house that isn't in a great location (not dangerous, just not centrally convenient to a lot of things). I rarely eat out. I guess I live like this as my parents lived like this (though they didn't really talk about it, I just followed their model I guess). As a kid we had one car, we almost never ate out, we bought our clothes at Sears. My parents both had graduate degrees and made a good living but just didn't spend money unecessarily.

rmk 2y ago

It puzzles me too. But as the other commenter here has said, it appears to be a habit of the yuppies. If you are time-poor but cash-rich, I suppose this is a good solution. However, in my experience, people do not use their time saved by doing this in high-leverage activities!

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Right, I'm just thinking these services wouldn't survive if the only people using them were the ones who could afford to vastly overpay for food.

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago

> How and why are so many people who aren't financially secure throwing their money away on something so unnecessary? I challenge the premise of your question. I don't think financially insecure people are buying food delivery. At least not nearly as often as you might think. I could be wrong, though. I have read that studies have shown that the majority of people buying lottery tickets can't afford to be buying them.

AnotherGoodName 2y ago

They have a weird priority in google and that’s their value. Unless you know where to look you will not find your local restaurants website via google. You will be redirected to grubhub or equivalent by many dark patterns on your way to the direct website. Try it yourself. Google ‘Thai spice’ (there’s a several thousand independent Thai restaurants by this name so it’s a good example). Scroll down past the door dash promoted adverts and such till you get a result for the actual nearest restaurant by this name. Usually under a ‘places’ section. Click ‘order’. See that this is just a redirect for door dash, grubhub etc that add a markup to the restaurant direct ordering system. In fact try to go to the actual website. Click the name of the restaurant in the places section after a google search. On mobile you now have a new google presented summary page with a prominent order online button which is again just a redirect to grubhub/doordash/etc. On a computer it’s slightly better. You can see a website button to order directly under the places section but it’s still second rated prominence compared to the prominence of the above services. On Mobile the pattern is dark as night. Basically that’s the revenue source. It’s a link that’s overly prominent in google that ultimately simply orders via the restaurants website with a markup. It’s free money. People will always have a reason to order online. Restaurants themselves bear the brunt of inflation more than anyone but essentially stealing a direct link to the restaurant, capturing all those online orders and added a markup is very easy and low risk money.

tokioyoyo 2y ago

All I can say is, internal dashboards in delivery companies show a completely different picture than I would’ve imagined. A lot (and I mean, A LOT) of people order in almost every single day. Convenience is hell of a drug.

buggeryorkshire 2y ago
I'd say a lot more but people from JET know me (fuck you, btw) but yeah it's depressing. People ordering the same pizza multiple times daily, for months. I don't understand it personally but did get an insight a few years ago. I had to move out of my house whilst I was renovating it for 6 months or so. Looked at the cheapest place I could that was somewhere nice in my town. It was fine for a single man, but the kitchen - Jesus, once you stood in it you could reach every surface and cupboard from being there. I couldn't believe how shit it was. The estate agent just said "that's how kids live these days - they eat out, or order in" (it was a few years before lockdown)

SheinhardtWigCo 2y ago

The markup’s not too bad and the delivery charges are substantially lowered by signing up for a membership, which is around $10/mo (or free with higher end credit cards)

morkalork 2y ago

It's weird when you can read articles about how half a country is living paycheck to paycheck but then as you see, these businesses are thriving with the other half of the population.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
Are they thriving? DoorDash, instacart, grubhub, and uber all lose money.