It's secondary but I maintain it's related because from what I know from talking to local restaurants, as delivery grows, margins shrink, and it's a different a

It's secondary but I maintain it's related because from what I know from talking to local restaurants, as delivery grows, margins shrink, and it's a different animal catering to floods of online orders. One option is to go cheaper to grow that revenue especially if you're not full with dine-in guests. It's primarily a trap when a restaurant doesn't command value relative to others in that segment, and their dishes are basically commodities (sure, food in general doesn't have great margins, but compare steakhouse vs fast food). Chopped lettuce or sliced tomatoes from Sysco/distributor is one thing for sandwiches but maybe not salads, and then there's giving in and having entire dishes replaced from their catalog: pancake mix, gravy, premade frozen entrees, desserts. Enter the death spiral as floundering restaurants raises prices and cut quality, discourage customers, raise prices and cut more, losing more customers, etc. FWIW regarding chicken-fried steak, I live in an area of people with "chicken nugget" palates and lots of diners. Most of the chicken-fried steak now is pre-breaded with canned gravy that is probably Sysco or Chef Store - I know I see the gallon cans walking through the aisles when I go. Yet, there's two local joints that still hand-bread and differentiate with home-made gravies, one spicy, one with herbs. Dinner-plate size dishes to boot which we split. They've resisted delivery and focus on dining in, but...mains start at $22 or so. It's representative of the split between cheap vs quality. The chicken-fried delivery anecdotes might be a proxy for the class divide, too, hmm.