Comment by bvandewalle
6 years ago
I said this in another post about Grubhub but similarly to this article I really don't get it. Those apps are all 25%+ expensive than ordering take out directly with the restaurant, they screw the restaurants and all those delivery companies lose millions.
Did everyone really become THAT lazy that driving 10 minutes to get your meal is that much trouble?
I used to think this, until:
1. We had a child
2. We had multiple children
3. We realized getting children (who may be sleeping) into a car for even a 10minute drive becomes a big production
4. We got rid of our car
Also, other reasons:
A. It is 8:30pm, you're at the office, have another 3hrs of work to do and cant spare even 10min to get away. Very common in my Junior Analyst days. In fact, we had a company sponsored SeamlessWeb account that we could use anytime.
B. You are on a business trip at a random city/hotel w/o a car
C. Your car is in street parking and you dont want to lose the spot (wicked, i know...)
> Did everyone really become THAT lazy that driving 10 minutes to get your meal is that much trouble?
Depends on density, and traffic.
Getting to a nearby restaurant to pick up dinner, even a close by one, would easily take 30 minutes+ round trip. If I want food from someplace more than a couple miles away, make that 45 minutes or more round trip for dinner.
Or I can order from an app and have food delivered.
The question then becomes, is saving almost an hour of time worth $20?
Meal delivery doesn't just exist because people are lazy. It has been around a long time via the much more inefficient process of calling a restaurant that you already knew about, having someone spend time with you on the phone getting your order and credit card # and then dispatching a delivery person they employed directly to deliver the order to you.
My experience is that calling for pizza is faster and easier than using an app.
I'm in Toronto, so we have Skip (Skipthedishes) instead of GrubHub along with UberEats and Doordash
1.) Skip doesn't allow the restaurant to jack up the price, so to the customer the total cost is the same 2.) These companies toss out tons of coupon codes and referral codes that bring the overall cost down (sometimes even cheaper than ordering directly from the restaurant) 3.) In dense urban centers, a ten minute "drive" is way more challenging/time consuming/effort than it would be somewhere else. In fact, these services use bicycle couriers in these areas.
I've probably only used each of the major delivery apps once or twice, so I'm not representative of their customer base, but yeah, every now and then I'm having a specific day where I'm feeling that lazy (and of course driving anywhere in the bay area around dinner time is likely to take a lot longer than 10 minutes round trip). Then again I'm living in the bay area and not making anywhere near FAANG money. I can definitely see the delivery fees being negligible compared to the value of my time if I was making 2-3x my current salary.
For me, it's sometimes laziness, but usually not. The long and short of it is that delivery only happens when it's hard to leave the house for whatever reason. If getting myself to the restaurant is an easy option, then dining in generally is, too. Takeout only happens when I've been tasked with picking up burritos on the way home from work.
Not everyone has a car.
It's the opposite. People are so busy that they can't spend 10 minutes to get food.
Also the fact that they can afford the premiums in the first place implies that they're not lazy ;)