This further cultural entrenchment of people into homebodies is really sad to me. Really hope this does not happen.
I am assuming of course that the implication is that in-restaurant dining demand will shift to delivery, not that delivery will see some massive explosion over and above current restaurant food demand.
Delivery made sense when it was artificially subsidized by VCs, now that they’ve all jacked prices it’s not competitive at all.
Because you can eat it in the comfort of your own home, instead of the discomfort of an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers.
It may just be me but I really do not like eating in public.
My family rarely goes out to restaurants anymore, not because we don't love restaurants, but because it's more fun to cook at home.
Most restaurant food needs to be simple and easy so they can get you in and out quick.
So now I think more people then ever will be having restaurant food at comfort of home and not worrying about traffic, driving, cabs, parking, crowd, one more beer or wine glass etc.
That really depends on your personality. Not only is "people watching" not my thing, but the idea of other people "people watching" me is terrifyingly uncomfortable. Sends shivers down my spine level of discomfort. Please don't watch me while I eat. Some of us find the idea of "making small talk" with anyone, let alone wait staff, to be inherently uncomfortable.
For others, eating is a social activity, or an opportunity to socialize, and they like that. Some people feel "trapped" if they are cooped up inside their homes for too long, and need reasons to "get out of the house." That sounds like you, and that's great. Nothing wrong with it at all and you should enjoy eating out as much as you like. For others such as myself, who are introverted and find great comfort in the solitude of our homes, the reasons that you find eating out to be comfortable are the same reasons we find eating out to be uncomfortable.
If it makes you feel any better, and maybe I'm only speaking for myself, but when I people watch, I'm barely paying attention, and I'm never really watching people actually eating. It's the activities around the eating, mostly just walking and talking (this is why I really like European sidewalk cafes, you get an endless river of people passing by to watch). I'm not taking detailed notes on anything, and definitely not bite sizes, how many times you chew, how messy you are etc. That's all too close for my own comfort. Couldn't care less about that stuff. Probably the most info I retain is new ideas on how to dress myself, outside of exceptional or weird situations that might arise in public. Which, OK, in the context of this thread, I might notice the people carrying two or more heaping mountains of food to their table at a time.
But it's when I'm not seeking those things, when I want to enjoy a meal or a private conversation, then I start to a) feel protective of my privacy (and yes I know, restaurant = public place) and b) I just have no interest in the type of socializing that we're talking about (making small talk with the wait staff etc.).
In other words I just want to be left alone, and I find the concept of people "people watching" me while I eat or go about my daily business to be, well, creepy. If I'm asking for attention it's different. If I'm enjoying a meal with my wife, leave me alone.
I will add, however, that the privacy element is probably a bit more "extreme" for me than others because of having experiences as a child where privacy and boundaries, when there was an expectation of privacy, was violated. And so I am more concerned with privacy than probably even the typical tinfoil hat wearing techie who is paranoid about Internet and device privacy. That's undoubtedly where the thought of people "people watching" me while I eat at a restaurant creeps me the hell out comes from.
I am unduly paranoid about my privacy when working from my home office, and I absolutely hate anyone approaching my screen to look and ask what I’m working on. I always have to catch myself to avoid snapping at my wife when she barges in. In my case its probably that my father used to aggressively check our screens and say like “oh who is that girl you’re talking to on Facebook etc” (not in a fun way, kind of ridiculing or trying to embarass you kind of way).
Its completely irrational but the back of my head is yelling “an authority figure is about to come tease, ridicule, question you etc”. So I definitely see where you’re coming from.
For you. If a person says they don’t like eating out because it’s uncomfortable, you can trust they know whether they are uncomfortable or not.
I don’t like loud, busy places. It’s great when I can have a meal at a restaurant when it’s not packed, but you never know until you get there.
Re: baby: If there's an Ikea near you, you might want to try that. Around here, they typically are very well-prepared for small children (say, 1+). Basically, all of the cutlery and china they sell for kids is available for use in the restaurant. And they have play areas integrated into the dining area - kids play and parents can eat.
With friends, family or coworkers, eating out is fantastic and a fun social activity.
Alone, it's awkward, uncomfortable and unpleasant.
If I'm not with someone, I'd rather it be delivered.
People never ate out because of the food. They ate out because of the dining experience.
You can make better meals, cheaper, at home, in less time than it takes to go out. Yet people still dined out.
And, they pay a premium for it. There is no sense in paying a premium for home delivery, because you are getting substandard meals[1].
[1] Few dishes travel well in a bag, even if it's packaged properly and delivered quickly - steam rising off hot food that is not ventilated causes things to go soggy. If you do ventilate it, then it goes cold in minutes while traveling. Then reheating the food makes it less nice than it was when cooked. Hence, all delivered food tend to be slightly different to eating it off a plate when it is freshly cooked. Even pizzas suffer from being steamed while traveling.
It isn't as good as a home cooked meal but it is a lot better than the awful TV dinners I rarely ate back in the 80s.
This is going to be highly dependent on your local restaurants and what you like to eat. I can't make better bbq or pizza than the restaurants near me. I can make either of those pretty well, but not faster. I can make a pretty good burger, competitive with almost all the restaurants near me, but I can't make French fries as good as a restaurant with a fryer.
1. I don't have to drive
2. I don't have to listen to other people talking loud or being obnoxious while I'm trying to eat my meal and have a quiet private conversation with my wife
3. I can enjoy it in the comfort of my home, whether this means eating dinner in front of the tv, or enjoying a scotch or wine we have at home, or even just being able to get out of the clothes we've been in all day and enjoy comfort food in our PJs
4. I don't have to brave the cold or wet weather
5. I don't have to deal with wait staff interrupting my meal every 5 minutes to ask if everything is ok
6. I don't have to worry about music that I don't care for, or is distracting, being played while I eat
7. I don't have to worry about dirty dishes on the table, or the table itself being dirty (although to be fair I have no control over the dishes used to prepare the food and so some might consider this to be moot)
8. I don't have to worry about my home being crowded and busy with strangers, making for an uncomfortable dining experience. My mother once took me to a restaurant to celebrate my birthday, just the two of us. I'm a foodie and, despite listing several reasons I often prefer delivery / take-out over dine-in, I actually do love a great restaurant and the food at this particular place was supposed to be amazing. The two of us were put in a tiny corner in a crowded restaurant so close to the tables nearest us that the three parties (us plus our neighbours on either side) could hear every single word of each others' conversations. It was practically a communal table situation. Edit: I forgot to mention that we had a reservation which made this experience all the more frustrating. Which leads me to...
9. I don't have to worry about finding myself at a restaurant that has communal tables
10. I don't have to worry about people celebrating their birthdays receiving a loud and obnoxious group of wait staff bursting out of the kitchen to interrupt the entire restaurant's private conversations with an annoying song and cheer
I recognize that a lot of the above points can be avoided by choosing a different restaurant. But sometimes you still want the food of a particular restaurant but that restaurant's dining atmosphere is what kills it for you.
I'm sure you know this, but they're actually interrupting your meal every 5 minutes to minimize any possible delay in seating the next person after you. They just accomplish that by asking if everything is ok.
It's all about throughput.
(And it's a US thing. In France, among other places, you're expected to be the only group using the table for that meal. Which means they're in no rush for you to finish, but also that they are not happy if a group sits down but only a subset of people order food. Sometimes to the extent of asking you to leave.)
And often, it just comes down to overcorrection, where the server is afraid of getting bad tips (so yes, that is US specific, and maybe related to throughput, though not exclusively), or incompetency, where they haven't learned how to read the table and predict their needs.
It's not about culture, it's about economic conditions.
- make housing cheaper
- fix education so people can start their careers and adulthood earlier
- pass safe harbor laws so that parents and feel safe leaving their kids at home, or letting them take the bus
- also economic incentives help, beef up people's social security if they have kids
People can only learn so quickly; you're not going to give people a college-level education by age 15. Modern society requires more education to be productive than past societies, but this is at odds with human biology.
> pass safe harbor laws so that parents and feel safe leaving their kids at home, or letting them take the bus
This is only a problem in the US, but birthrates are low in all developed nations.
Some economic incentives might help a bit, but they're not going to have a dramatic effect: people simply don't want to have big families any more. Kids are a lot of work (and expensive, even with those incentives), so people like to have 1 or 2 and concentrate all their attention on those. They don't want 6 kids.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer... does not show eastern countries as having particularly high birth rates, and the largest eastern countries have the lowest.
The description on that page under Africa, which is the only continent remaining with fertility rate well above replacement rate, does agree with your assessment that it's about the society and its expectations.
(As a side note, I heard that Nigeria is on track to soon becoming the country with the 2nd highest number of English speakers after the US, which stunned me given that India is the most populous country in the world and—I thought—has a fairly high percentage of English speakers.)
No? A -> B doesn’t mean that B -> A. In the case of East Asia, it’s nearly a century of deliberate anti-natal government policy. China’s one-child policy is the most brutal, but pretty much all East Asian countries had softer forms of encouraging people not to have kids.
China's one-child policy is long since over, but their birthrate is very low too. Government policy isn't the problem (if it's even a "problem"). People just don't want to have big families, and now that they have a choice, they don't.
> People just don't want to have big families, and now that they have a choice, they don't.
But “choice” is individualism! There are American subcultures that are more educated and affluent than average, like Muslims and Mormons, that have much higher fertility rates than average. And that’s because those cultures exert strong social pressures to conform to expectations about family life instead of leaving it to choice.
Grandparents used to take everyone out to dinner regularly. Now we eat at their house. They have more comfortable chairs at home. The environment is much quieter. You don’t have to wait for refills. They personally have better cutlery. We aren’t really the types to like being waited on.
So unless we explicitly want something social from the restaurant or we need a table as we are travelling, the reasons for actually going in one have disappeared.
If my family gets together, we can bang out a multiple course guaranteed high quality meal in one hour, having fun while we do it.
But a lot of that is due to cooking knowledge that the elders in the family pass down and refine over many, many decades.
And I'm sure restaurant chefs get some kind of training to replace the passed down knowledge :)
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-r... [0]
This is an odd take because the trend in new/remodeled homes is dedicating practically the entire first floor and back yard of every home as an entertaining space. The line between "at home" and "out" is getting to be very thin.
Going over to a different friend's house 4-5 times a week for dinner, games, movies, music, sporting events, swimming, spa, fire pit feels to me pretty darn out.
US tipping is sick, and it is not fair to people who are involved in preparing your experience. Why only servers receiving tip? Why not the cook? Or cleaning lady? After all, dirty toilet will ruin your dining experience.
It's a glaring example of local optimization at the cost of global (your own life, viewed in its entirety) worsening.
The only reason I eat out is it's a date and we're in the early stages of getting to know each other, I want to treat someone (including dates) to something nice, or it's a special occasion.
At least in this country (Ireland) restaurants seem to be, if anything, fuller than they were before covid; deliveries are definitely more of a thing than they used to be, but no apparent evidence that people are giving up on going out.