But then that gets countered by not wanting to pay too much for a luxury service, such as delivery, when I can just jump in the car and pick it up.
One question: What did this people do before all of these apps came into play?
Simple, the same thing many of us still do today:
1. We make our own food at home, using stuff we bought at the grocery store.
2. If we want restaurant food, we get up and leave home and go to the restaurant and eat there, and enjoy freshly-made food instead of cold food that was made 45+ minutes ago.
3. If we really wanted to eat professionally-made food at home, we ordered pizza. The pizza industry figured out how to do delivery cost-effectively decades ago (and keep the food hot too, something the new app-delivery industry apparently still hasn't quite figured out). Also, take-out has been around for ages.
The sort of situation where I order DoorDash now (too busy to go out, going through a major depressive episode and don't have the emotional energy to cook) I would have microwaved a frozen meal 10 years ago.
These days I live in a somewhat dense city and yet I still prefer to order nearby and go walk to pick it up, at least when I'm just ordering for myself. It's probably an extra $5-10 and usually at least 20 minutes more to have someone else pick it up.
As for the economics... If you force higher wages, then higher prices are likely and demand then goes down. Not surprising.
The alternative might be for business to respond by working on higher efficiency, to get the average price of a delivery down by sharing the labor - that would require figuring out how to give the delivery workers multiple orders from the same or nearby restaurants to deliver in the same direction. Might be possible to build but when the restaurants aren't cooperating (it's wasteful for the delivery guy to wait for your food to be ready) and there's not enough orders from one area to another it's tough. Add that a lot of food delivery is relatively time sensitive as not all food keeps well / stays warm long enough. I suspect pizza delivery is the main type of business that has solved it this way. For everyone else, it's clearly a tricky problem and the net result either way is to need less labor for food delivery, higher prices, or a mix of both.
Which is fine as long as we have other jobs those delivery drivers are willing to switch to instead. Imo that's a big part of the problem - mandating certain jobs will pay better without necessarily having a plan for creating other jobs for the folks who end up underworked/jobless as a result. Now if gig companies downsized their workforces like regular employers some of the extra jobs should result from the extra discretionary income spent by the remaining workers... But probably a tiny fraction of what's needed to avoid more unemployment. Complicating this may be that gig workers are subject to underemployment if not enough if them quit, and I suspect the unemployment safety net works poorly for them.
Sometimes, the options in an area extended to sandwiches or Chinese food or a little bit beyond.
So that's what we did if we were either lazy or busy: We ate pizzas, or sandwiches, or Chinese food. These things can all transport fairly well.
We simply did not get soggy Whoppers, cold fries, or tacos delivered. (Some of us still don't, as we feel that it is the path of madness.)
We went to a restaurant and ate there. Or we got takeout.
Only pizza was ever "delivered" because you could batch up multiple pizzas and deliver them simultaneously.
I don't even remember any delis doing delivery and at least their products travel well.
Can't you do the same with regular restaurants? I've been to many non-pizza restaurants where delivery drivers regularly come in to pick up food. Surely those restaurants could do the same?
"Chinese" places are probably the only ones that I think can get close.
Traditionally, one shop had one or more drivers who would deliver multiple orders in one trip, and then return back to that same shop to pick up and deliver the next round.
This is very different from services like Doordash, which are many-to-many in terms of locations. There's a huge efficiency loss here.
Also different: Pizza delivery was single-source. If there was a problem with the order, the driver could fix it. Things like "Hey, man. You forgot our bucket of soda" could be fixed pretty quickly and painlessly -- they'll just bring it over on the next round, usually rather quickly.
Things are not this way with Doordash.
Pizza was different, as mentioned in a sibling comment, because the pizzas themselves were cheap and shitty, there were only 3 pizza shops that delivered in your area: Domino's, later Papa Johns, and usually some popular local chain (not Little Caesars, not Pizza Hut, neither delivered.) They frequently took way longer than they said they would, each driver was delivering pizzas to 5 locations average on a run, and if it showed up cold you would eat it anyway, or throw it in the oven for a few minutes.
This individual attention did not exist, because it was obviously too expensive to provide. Only upper-middle class professionals got non-pizza restaurant deliveries, it was more expensive than it is now.
Chinese might be an exception, too. A lot of people would get Chinese delivered. But it would always be a ton of stuff in those neat, stackable white boxes, and the person delivering rarely spoke English (recent immigrant.)
I always pick up my own food, but I’m aware that makes me an anachronism.
I tried it once. I'm in a suburban area. Food took 90 min to arrive. The driver went to/from the front door 3 times, trading food, before we wound up with our pizzas. They were cold.
What put me permanently off was the mistreatment of restaurants by the delivery corporations.
The same thing we do now: get takeout, sit down at the location, or cook at home.
Hell, even before these apps were invented I always just went and got my pizza or grabbed it on the way home.
In doing genealogy, I've seen the end results of allowing powerful corporations to decide the best offer people would have.
Mass die-offs of 45yo's from Black Lung disease springs to mind.
> I don't think gig workers are remotely comparable to coal miners from 50 years ago.
I wasn't comparing gig workers to coal miners. I was illustrating how "best offers" are designed by corporations and trend toward being exploitive.
Yup. It's a tale as old as time.
Simply raising raising wages just means fewer people will be employed/contracted, thereby maintaining ultimate cost.
Another side effect is with higher wages, people have more money, which means more money in circulation, which means merchants will charge more for goods/services rendered. Aka inflation.
"Just raise wages." is an easy and seemingly simple thing to say and do, but economics aren't easy nor simple.