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Comment by colonial | Hacker News Reader

What I'd like to know are the demographics of the people using the delivery apps.

Everyone I know refuses to touch them due to the massive extra costs piled on top, but whenever I swing by somewhere in-person to get takeout, I have the same experience as you - there's always at least a few bags on the "Doordash shelf" or equivalent. Who's burning all this money?!

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I think tons of people do it. I have a cousin who moved to my town for a couple years around 2021-2023 and ordered delivery all the time. I have a friend in London who does it multiple times per week. I see a lot of food delivery happening in college-student neighborhoods. I think a sizable segment of the population has just gotten desensitized to the cost of it because they've come to see it as the "normal" cost.

There is a sizeable and growing group of people who legitimately do not know how to cook a meal for themselves. They actually go a to a restaurant for every meal, kitchen is unused basically.

Eat at corporate cafeteria for lunch, doordash or get takeout for dinner. Premade salads and microwave prep meals is "cooking." Every meal.

This is extremely common almost everywhere in Asia. Many places still have SROs (which were outlawed in the US decades ago) which is essentially just a room and (nowadays) a bathroom. No kitchen so the only cooking tends to be instant noodles. Virtually every meal is eaten out or via delivery.

>SROs (which were outlawed in the US decades ago)

I found no evidence that existing SROs were "outlawed", rather that construction of new SRO hotels has severely declined from a century ago, for a number of reasons including laws/regulations.

That's called outlawing it

Not when existing ones continue to operate.

Anecdata, but I usually see people who live alone or DINKs that have been together for a long time use it the most often. Those who started dating usually opt to cook or go out together. Those with kids don't even bother.

When you never step foot inside a grocery store, it's easy to think that the price of takeout is just the normal price of food; that the "luxury" kind of food you don't eat all the time are the Michelin-star type places; that takeout is cheaper than cooking yourself because the restaurants do everything in bulk and pay low wages.

I'm a retiree. I don't have much time left to spend it on cooking. Going to a restaurant takes even more time than cooking. Ordering and opening the door is much faster. Anyway, my assistant does that. I do cook meals that take no more than 5 minutes of my time, like boiled eggs, rice, grilled meat or quick salad.

I am also retired and have more or less the same routine as you. I aim my own cooking time to a maximum of 7.5 minutes e.g. fried eggs and smoked salmon. I do open the door myself though. I hope you have an assistant because you can afford one and not because of some disability.

Oddly, one of the things I'm looking forward to doing in retirement, is spending more time cooking. I started learning in my 40's and can now competently cook some basic dishes. Once I'm retired I'll have more time to experiment and try out different things.

One of the upsides of cooking yourself, is knowing exactly what goes in to the meals you're eating and being able to control things like spice level and how well done you like your dishes.

Exactly, in retirement I have more time to experiment and try out different things, but cooking is not one of them, and would take time away from truly exciting things:)

I was shocked when I went to college and we lived in a shared house for the summer to intern in the bay area, and I realized some people legit don't know how to cook anything, not even eggs or rice.

I tried to share my food with them but they didn't want it (admittedly I'm not Gordon Ramsey or anything). They were happy eating either frozen meals or doordash (back then it was cheaper) every dinner.

I moved back to the USA, SF in June 2021. I stayed with a friend and parnter for 5 days. In those 5 days they ordered via doordash for ~8 meals (lunch and dinner).

'21 is hardly representative, depending on where you were. If it was one of the bigger cities in blue states, they were paranoid about COVID until the early '22.

This seems to be the opposite of the trend but personally, due to some mixture of inflation, worsening service standards from the main delivery app where I live, and me just getting better at cooking, I've dialed back my food delivery app usage by like 80%.

Covid encouraged me to spend more time cooking and the result is that I now make better versions of most of my favorite dishes than any restaurant does (at least to my taste). I also worked out how to do their preparation in bulk so that they take a half hour or less to prepare.

This made me realize that meal delivery wasn't saving me as much time as I thought it was. Rather it was saving me from learning to cook, but you only have to do that once, and then you end up eating healthier, saving money, eating food that isn't cold because it wasn't sitting in a bag for an hour, and it takes less time than someone who can't cook probably thinks it does.

Grocery delivery on the other hand, now that service is worth its weight in gold. 2+ hours of work every week replaced with 10 minutes ordering online, which is mostly just going down the list of what I got last week and clicking add to cart.

Another strategy I like for groceries is walking to the store during my "lunch" break each day. It's never busy, you get used to the layout and can shop faster, it's easier to only choose ripe produce and to be selective with temporal price variations, it makes it easier to plan meals around produce that's ripening faster than you want, and you don't have the chore of dealing with a whole basket of groceries.

It still takes 2+ hours of work every week, but I was going to be walking or doing some sort of light exercise eventually anyway, and the mental break helps with focus on coding the second half of the day.

DoorDash has a button that lets you filter by items that are eligible for SNAP (food stamps) when ordering from a grocery store. So enough people living in poverty are using DoorDash that they thought it was worth building the feature.

Over forty million people receive SNAP benefits so even if only five percent of them use DoorDash, it's still a couple million customers. Any fees DoorDash or other delivery services add on have to be paid by the customer and cannot be charged to SNAP.

I have never once ordered delivery from an app. I very rarely order delivery period. I will order carry-out sometimes, maybe a few times a year, but I use the phone to place the order and I pick it up myself.

The American people have literally never been richer than the last 5 years. It’s mass affluence - the people door dashing are the newly mass affluent. It’s why the lines for ski lifts are so long and why Disney world is so packed

Young people?

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