I think the truth is restaurant food delivery is a luxgury good, literally “private taxi for your burrito” yet many people spend like it isnt.
Not all Gen Z, of course. Most of the younger people I’ve worked with have been generally smart about finances. It’s a subset who fall into the normalization of luxury services as a standard cost.
> Why is my $8 burger $23 after fees - An average reddit user
As you say, it's a private taxi for your burrito. When you factor in the labor costs, gas/car maint costs, and the amortized cost of providing the service, it's hard to see why anyone would think $15 for an on-demand delivery in a major urban area is abnormal.
Literally the same price for the pizza for in store take away or home delivery.
Always wondered if that was tax or immigration fraud (pay-to-work schemes). Or both.
Other restaurants just aren’t optimized for the delivery business, so it’s more expensive per serving for the customer (no matter who is doing the delivery).
I asked Claude AI to run a marginal cost analysis of food delivery, taking driver salaries etc.. into account and separately considering third-party platform vs restaurant direct. The answer came out at around £2 per order (in the UK). The artefact is published here for anyone to view: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4827ebef-9208-4cdb-8e9c-7...
I got it to rerun the analysis for the US and it's pretty much the same: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5b56e048-7af7-4b6c-8054-5...
My suspicion is that apps like Deliveroo, Uber Eats etc.. are ramping up their prices now that they have moats and market share.
However, I don’t think food delivery is the reason they’re complaining about finances - it’s more likely it’s that every generation above them has been able to buy housing and they cannot.
No amount of penny pinching on everyday spending is going to close a doubling [1] in the cost of buying a house for Gen Z vs _Millennials_ (never mind boomers!). It’s incredibly unfair and Gen Z are absolutely right to complain and be angry about it.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gen-z-mortga...
The problem here is not the concept of food delivery, which has been widespread for decades and used to be very cheap. It was not always a luxury service. The problem is that tech companies have become an established middle-man platform and are driving up the prices for a small amount of added convenience. And it's often a net-negative in my experience, having now sworn off Just Eat after some horrendous experiences and negligible customer service.
Looking at economic stats, spending on food and drink outside of the home grew enormously between 1992 and 2004 to overtake spending on food within the home: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-3010...
I found an archived copy of ref ONS2006d "Social trends No.36" here - https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20151014074...
Table 6.2 (p90) says household expenditure on restaurants and hotels went from £167b to $202b between 1991 and 2004.
Table 6.6 (p93) says that households spent an average of £11.60 per week on restaurants and cafes. Not clear if that includes takeaways.
There's an Independent article from 2006 which talks about the study, still not much about takeaways but some interesting nostalgia about the rise of gastropubs: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/britain-spe...
Mumsnet (to the rescue!) with a thread about takeaway frequencies from kids born 60s-80s. A lot of variation from "only on my birthday" to "every Saturday night": https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5031860-did-you-have-many...
I've no doubt that my own childhood was atypical in many respects. Relatively well off, only two kids, dad was a first generation immigrant so perhaps had fewer financial and cultural constraints. When I was a teenager at home from 2000-2006 the data suggests that spending on takeaways and eating out had been surging up to that point.
Either way I will always fondly remember having a donner kebab on a Wednesday evening, sat in the kitchen watching Star Trek Enterprise on the telly on its spinning turntable.
I agree with you about grandparents though. I think the closest mine would ever have gotten was a microwave meal.
And the funny thing is I made about $20 an hour (unadjusted for inflation, ~4 deliveries per hour + $5 an hour). Today the drivers still around that amount, the restaurants pay more and the companies operating are often operating at a loss.
Something very strange happened in the last 20 years.
Restaurants get less than 50% of the order total. The only parties winning from this shift are the delivery companies.
Tech companies discovered that the most profitable position to be in was global middleman, at a scale previously impossible before everything was connected by the internet. They undercut a given market until all the alternatives become financially non-viable and then start hoovering up all the margins from both sides (producer and consumer) of the deal.
Meanwhile, drivers—now independent contractors—get no hourly wage, no benefits, and absorb all costs (gas, car, downtime). Tech didn’t increase efficiency for workers—it added a VC-funded layer that extracts value.
So despite more demand and better tools, drivers earn the same (or less) in nominal terms, and much less after inflation.
The human brain is wired to go the way of the least resistance short term, no matter the cost long term, so customers pay a lot for that.
I have many pizza places that tell me they still deliver themselves for cheaper: almost nobody takes the option, they use the giant company app.
I ordered Indian food from one of my favorite local establishments. I was home alone so I wanted it delivered. I called the restaurant and placed my order. The owner showed up 20 minutes later in his Mercedes to drop off my delivery.
Some restaurant owners know that they can buy themselves nice things and still provide excellent customer service if they don't give all their profits to a delivery service.
'nonperishable food' or 'properly packed short travel' (i.e. dairy/frozen) IMO is a fairer niche of 'could be non-luxury with better societal outcomes', except for the 'as close to JIT as possible'. There's ways to optimize the process to where something on the scale of 10-20 homes could get their main groceries delivered two or 3 times a week and the overall cost would be lower than all of them doing so. Yeah you'd need a reefer van or an otherwise replenishable source of cold for dairy/frozen but at that scale the cost of such makes a lot more sense. Biggest problem is getting the right buy-in and mindset from consumers.
When you work from home and cant cook, delivery can happen right now. Or if you are having a small gathering with friends, delivery makes your life easier exactly when you need it.
I think that's the main vision behind Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens since he left Uber. You could order food prep for your week from a choice of menus, and the food would be prepared in an industrial kitchen for you and thousands of other people around you. It's basically restaurant-quality food that you can eat at home and isn't frozen.
Unfortunately for the meal prep market, I believe the break-even point for scale is much more difficult to achieve. Food is like hardware but with a much shorter end-of-life. You would need consistency in ordering to avoid excess spoilage and to operate at scale within small geographical pockets to make the delivery worthwhile. I really believe this could work with the right demographics and in the right geography, it's just much harder than simply delivering takeaways.
The main difference is that in practice, you go to the store and pick up meals for the next 2-3 days (I'm fine with this FWIW) and then you select meals (this is where it fell apart, often the 'good stuff' that I could eat with my diet wasn't available). The overall quality after microwaving per instructions was 'like you got a local restaurant dish but it tasted better than if you reheated that'.
Ironically, I actually appreciated it overall, and if nothing else it was really good portion control for myself and my partner. They were healthy meals with a proper portion for a normal adult, and frankly comparing said portion vs cost to 'leftovers' from a restaurant I think it was a... not bad value prop. Our only problem was the aforementioned 'not having the stuff that was gluten free and not overly bland in stock enough'.
I think the other problem is the sort of wool over everyone's eyes, where at-home meal prep for the week can be extremely simple so long as you've got a good process to follow and are willing to make various compromises.
Of all the things to worry about this is probably the least important.