Delivery services charge ~30% and increasingly police the practice of charging different amounts for items in person vs. in app. So not only are you paying a delivery fee + tip but (until very recently) you were likely paying more for the food.
Now that menus are being 'audited' by the delivery companies, the use of UE or DD can lead to the _retail_ prices that people pay in person being raised (as it's the only way they restaurants can safely raise their delivery prices).
Bad for everyone except shareholders of delivery services, I guess.
Food/grocery delivery should be a municipal service like garbage/recycling with no tipping and service provided by full time government employees with good benefits and use of city vehicles. Many, many new jobs, and a public service that everybody would love.
But DoorDash has a patent on giving you a deal if you combine your order with another restaurant, and giving you a higher price unless it determines that pisses you off and then backing off a little. Those contributions to humanity must be protected.
Is this satire? It sounds exactly like what someone would say if they were trying to parody a big government liberal. The idea of turning an expensive, optional convenience into a government-run service and touting job creatoin is a bit too on the nose.
It's not an optional convenience for some people. And no, not satire. We should be using local governments to drive competition as frequently as possible in my opinion. I believe in municipal broadband and cellular service as well.
I do agree that there is a small minority of people who greatly benefit from delivery services due to disability or otherwise, but the thought of tax dollars paying to deliver Tom's crunchwrap supreme because he's a little high and really wants taco bell grinds my gears in a particular way.
I'd have no problem with a subsidized service for those that NEED it, but for those that just WANT it? Nope. But then you get into the sticky messy world of how to determine need.
I think the argument here is if you allow delivery to become a local monopoly like other utilities then just make it a utility. However as-is, there's little barrier to entry on adding delivery to any business and it should probably stay that way.
Is it necessary? No. Unfortunately I don't think would be great as a utility because quality of service matters and unlike the actual utilities, there's a lot of arbitrariness to quality of the service.
Availability of vehicles for delivery purposes is an interesting proposition. Charge doordash a tax or fee to maintain a fleet of vehicles that would open flexibility in the job market. (Consider this for ride-sharing as well... basically just reinvented the taxi medallion system but maybe with less restriction).
I think the best idea would be a free and open source Doordash clone. The local government would contract a local company to handle logistics, so it would still be a private company (like garbage collection), but ideally lots of them spread out through the country. Each local government would decide if it's fully paid for by taxes, subsidized by taxes, etc (like garbage collection). City vehicles repaired/maintained by mechanics like school busses, etc.
I'm talking about local governments and not state or federal level, which is out of the scope of this conversation. I agree FWIW, but anyone with any degree of capacity for critical thinking would agree.
In my area, garbage collection is not done by the city, you pay a quarterly subscription to a private company if you want pickup. If not, you take it to the dump yourself. Some of my family live somewhere there are 3 of these pickup companies operating (which also pick up on different days).
Just saying, city run trash is far from universal.
I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.
(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).
For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.
Grocery deliveries for the elderly and disabled are an excellent public service. But it's a hard sell to make everyone pay for stoners to get a $30 burrito delivered at 2am.
Are you kidding me? I don't use these services because I can save a lot of money by driving, taking public transit, or (gasp) walking to buy groceries or food myself. 100% do not want to be taxed to pay for some lazy individuals food delivery.
We need the government to deliver food to our doorsteps? Shouldn't the stores provide this service? If there were demand and a sustainable business model, wouldn't they? Costco delivers, to commercial customers. I imagine they are not necessarily losing money doing that, but perhaps.
lol, this is the state of leftist discourse online? Now even completely unnecessary services like DoorDash should be socialized so we can all pay for it? This has to be satire.
Municipal services like garbage pickup are generally funded by a mix of per-household fees and property taxes. Property taxes loosely correlate with the size of the household (and yard and construction materials and everything else that scales with price) while the per-household fees can scale depending on how big of a collection can you request.
It's a good system for aligning the costs with the people who use the service.
If you thought all tax money went into a big general bucket and the government decided what services to offer out of that, municipal garbage pickup does not work that way.
There couldn't be a free delivery service because the usage would be all over the place. Someone DoorDashing burritos for breakfast lunch and dinner 7 days a week would use it 20X more than someone doing their once-weekly grocery order. Subsidizing it would incentivize a lot of waste, traffic, vehicle usage, and other things that we actually don't want to incentivize people to use more of.
The only way this could work is with a substantial per-delivery fee, which gets us right back to what we already have with DoorDash.
It surprises me that you are getting such a strong reaction about a service that used to be extremely common and not even cost extra. Used to be - in my part of the world anyway - a greengrocer would come by and drop off your order and take a new one, the milkman would pick up bottles and drop off your milk, the ice man would come. It is hard to go out and do all these things with kids and with day jobs, and it does not take much marginal cost to take care of one more house in the neighborhood. Imagine rejecting receiving a birthday card in the mail as an irresponsible extravagance.
> I’ve literally never ordered from any of these 3 companies. ...
>Don’t get it.
I get that it takes full advantage of human tendency to be lazy. A friends stepson works a crappy job seemingly to pay for his door dash. The kid saves almost no money and is always asking his mother for money here and there while living at home with no expenses outside of his door dash and video game purchases. He couldn't afford to buy a bicycle.
I did it a few times years ago when they had huge promotions. And even still I found it to be too expensive on top of being a bad experience.
I do get it. If you just really dont want to spend time on getting/making your own food, dont care about the cost, and are willing to put up with the experience then it serves a purpose. There is also a difference between doing it regularly and rarely.
I'd wager most, although not all (reread this before replies of "but I ..."), of those people doing it regularly are lazy and making a bad financial decisions but thats on them.
do any of you have young kids and dual, heavy stress jobs? DoorDash and Instacart are godsends for families on the go who don't have time to do all this stuff anymore. My wife and I BARELY have time to go grocery shopping and will probably use this service once a month, doordash more than that when we don't have the energy to cook dinner and don't want to wrestle our kid into the car and constantly entertain them at a restaurant.
Parents who use digital pacifiers (ipads, etc) do it because they think it will make their life easier and their child happy.
They are wrong on both counts. You are stealing your kids opportunity to develop an internal world, an attention span and to self stimulate.
And your kid, who is probably fairly smart and good, will always be "difficult" in social situations. You will dread taking them out. A dead ipad will be your doom.
I promise: your kid is smart, great and can self entertain. It's never a problem in the kid, always the parents.
I took the advice as to remove the stress and pressure of assuming kids need synchronous attention to stay entertained. They sure will want it. resist.
While I agree with what you are saying I'm surprised at how confidently you can say it to someone else who lives, or grew up in, a different environment than you. How do you know theres no mental illness? How do you know if they're trying to shield their kid, via entertainment, from the brutal reality that they might lose their house? Maybe one works nights and one works days?
What if your kid is a three legged midget in a horse costume? What if he's just a Claude operating a child sized robot body? What if your kid is Benjamin Button and has a crippling addiction to internet porn?
You probably shouldn't still be "entertaining your kid". Your kid can almost certainly still entertain themselves. You are not helping them by shoving an ipad in front of them.
I spent several years as a young kid with a peer who was severely disabled both physically and mentally. This kid was also very happy to entertain himself, especially with shoelaces. He loved untying and tying his shoes. He also deeply loved picture books.
Don't use people with disabilities as an excuse to be lazy.
First, the only useful parenting advice is Every Kid Is Different. All other parenting advice needs to be evaluated with that lens.
Also, entertaining is not always putting on a show for them or giving them an ipad. Just chatting with three small children sitting around a table while they color can be difficult and you don't always have the energy.
With 3 kids and both parents working we still never use these things. The few times I tried the food takes a long time and arrives kind of slimy.
The way I see it: customer service sucks real bad now. In San Francisco it sucks incredibly bad. Adding another layer of it is another place for things to get worse.
I completely understand how door dash is useful. But I've been so disappointed that I just don't consider it anymore
Do whatever it takes to handle things, but for this:
> My wife and I BARELY have time to go grocery shopping
If you can, take them grocery shopping with you. One parent stays at home doing stuff, the other goes grocery shopping with at least one kid.
In my experience kids at least 12-18 months old LOVE grocery shopping.
Get a big shopping cart, put them in that special seat facing you. Keep it concise, don't shop for more than 1 hour per round. Talk to them, explain what you're doing, give them harmless things to play with (a carrot, a celery bulb, a bag of rice, whatever). Have a little fun with the produce, they will love random things, for example that weird looking tomato.
My daughter used to love sitting in the cart while perusing the books they sold at Costco. But maybe we didn't buy enough, they don't seem to carry many anymore!
In my experience routine trumps almost everything. And considering language learning, religion, accents, etc, routine probably trumps everything, period.
I've seen people carting bored kids through supermarkets, while walking sullenly and silently, to know that some people aren't even trying.
I don't order artificial food on apps or go anywhere near the golden arches, but it amazes me that the majority of the app orders are for these chains that sell utter garbage.
It is a bit like a phone, you could open a book to read classic literature or you could doom scroll AI trash all day. For some reason the latter option is invariably chosen over the former.
The money is also ridiculous, I am not sure of golden arches prices with delivery and tip on top, I just don't live like that. However, I always cook from scratch with no animal products, just stodgy vegetables, and I am sure that my weekly food bill is going to be less than one delivered cold and late burger meal of no nutritional value.
Also shocking as a cooking person is how few McDonald's orders are sit down with people. We have ended up with people eating with their fingers in their solitary confinement cars with the worst junk food possible, whereas we once had dinner parties with a proper table, home cooked food of nutritional value, valued company, crockery, cutlery, etiquette and prayers to an imaginary god.
Even stranger is that there is no free healthcare in the USA. Eat this garbage and you have a healthcare bill coming for the obesity, saturated fats blocking arteries, cancer and the rest of the chronic diseases that go with artificial food.
This situation is a product of American corporate ways of doing things and hard to unpick, but with these delivery apps now worth billions, there is now another barrier between healthy eating since this silly gig economy now needs to be kept in existence since jobs and corporate profits depend on it.
I'm not sure what the third company you're referring to is (I've read through the article twice and only see DoorDash and Instacart (which I guess is incorporated as "Maplebear", but not a separate company from what it sounds like), but I've ordered from both of them, albeit not recently (my wife and I have been using FreshDirect lately). The value proposition of getting groceries delivered for us is that we don't drive (or have a car) and the grocery store is over 20 minutes away walking distance from us. The extra cost to have them delivered is far less than the cost and maintenance of having a car, and the convenience of being able to have it done even during times when I'm busy working from home is added bonus. My wife also has a condition where the treatment is essentially turning off her immune system every six months, so the safety of not exposing her to something by doing shopping in person is not something I'd ever want to give up.
I guess I could like, get a shopping cart and spent an extra 40 minutes hauling stuff back and forth every time we wanted groceries, but even that would be somewhat dependent on weather; a delivery driver is not going to have to walk 40 minutes in heavy rain and can bring frozen goods in an amount of time that doesn't result in them being soggy or completely melted messes by the time they reach us.
not an instacart user, but as a carless person an ebike has really saved me hundreds of dollars on DD fees just by doing pickup, and it really shortens the amount of time; even a very slow biking pace of 8mph is orders of magnitude faster than walking. and with bike panniers you can carry two grocery bags' worth of stuff. a decent ebike assists up to 20mph.
basically the only things i bother online delivering grocery wise are bulky dry goods (e.g. paper towels)
Uber does both food and grocery delivery on top of rideshare.
I wonder if DD is going to make a play for Lyft next, which they’re already in close partnership. The market consolidating to these 2 players (Uber and DoorDash) seems natural(?), for lack of better terms. Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Uber Eats in my area is usually faster than DoorDash. I look forward to the ongoing competition. But, Instacart provides delivery services behind the scenes for Costco and Walmart; having less competition between DoorDash and Instacart will surely lead to higher prices charged to the big box stores. Hopefully Uber steps into the fray to keep them on their toes.
My new years resolution for 2026 was to quit using 3rd party delivery companies. It was annoying at first but I've kept it and life is better without them.
Mind giving more detail into how it went? Did first-party delivery options tend to exist and work well, or did you just adjust your expectations re: convenience?
I've been delivery-app-free for several years, with the lone exception being when I'm sick and contagious. Restaurant food with delivery basically costs double where I live, and grocery delivery has always been hit-or-miss on the quality of things like produce.
Freak what you feel but delivery apps are just not worth it for me personally outside of those necessary contexts and I don't mind the inconvenience of picking up my own food.
We decided to completely rethink our eating. Started meal planning around basic staples like pasta and rice. Going to the store 3-4 times a week for fresh meat and produce. I cook lunch in big batches twice a week and hot pack individual portions in glass containers. Partner and I have both lost weight and gained energy while spending far less on food.
I've reignited my love for cooking. I'm getting more exercise since I make a point of walking to the grocery store 3-4 times a week. Also means I'm cooking fresh foods. Partner and I have both lost weight without doing anything else.
Speaking purely for myself, and there are other factors, but enormous money savings and I've lost a bunch of weight. I took the force majeur approach of moving outside of delivery app range.
Same here, I don’t have to deal with rude delivery people and useless AI based customer service, plus I am not wasting my money delivery and services fees. On top of that I became a home cook!
Not a resolution but when I moved cities I changed habits. My new city is great for cycling (infrastructure and weather) so I quite enjoy cycling somewhere to pick up the food. Much easier to change habits when you have to change a lot in your life at the same time.
Exactly. I’ll also add two other cases. My 80 year old grandma no longer drives. We live a hour away and visit every weekend to take her grocery shopping, but it’s nice to order her snacks throughout the week.
When our kids were babies we were sleep deprived and their sleep schedule made it hard to randomly go out. Having delivery was so helpful during those years.
And these days I’ll order delivery if I’m feeling sick or just tired.
I use Instacart every week. It's clearly valuable over shopping yourself for a lot of people and the shoppers are clearly making more than "half a dollar".
Maybe you don't have kids or that busy of a schedule?
Having a terrible experience seems like a local issue, certainly some areas might have a worse pool of delivery personnel than others but where I live the people doing Instacart are primarily women and they do an excellent job. Many women can't do Uber because of the insane levels of harassment, but they are able to do "gig" work like Instacart or UberEats that doesn't involve interacting with random strangers.
Like most things in life, it's not a matter of difficulty, as if I am so incapable of going to a grocery store to buy groceries and the undue hardship it will cause me. It's simply a matter of how I like to budget my time. I judge that the 30 minutes it can take to do groceries is better spent doing other things with my life.
I use DoorDash all the time. Here in urban San Diego, there are lots of restaurants with no nearby parking – so you either have to park blocks away in a residential neighborhood or have a companion who can grab the food while the driver circles the block. Or carry your tacos home on the bus.
I live in NYC and most people don't have cars here. If I order from somewhere in a 10 min walk radius then I'll often choose pickup, but if it's a couple subway stops away then a guy on a moped is going to be more efficient. The mental justification is I'll pay $10 to save 30-40 min of roundtrip walking/subway to an adjacent neighborhood (which will generally take 5 min to travel on a moped).
For groceries, yeah I just go to the store myself, but there are 3 grocery stores a 2-3 min walk away.
I gift meals to people in other cities when they're in need (sick, childbirth, death in the family) and I'm not nearby to help.
I've had intense working situations where an extra hour of work was worth paying someone $30 to deliver my $100 of groceries.
We've frequently used DoorDash and other services for small business meetings where we wanted to provide lunch, or in some situations where we had to stay late (security incidents, etc) and wanted to provide the team with something better than pizza delivery.
However it's also scary to watch some people who will DoorDash whenever they feel like it without regard to the cost. I watched some eye-opening conversations among college students comparing how much they had spent on DoorDash in the past year, even though they were not in a financial demographic that should have been indulging in delivery.
> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
Ok, but then...
> I use Amazon fresh frequently
So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...
Why are so many people commenting things like "I don't get why people use these services"?
First off, okay that's great but no one is telling you to go use them. You can continue living your life exactly as you were without needing to judge others who live their lives differently from yours.
Second, clearly there are plenty of people who do judging from this $17b acquisition that just happened.
I was at Snowflake supporting Instacart as main technical account architect and saw them polish things into place to get to a decent-sounding S-1 and then to go public. It sure was an interesting experience seeing battles between some people just not giving any care to costs and others trying to make money from these little itty bitty consumer transactions. Epic political battles, I tell you.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadNow that menus are being 'audited' by the delivery companies, the use of UE or DD can lead to the _retail_ prices that people pay in person being raised (as it's the only way they restaurants can safely raise their delivery prices).
Bad for everyone except shareholders of delivery services, I guess.
If they were actually “bad” for consumers as reflected in their revealed preferences, the restaurants shouldn’t lose any business.
Personally, I don’t get the economic appeal for most restaurants and foods, but obviously a lot of consumers disagree.
I'd have no problem with a subsidized service for those that NEED it, but for those that just WANT it? Nope. But then you get into the sticky messy world of how to determine need.
(And no, I don't want the city involved in food/grocery delivery).
Is it necessary? No. Unfortunately I don't think would be great as a utility because quality of service matters and unlike the actual utilities, there's a lot of arbitrariness to quality of the service.
Availability of vehicles for delivery purposes is an interesting proposition. Charge doordash a tax or fee to maintain a fleet of vehicles that would open flexibility in the job market. (Consider this for ride-sharing as well... basically just reinvented the taxi medallion system but maybe with less restriction).
Just saying, city run trash is far from universal.
I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.
(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).
For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.
That said, I'm not convinced of this idea either. But if you're not going to enforce antitrust laws, it seems preferable to a private monopoly.
Here is the neat thing.
They want stores to be government owned too.
It's a good system for aligning the costs with the people who use the service.
If you thought all tax money went into a big general bucket and the government decided what services to offer out of that, municipal garbage pickup does not work that way.
There couldn't be a free delivery service because the usage would be all over the place. Someone DoorDashing burritos for breakfast lunch and dinner 7 days a week would use it 20X more than someone doing their once-weekly grocery order. Subsidizing it would incentivize a lot of waste, traffic, vehicle usage, and other things that we actually don't want to incentivize people to use more of.
The only way this could work is with a substantial per-delivery fee, which gets us right back to what we already have with DoorDash.
And "should"... what?
I do wonder what percentage of their orders are McDonalds. I lived near one and the car traffic of vehicles with delivery placards was significant.
Which makes me wonder about pricing pressure that is often reported re: McDonalds, and yet people end up paying $30-40 for a $15 McDonalds order.
Don’t get it.
>Don’t get it.
I get that it takes full advantage of human tendency to be lazy. A friends stepson works a crappy job seemingly to pay for his door dash. The kid saves almost no money and is always asking his mother for money here and there while living at home with no expenses outside of his door dash and video game purchases. He couldn't afford to buy a bicycle.
I do get it. If you just really dont want to spend time on getting/making your own food, dont care about the cost, and are willing to put up with the experience then it serves a purpose. There is also a difference between doing it regularly and rarely.
I'd wager most, although not all (reread this before replies of "but I ..."), of those people doing it regularly are lazy and making a bad financial decisions but thats on them.
Stop entertaining your kid.
Your kid doesn't need to be entertained. They don't need the tv, a tablet, or a scheduled production put on by their parents.
Let them be entertain themselves. They are great at it.
They will be better behaved, they will be happier and more independent. You will enjoy spending time with your kids again.
Take them out. Let them wait in line. Let them sit at the table a bit. Do slow restaurants that aren't kid friendly.
Let them bring a few small non-electronic toys or a little book, or paper and crayons.
Things that work for your kids don’t necessarily work for all kids.
1. only some specific circumstances for regular kids
2. special needs kids
should warrant exceptions.
They are wrong on both counts. You are stealing your kids opportunity to develop an internal world, an attention span and to self stimulate.
And your kid, who is probably fairly smart and good, will always be "difficult" in social situations. You will dread taking them out. A dead ipad will be your doom.
I promise: your kid is smart, great and can self entertain. It's never a problem in the kid, always the parents.
> Take them out.
?
I took the advice as to remove the stress and pressure of assuming kids need synchronous attention to stay entertained. They sure will want it. resist.
its ok to say what you mean and have it land in different ways for different people.
I was going to say that this is an absurd leap, but going off your username I suspect that was the point.
You probably shouldn't still be "entertaining your kid". Your kid can almost certainly still entertain themselves. You are not helping them by shoving an ipad in front of them.
I spent several years as a young kid with a peer who was severely disabled both physically and mentally. This kid was also very happy to entertain himself, especially with shoelaces. He loved untying and tying his shoes. He also deeply loved picture books.
Don't use people with disabilities as an excuse to be lazy.
Also, entertaining is not always putting on a show for them or giving them an ipad. Just chatting with three small children sitting around a table while they color can be difficult and you don't always have the energy.
Conversing with your kids is great. Coloring is great.
The way I see it: customer service sucks real bad now. In San Francisco it sucks incredibly bad. Adding another layer of it is another place for things to get worse.
I completely understand how door dash is useful. But I've been so disappointed that I just don't consider it anymore
> My wife and I BARELY have time to go grocery shopping
If you can, take them grocery shopping with you. One parent stays at home doing stuff, the other goes grocery shopping with at least one kid.
In my experience kids at least 12-18 months old LOVE grocery shopping.
Get a big shopping cart, put them in that special seat facing you. Keep it concise, don't shop for more than 1 hour per round. Talk to them, explain what you're doing, give them harmless things to play with (a carrot, a celery bulb, a bag of rice, whatever). Have a little fun with the produce, they will love random things, for example that weird looking tomato.
It becomes even easier as they grow a bit.
I've seen people carting bored kids through supermarkets, while walking sullenly and silently, to know that some people aren't even trying.
I don't order artificial food on apps or go anywhere near the golden arches, but it amazes me that the majority of the app orders are for these chains that sell utter garbage.
It is a bit like a phone, you could open a book to read classic literature or you could doom scroll AI trash all day. For some reason the latter option is invariably chosen over the former.
The money is also ridiculous, I am not sure of golden arches prices with delivery and tip on top, I just don't live like that. However, I always cook from scratch with no animal products, just stodgy vegetables, and I am sure that my weekly food bill is going to be less than one delivered cold and late burger meal of no nutritional value.
Also shocking as a cooking person is how few McDonald's orders are sit down with people. We have ended up with people eating with their fingers in their solitary confinement cars with the worst junk food possible, whereas we once had dinner parties with a proper table, home cooked food of nutritional value, valued company, crockery, cutlery, etiquette and prayers to an imaginary god.
Even stranger is that there is no free healthcare in the USA. Eat this garbage and you have a healthcare bill coming for the obesity, saturated fats blocking arteries, cancer and the rest of the chronic diseases that go with artificial food.
This situation is a product of American corporate ways of doing things and hard to unpick, but with these delivery apps now worth billions, there is now another barrier between healthy eating since this silly gig economy now needs to be kept in existence since jobs and corporate profits depend on it.
I guess I could like, get a shopping cart and spent an extra 40 minutes hauling stuff back and forth every time we wanted groceries, but even that would be somewhat dependent on weather; a delivery driver is not going to have to walk 40 minutes in heavy rain and can bring frozen goods in an amount of time that doesn't result in them being soggy or completely melted messes by the time they reach us.
basically the only things i bother online delivering grocery wise are bulky dry goods (e.g. paper towels)
I wonder if DD is going to make a play for Lyft next, which they’re already in close partnership. The market consolidating to these 2 players (Uber and DoorDash) seems natural(?), for lack of better terms. Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Freak what you feel but delivery apps are just not worth it for me personally outside of those necessary contexts and I don't mind the inconvenience of picking up my own food.
They seem like near-identical businesses to me.
When our kids were babies we were sleep deprived and their sleep schedule made it hard to randomly go out. Having delivery was so helpful during those years.
And these days I’ll order delivery if I’m feeling sick or just tired.
Maybe you don't have kids or that busy of a schedule?
Like most things in life, it's not a matter of difficulty, as if I am so incapable of going to a grocery store to buy groceries and the undue hardship it will cause me. It's simply a matter of how I like to budget my time. I judge that the 30 minutes it can take to do groceries is better spent doing other things with my life.
We also think it's important not to have our kids grow up thinking that everything is just delivered to them at their beck and call.
For groceries, yeah I just go to the store myself, but there are 3 grocery stores a 2-3 min walk away.
I gift meals to people in other cities when they're in need (sick, childbirth, death in the family) and I'm not nearby to help.
I've had intense working situations where an extra hour of work was worth paying someone $30 to deliver my $100 of groceries.
We've frequently used DoorDash and other services for small business meetings where we wanted to provide lunch, or in some situations where we had to stay late (security incidents, etc) and wanted to provide the team with something better than pizza delivery.
However it's also scary to watch some people who will DoorDash whenever they feel like it without regard to the cost. I watched some eye-opening conversations among college students comparing how much they had spent on DoorDash in the past year, even though they were not in a financial demographic that should have been indulging in delivery.
> are people so antisocial now that going and grabbing groceries yourself is too much to handle?
> Paying an immigrant worker half a dollar to drive some tacos to a member of the upper class when the math has never worked out in the immigrant’s favor seems… bad? Or atleast a good way to turbocharge inequality
Ok, but then...
> I use Amazon fresh frequently
So... you do seem to understand who uses these (it's exactly people like you), and you have an actual use case for using a grocery delivery service (since you use it yourself), but you just think that Amazon Fresh is a completely different experience and ecosystem than Instacart, that does not promote inequality, and isn't antisocial? Can you elaborate on your reasoning/sources? I wouldn't say Amazon is exactly known for its humane treatment of low-wage workers...
Lots of well paid immigrants here on HN.
A mental model of immigrants == poor people has unhealthy political impact.
There's also times when you have people over and don't want to leave to pick something up.
And times when you are too tired or sick and don't want to leave the house
First off, okay that's great but no one is telling you to go use them. You can continue living your life exactly as you were without needing to judge others who live their lives differently from yours.
Second, clearly there are plenty of people who do judging from this $17b acquisition that just happened.