People are not forced to use DoorDash, UberEats, etc. We never do and are surviving just fine.
The problem here is that there's a $45B company (doordash) in the middle of the person cooking the food and the person delivering the food instead of a high school kid in a funny hat.
Exchanging the overhead of a dining room for the overhead of unskilled labor taking food to a place is an easy win for a restaurant. Doordash and the like are taking jobs that you could train a child to do in an hour (take an order, deliver it to a place) and spending billions on the technology to do instead while still requiring unskilled labor to do the job.
This is the kind of software that needs to be a small scale distributed open source affair instead of a $45B company with several competitors at the same scale.
They started selling their product as if it were basically free by burning investor cache and now they're riding the limited rails of brand recognition and habit while trying to charge for the ridiculous amount they're doing for such a simple task.
Related: a few years back before DoorDash and the like exploded in popularity there was a local company near me who tried to start a food delivery business. They lasted one summer (busy) season and then made a post on social media about how unsustainable it was. These services (Uber/DoorDash) are only seemingly viable because of the mountain of "investor cache".
But not at this scale; it was always a side offer from a more select number of restaurants catering more to pressing needs than an "immediate satisfaction" culture driven by same-day shipping.
I think that's probably a viable model for the future, assuming they don't have VCs that will push them to squeeze restaurants like the big apps, at some point.
Is this DoorDash's plan once they've driven their competitors out of the market? The market will shrink and it will take quite some time to recoup their expenses. Maybe that's okay in their books. Own the whole pie even if you shrink it.
Even picking up your own food is becoming destroyed. Orders get made with no regard to the estimated pickup times you used to be able to rely on. Your order might get made immediately and just tossed onto a pickup shelf where it sits getting cold for half an hour.
This is all because DoorDash guarantees absolute shit quality and accuracy. Cold food, wrong orders, and they've trained people to not complain by threatening to ban you from the service. So instead of the son of the owner of the pizza place rushing right out to make your order right with an apology, you just accept that an 80% correct order is OK.
A whole generation of young adults has come of age with this thanks to COVID, so we're just stuck with it now.
No, you've got that backward. Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital. Advertising is a pretty clear example but it's not the limit. I mean, how many people were ordering DoorDash before DoorDash existed? I'm not being entirely facetious - it's impossible for customers to behave in a way that's not allowed by the market.
That you are resistant to these tides is not evidence against, it's just accounted for. You're not the target audience. Nor am I. But neither of us has ever made a decision in a vacuum; we choose our purchases from what's available, according to the information we're exposed to.
Source?
The best argument against this is how elastic demand was when ZIRP ended. Customers responded to an underpriced product. When the price was raised to a profit-clearing level, it no longer cleared most of the market.
It sounds like customers had agency. Tides of capital gave them more or fewer options, and they chose them at their discretion when the terms were advantageous. When they weren't, ever or any longer, they didn't.
Let's assume that the answer really is to ensure individual choices are changed. Who's going to go house to house and educate everyone about why the choice to use DoorDash is problematic? Does this person have the time to customize their solutions to every family's needs? It's insanity. It's an argument that leads nowhere at all; it's an abdication of responsibility (which is totally unnecessary, because the commenter never had a responsibility to change the situation). Hell, it's a call for the audience to also abdicate responsibility they might feel. It's just a useless or harmful way of telling listeners how proud one is to be a statistical exception.
No, it's not that most people are interior and follow the market, it's that the market literally is what most people do. If everyone "went against the market", they'd just have moved the market.
There is a massive market of lazy AF people who also are terrible at personal financial management, and they are the ones complaining.
I order delivery through the apps a ton, but it's not because I'm bad at financial management. Like many here, I have a well paying job that takes up a ton of my time and energy during the week, and cooking every night is simply not feasible. Takeout is expensive, sure, but if it enables me to hold down a job that let's me afford it, it's a conscious trade-off that I can make.
Could I spend more time meal-prepping and freeze meals instead? Sure. But again, time and energy.