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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

I don't think they're saying they're confused about the psyche of individual people electing for delivery.

The "social question" to explore is about how so many people collectively came to see leaving the house, interacting with others humans, and setting aside work or idle distractions as bad things to be bought off with cash that we had to work to earn.

We know that people like delivery and we know that people don't like the alternatives I mention above, but that wasn't always the case and it's probably worth slowing down to think about what change and whether that might correlate with other concerns.

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Ah, that one is easy. These services would have been popular in the past had they existed, but they didn't. There were no apps and no immigrant slave labour. Now that these things exist, the services exist and have become popular. Turns out people like others doing stuff for them. For example, maids. Who wouldn’t want to have one if they could pay for her?

You might want to check your priors.

Suitably cheap labor and the opportunity to hire them has almost never not been available, but industrial-society middle class people who could otherwise afford it long found it to be a luxury to indulge in only occasionally (family pizza night, a cleaning service before the big party, etc) -- not because of unavailability or inaffordability but because class-culture norms acknoweledged it as irresponsible, wasteful, and foolish.

It would be embarrassing largesse to have somebody make a $7 iced coffee and then have somebody else deliver it for another $5. It would be like going to the grocery store in a tuxedo. You might be able to afford it, you might own a tuxedo, but it was just seen as sort of an absurd class theater.

Those norms have changed radically in the last couple decades, and not just on this matter.

Apps have made things so much easier. You get a list of restaurants and you choose your order. You know what restaurants are available, no need to know their phone numbers, you have the menu, the prices, no more waiting for them to pick up the phone or understand you in the noisy restaurant over the phone. If the experience sucks the app will reimburse you.

And immigrant slave labour has made it all affordable.

You're missing the point of the comment. It was not about affordability.

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