Me neither. My daughter's prior bf had $200 in the bank and ordered Wendy's from doordash. There's a strong treat-yoself mentality that says everybody deserves a little luxury and makes it practically immoral to be frugal or contradict the "healthy food is too expensive" gospel etc.
I understand it for disabled people and I understand it for very busy people such as families with young kids but I don’t understand the majority of people who use it. Just go get it…
As someone with a family with young kids, it makes even less sense. Kids will order chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, or hotdogs or something, which are expensive at restaurants (>$5 usually), cheap at home (like $2), and easy to make (~10 min)
It literally takes longer to order than to cook IMO. For each of those meals, here's the process:
Prep for cooking - about the same time as entering an order, less if kids get to pick drinks and sides
Wait
Finish (add sauce, mix, etc) - about the same as unpacking and distributing the doordash stuff
And it costs less than half as much. We keep easy meals in the freezer if it has been one of those days and we need food to be ready in 15-20 min. I made orange chicken tonight, and with cooking rice in the rice cooker, active time was 5 min (wash rice, preheat oven, prep cooking sheet), and we had food about 25 min after starting. Total cost to feed 3 kids and 1 adult (SO was out) was ~$10. If I ordered the same thing, it would've been $30 if I picked up or $40-50 delivered. Oh, and no fighting about sodas, we just had water.
I can afford it but refuse to use those services. They inflate the menu prices, add fees. I'm ok with tipping but not the rest of that.
Also, it's ridiculously inefficient compared to picking it up yourself. It's not just someone else is doing the drive for you. The delivery does work for the store so there is extra driving occurring, deadheading in trucker parlance.
Especially when most restaurants I'd order from are like 1-2 miles away. It's worth it to me to drive 15 min roundtrip to save $10-15 and be able to check my order.
That only applies if they live at your house, and only deliver to you for thier entire shift, otherwise they have dead space to cover as part of being able to do delivery between other customers, restaurants and going home. That makes it not the same.
Are you saying it is inefficient because the delivery driver has to drive from the restaurant to your house with food and then back to the restaurant without food? Because delivery drivers usually take more than one order or at a time.
That's going to depend on the location. I do not live in a heavily populated area so they are usually delivering one order at a time. The only time there was enough volume to stack orders was during Covid.