Seeing how many Gen Z people use food delivery services on a weekly or even daily basis was mind blowing to me. I’ve had numerous conversations where I’ve had to bite my tongue when younger colleagues complained about finances after also explaining that they DoorDash dinner nearly every night. It’s bizarre.
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.
I was born in the 80s in the UK. When I was a teenager, my family had a takeaway meal delivered every Wednesday night. My dad would ring up the restaurant, tell them the order and our address, and pay the driver when they arrived. It cost us exactly what it would cost someone going to the restaurant, plus a small 5-10% tip to the delivery driver. Most places had a delivery fee only if you live outside a certain radius or your order was under £20 or something. This was very typical for families at the time, and restaurants would directly hire delivery drivers.
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.
I really don't think that frequency was 'normal' in the UK at all. I'm a similar age and we had a takeaway maybe once a month (usually fish and chips, occasionally a curry or chinese). Meals out were a bit rarer, usually a pub but occasionally McDonalds. For the generation above mine, my grandparents on both side basically never ate takeaways unless it was fish and chips on holiday - culturally it just wasn't a thing. I just asked my wife who was much wealthier growing up than I was and she similarly reckoned she didn't eat out much / have takeaways often.
Thanks for relating your experience. Wow is it hard to get any concrete figures on questions like "how many takeaways did an average household get per week in 2004". Also pretty tricky to chase down the references from the article you linked.
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.
Even the subtitle of this article basically enforces that fact:
> 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.
I still find it hard to see. Urban areas should have a high density of orders and a low number of miles per delivery trip.
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...
Most pizza restaurants are built around the delivery cost-structure. They locate off main streets, they have a small front-of-house relative to kitchen size, and they have relatively low ingredients costs. They save money on both real estate and taxes, and use those savings to pay for drivers who deliver multiple orders per trip.
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 agree with your sentiment and was also astonished about spending on delivery.
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.
My coworkers stepson is the same, door dash every day then complains he has no money. Even after having finance explained to him he still doesn't get it.
I think this partly explains gen z's constant complaint of not being able to afford a house. Most people didn't used to pay for TV (there's this invisible signal going over the air!) and now everyone pays for Netflix. People did pay for premade food (TV dinners, canned food, etc) but now they're paying for a restaurant-level expense one or multiple times a day. They're purchasing equipment in online games, subscribing to a million online services, constantly buying junk from peddlers like Temu, Amazon, etc. $100 home internet, $70 mobile phone service, $1000 phones? They're throwing their money away. And while they technically could stop, I'd argue that we have all been programmed to do this, to the point most people probably are unable to stop. Consumerism is addictive. I'll bet in the future your paycheck comes pre-deducted with all your subscriptions "to help you afford food and housing", and it'll be provided by Stripe.
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.