People's decisions actually do hinge on those restaurant examples, though. Gross food? Hair in your meal? Horrible service? Restaurants can't get away with that due to stark business and reputation penalties. People will simply never come back.

Quite a different scenario than all websites taking an extra few seconds to load.

In fact there's very little a website can even do to turn off customers like a restaurant can. Imagine if HN took 10 seconds to load. Who cares? There's no "HN across the street" that I can go to that hinges on a 10 second wait time.