I think they're trying to rewire teen/young adults brain to reach for them before even thinking to step out.

Kind of like food delivery companies do/did. I know people who get pizza delivered from literally 50 meters from their front door. Or buy basic pasta with tomato sauce/cheese for 15 euros when you can do the same thing at home for 15% of the price and 15% of the time

Don't forget that it literally buys you time. Even if the pizza place is 50m from your door, you still have to put on clothes, wait in line to order and then wait for the pizza to be ready. Delivery on the other hand takes 1 minute out of your day.

If you have kids, time is worth a lot.

Pizza is simple enough that you can easily make it at home and it would probably be better and cheaper than delivery chain quality. But this will take even more time.

> If you have kids, time is worth a lot.

I'm talking about 20 something tech bros, they had plenty of time.

Also, you can call the place in advance and just come to pick it up, no wait time

I understand that time is important but as some point you still have to go through life. Otherwise what's the ultimate goal ? Matrix style pod with automatic feeding, that's what peak efficiency would look like

Making a pizza with your kids can also be quite a nice experience, better than putting them in front of candy crush while you do unpaid extra hours for mega_corp_of_the_day

> Also, you can call the place in advance and just come to pick it up, no wait time

Two way drive time, plus, depending on parenting situation, possibly needing to pile kids in and out and both ends, is not negligible time.

> I understand that time is important but as some point you still have to go through life.

Yes, and personally prepping every meal, or picking it up, is not the experience of life everyone wants to focus on. There's time to prep meals with the kids, or while they are home doing something else. There's time to pick something up for them. And there's time to schedule a pizza delivery that arrives about the same time as the babysitter. And lots of other things, that are sometimes right for some people.

> Making a pizza with your kids can also be quite a nice experience

Sure. But it is not necessarily the right choice every time you or they want to eat pizza.

> better than putting them in front of candy crush while you do unpaid extra hours for mega_corp_of_the_day

That's hardly the only reason to order pizza; holy false dichotomy, Batman.

Not everyone enjoys cooking. Not everyone enjoys food. And not everyone has oodles of spare time all the time. I love food, and I like cooking it sometimes. I also don’t get instant delivery, but mostly because the quality sucks. I get food delivered all the time because calling a place, picking it up and then going back home to eat it is a lot of time I would prefer to spend working or reading or doing literally anything else.

> Making a pizza with your kids can also be quite a nice experience,

Maybe the people who order pizza[1] have better experiences with their kid due to the time saved by ordering pizza.

If you're making pizza with the kid (or muffins, or anything really), it's not a 15m prep, it's at least 30m, usually more. You cannot rush things with kids.

[1] I make things with my kid, but I'm not snobbish about people who buy things to save time, and then spend their time with their kids differently.

> Making a pizza with your kids can also be quite a nice experience, better than putting them in front of candy crush while you do unpaid extra hours for mega_corp_of_the_day

Agreed, the problem is that making pizza with kids or just with your partner tends to be a lot of work and especially mess: preparing dough, wait until it rises, spreading the dough, slicing toppings, placing toppings while preventing the cats from snacking off the ham, put it in the oven, clean everything because EVERYTHING will be covered in flour, oil and tomato juice, eat, put out wastes to the compost bin...

It's one thing to do such a meal on a weekend where you actually have time, but after nine hours of work (8h+lunch break) and two hours average commute? Shit no, who got time for that?

(Side rant, we need lower working hours. 20 or 30 hours, not the 40 hours that were only made possible by having women as house keepers)

> preparing dough, wait until it rises, spreading the dough, slicing toppings, placing toppings

you can buy prepared dought and sliced ham. Beyong that either you have time to spend with kids or you don't - this couod one way to so that.

> preventing the cats from snacking off the ham

Thats the fun part

Not to forget that you need to be pretty sure you want to use the ham and cheese in next couple weeks... And if you don't it is pretty much wasted. Inventory management is restaurants problem. Which again makes life simpler.

> Also, you can call the place in advance and just come to pick it up, no wait time

I suspect both the orderer and order-taker are both a bit happier to have orders come in online instead of taking calls. It enables a bit more asynchrony and batching, and removes the potential for miscommunication.

Big advantage of moving food ordering online is that it's gotten rid of trying to read off an order through the phone to someone who barely speaks English, standing next to the phone in a loud kitchen with dishes clinking and people yelling in the background.

The order taker may not be all that much happier - those online front-ends see to charge sizeable fees.

I certainly hope you aren't getting delivery from a pizza place 50m from your door. Just order takeout, and it'll take 3-5 minutes instead of 1 if it's really that close.

For every parent stuck at home with the kids, there's got to be a quite large number of people who could go out and get stuff, but instead do not - and some percentage of them aren't doing "something useful" with the time beyond Netflix. I doubt delivery services could survive only catering to those who "need" or can "really use the time".

(Amusingly enough some customers of delivery service are the very workers for delivery services, I presume.)

It doesn't buy you any time when the delivery driver gets lost. This seemed to happen at least a third of the time. I gave up on delivery drivers. I order take out and pick it up myself.

I can confirm this happens. I used to cook, but even when I didn’t cook I would make a simple sandwich or pasta sometimes. But a huge number of people have forgotten how easy it is to prepare something simple since they became reliant on these apps.

It makes perfect sense when you need something quick, but can't leave the home.

Eg, you're working from home, cooking your own food, but are missing something. You have enough of a lunch break to cook something simple like pasta, but not enough to run to a shop, buy, then cook the pasta. Ordering it online means you can keep on working while it's coming.

Another scenario is where something else is expected to arrive. Eg, you have an important package from Amazon coming. You don't want the delivery person to try leave $2000 worth of hardware on your porch, so it's not comfortable leave the house for food.

Or when you have another schedule to keep. I have regular meetings with a trainer, and on those days it's great to have predictable deliveries, rather than "during the day".

Or you can buy an extra bag of rice and a few tomato sauce cans for these rare events instead of paying $15 for $2 worth of groceries

My grandparents had full time jobs and five kids, they managed just fine. This is a first world problem coupled with an edge case you can easily avoid

> You don't want the delivery person to try leave $2000 worth of hardware on your porch, so it's not comfortable leave the house for food.

Delaying or skipping a meal never killed anyone.

I feel like people completely lost their mind and make up semi fake scenarios to justify their crazy way of life. Either way I don't see how it justifies a multi billion $ industry

In my experience the dark stores were identically priced to my nearest supermarkets. The bigger issue is they didn't have the cheap brands. None of the $1 Barilla pasta sauces, instead it was the $5 brands.

Not so identically priced then, eh? Looks like they do need those higher margins.

> You have enough of a lunch break to cook something simple like pasta, but not enough to run to a shop, buy, then cook the pasta. Ordering it online means you can keep on working while it's coming.

Or you could do what most sane people do and buy the pasta and sauce in advance so you can prepare it whenever you want, for a fraction of the cost. Dry pasta and bottled sauce last approximately forever, so it's easy to keep an inventory at hand.

You've never ever been without an ingredient for a recipe? They're not saying it's their weekday routine to forget ingredients. But don't act like it's never happened to you.

Sure. And sometimes I forget something, and then don't want to sit for the rest of the work day annoyed and hungry, when I could just pay for my mistake with a bit of money and get over with it.

There's also the rare cases that don't work out sensibly otherwise in one's particular situation.

Eg, one time I ordered a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks because I've never actually tried one. The closest Starbucks to me is an hour by foot, half an hour by public transport and 8 minutes by a car I don't have. It's also in an industrial area I have no reason to visit otherwise.

So win-win-win in that case I figure. I got my curiosity satisfied, Starbucks got money from somebody who'd otherwise never buy there, and some delivery person made a bit of cash.

At one point I spent two weeks ordering stuff from every restaurant around because I had a bunch of stuff to do and going all around the town would consume a lot of it, but I still got to try what everyone around is cooking.