devil's advocate: wouldn't you want the pizzeria to feel that market pressure so they either 1. improve their product, or 2. are replaced by a better pizzeria?

I dunno about you, but "improving the product" on food trends towards everything tasting the same, whether it's:

- Following the same trends/hype

- Changing the recipe so it suits a wider palate

- Narrowing the menu(s) to specific items most likely to move

It boils the ecosystem down to generic and less interesting by default.

Not everything needs to be some perfected ideal and frankly the world is more interesting when it isn't. I'd much rather live in a world where someone can try to build a restaurant based on their take on food and can subsist on their local community at first, maybe growing from there.

I think you're making strong points that what generates revenue for these places isn't always quality but social media hype / overly broad appeal etc... but objective quality is still a huge factor. Some restaurants may have a 2/5 star score because they're too innovative, but many have that 2/5 because they're simply serving bad food. If a place is serving burned/undercooked/expired food, I'd like them to feel like they need to address those issues.

Where do you live? I've never seen this happen and I'm in NYC... It does not seem to have occurred anywhere else I've traveled in the US

Funny you mention that, I did take a vacation to NYC recently. Had 5 or 6 slices while I was there and every single one was good! Maybe the result of market pressure, maybe not :).

Maybe it's the shit pizza you're used to. The quality has nose-dived the past few years.

Honestly, I think it's more the fault of city planners. There are almost no places to eat within 10 minute walk of where I live, and I live downtown. If more apartment buildings had commercial first floors that would go a long way.

May I ask what city you live in? I've lived in three boroughs in NYC, and I've never lived more than 5 minutes away from a local eatery. Hell, our first apartment was directly above one.

A lot of midwest cities aren't really "cities". In the NYC sense. Usually it's a tiny shitty downtown surrounded by suburban sprawl. The places to eat are off of stroads in and around strip malls. In my town a lot of downtown closes not long after the business crowds that work downtown dry up. The zoning doesn't allow enough residential zoning near businesses to have many walkable options.

We're pretty "lucky" in that our subdivision is only about a mile walk to the nearest store and we have sidewalks the entire way. So if I wanted to eat at Subway or Marcos Pizza or pick up a Papa Murphey's take and bake I've got those options! There is also a diner that cannot stay in business. It changes owners every other year or so. If you go a mile from me in the other direction, then the closest place to walk to get something to eat is two miles away (hint, it's the same place) and you no longer have sidewalks the entire way. Guess what happens at five miles away from my house in that other direction? Now you've got to walk six miles one way! My "city" has a population nearing 300,000 and you could find a copy and paste of this design all throughout the city. Miles and miles of suburbs connected via stroads and separated by strip malls.

To be fair, ground floor retail sounds great to residents but doesn't seem to be economically justified, judging by the amount of it that ends up vacant. I think it's more financially complicated than you would guess.

I reject the entirety of your comment but this point struck me:

>It also destroys every restaurant's natural advantage of closeness - if you run a pizzeria and your food is not horrible, you can naturally expect people from about 2 city blocks over to eat there - now, they're competing with every pizzeria in the city.

How is this a bad thing? You want businesses to compete, both in quality and price.

Food delivery reduces competition and increases price - now, instead of having a corner pizza shop, you have a couple massive chains supplying wide geographical areas - the food is not as fresh, the prices are higher due to the delivery markup and extra labor of bringing the food to you, so you likely end up paying more for a worse product, and said money will go to big corporations instead of a local small business

That is only true if the chains are better than the local restaurants. Which, admittedly, is true far too many times. So maybe those local restaurants should improve or close. I'm not here to give handouts, and neither are the users of those apps. Cook food that is better than the slop that the chains serve, which is a tremendously low bar to clear, or close shop.

And what happens if the chains are also "slop" but have more capital to continue to dominate a location thereby stopping any potential smaller, but better, local competitor from entering the market? Is that better for the local community or, somewhat more grandly, society as a whole?

How will they stop local competitors exactly? Will they send goons to trash the place?

Large businesses can operate at a loss that small businesses cannot sustain. They do this to strangle out competition. Then, after they’ve established a monopoly or oligopoly, they price gouge customers, reduce COGS resulting in inferior product but higher margins, etc.

I’m surprised that this is news to you. This is basically the foundation of antitrust law. Like, this is extremely common knowledge to the point that it mystifies me that you are not aware of it.

Come on mate let's be serious here. Monopolistic actions can stop local competition through completely legitimate means (such as temporarily selling products at a loss in a way which smaller competitors cannot due to access to more palatable capital funding for instance). After a certain level in size, competition is rarely about the product alone