[dale_glass]

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".

[lm28469]

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

[squeaky-clean]

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.

[solarkraft]

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

[thematrixturtle]

> 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.

[squeaky-clean]

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.

[dale_glass]

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.