[fragmede]

Which is an empty platitude if restaurants won't meet customers where they are - on their smartphones. I'll use my local restaurants' app/webpage when there is one and get pick-up, but if there isn't one, I'll be real - I just use Doordash. When I've got people over and need to order food, it'll take 45 mins between everything else going on to figure out a restaurant, and then another hour to pick some food. And then someone changes their mind while on the phone with the restaurant. Orrrr (after we pick a restaurant) we just pass the phone around.

[bena]

This really seems like exaggeration. Two hours? How many people are we talking about here?

Also, nothing you've mentioned really solves your issues. Even with DoorDash, you'll need to pick a restaurant. And DoorDash doesn't solve the problem of someone changing their mind as they are ordering.

And then you still have to wait for the food to be prepared and delivered. And there's no guarantee on when it will arrive. So it winds up being a wash.

Also, there's a reason places that don't do delivery don't do it. The cost doesn't justify it. Then there's the whole "meet me where I am" attitude. They're the ones with the service you want. You have some obligation to meet them yourself.

And if you don't want to, that's fine. We used to manage all of this well enough before

[fragmede]

You've never herded cats? That time is wall clock time, so to be clear, It isn't 1:45 collectively sitting down and paying attention to that one specific task. (That would be too easy.) Just like how it'll take three days to write six hours of code because of all of the other work stuff going on during a busy week, in my experience it just takes roughly three hours of wall clock time from "start beginning the process of ordering food" to food in mouth. Most of that is spent not ordering food. Finishing up some work stuff or finishing the TV/movie someone put on or hey check out this one video on YouTube/Tiktok/etc and getting sucked down a rabbithole, or a quick game of whatever cards, or a discussion about how someone's life/work/relationship/whatever is going. Just normal distractible people things.

The cashier at the restaurant isn't going to, (nor should they!) wait on hold for that entire hour of mostly not ordering food. Ordering via phone app doesn't care how long it takes after we start, or that we got utterly distracted and came back to it 20 minutes later.

It starts to take too long when it's more than a dozen or two people, though there usually aren't that many. At some point though, it becomes more effective to get people's dietary restrictions and make decisions for everybody, but just ordering a bunch of pizzas is considered a (delicious) failure mode to be avoided.

Doordash's app mostly doesn't help in figuring out which restaurant to go with, though it does say what got ordered last time. and has a rating and $ signs. The process becomes asynchronous. each person gets the phone and figures out what they want, without the rest of the group just staring at that one person until they finish. No one needs to manage orders beyond passing the phone around and eventually pressing checkout. The person who changes their mind just gets the phone back before the checkout button is pressed and edits the order. Doing that verbally via the phone is terrible. It's also understood that there's no changing after checkout is pressed.

To be clear, restaurants don't have to meet me on Doordash, but they do have to meet me at least halfway, which is on the Internet, and that there are local restaurants who do. They have their own webpage, they take orders there, it isn't run by Doordash, and we just send someone(s) to go pick up the food. At least one of them is operated by Square, which also runs that place's PoS system. So I'm not holding restaurants to some impossibly high bar that none of them seem to be able to meet, just discussing the reality of operating a restaurant in the digital age.

Restaurants modernized and installed telephones and credit card machines and now, they also need a digital presence to compete. There are umpteen restaurants competing for my business and if it's too much friction to eat their food, chances are I'm just not gonna eat there and my business ends up at a competitors.

I mean, they don't actually have to. There are some spots that don't have a website and still only take cash and it's word of mouth, and I frequent them infrequently, but that's their business model, so good for them, so long as it's actually working for them.

[hiatus]

We used to order lunch for an office of 15 people just fine over the phone. We had a drawer stuffed with local takeout menus. The hardest part was deciding where to order from but that's the same with Doordash.

[talldayo]

Ah, but there's the catch. Resturants aren't meeting you there, Grubhub workers are. Resturaunts largely just optimize for takeout, and whether or not your food arrives warm is less of their problem and more of the Grubhub worker's issue. And as delivery drivers quit over low pay and their businesses go bankrupt, I really see no way for restaurants to support this behavior.

Additionally, you have to look at it from a pragmatic perspective. When I visit the East and West coast of the US, meal delivery is popular enough that you might think it's a booming business. Everywhere else it's pretty much dead though. In places where the cost of living isn't enough to compensate for a restaurant and their middleman (read: most of the US), you can't even find a driver most hours of the day. It's one of those nonsense businesses like Uber that seems like a great idea on paper but one that falls apart outside the Bay Area economy. Most places in America are not gentrified enough to pay peons gas money in exchange for hand-delivered McDonalds.

[fragmede]

edited to be clear this is for pickup. a number of local restaurants meet me there.