December 10, 2025 • 24 mins
What does the death of restaurants look like? Ellen Cushing, staff writer for The Atlantic, joins Karah to talk about the rise of delivery apps and the fall of the in-person dining experience. They discuss how delivery apps became part of the millennial lifestyle subsidy, how they reshaped what’s on the menu, and why this feels all too similar to what’s happening to movie theaters.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Welcome to text Off. I'm Kara Price here with Oz Valascian.
Hey Oz, Hey Kara. So I want to tell you
a story about young me.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Okay, I grew up in New York, and growing up,
we lived in this small apartment and.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
We had this little play kitchen for me.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Yeah, and of course like it had all the fixings,
but I guess because it was a New York play kitchen,
it had a telephone in it, so I was sort
of playing at making dinner for my family, and my
parents recall this story of me going into the kitchen
and picking up the phone and calling for Chinese takeout, and.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
That was you making dinner in the playhouse exactly exactly right.
Are your parents embarrassed or they like, She's the apple
does not fall far from the truth.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
There are things that I said as a kid that
they embarrassed them. That was not one of the things,
because the truth is is that we mimic our parents behavior,
and that's what my parents did. They ordered in So
there's a reason that I've told you the story. I
recently talked to Ellen Cushing, who's a staff writer at
the Atlantic who primarily writes about food and food trends,
and she shared with me this kind of pun intended
(01:27):
het take.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
I think that delivery and what delivery apps have done
to restaurants is the single biggest change in food basically
since I've been alive.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
I actually have some more first hand observations about this
because my stepfather owns a restaurant in London, and I
watched first hand the delivery door Dash, Uber eats ification
of his restaurant. He was actually a pioneer of doing
high quality restaurant food delivery for an Italian restaurant in
London in the kind of mid two thousands, and then
(02:02):
these tech platforms came along and it went from like
quite a significant share of the business back down to
a very small share because the margins they take are
so much that it's basically not worth It's not really
worth doing unless your business is totally optimized for it.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, I think it's something that if like you've ever
been to a restaurant, you obviously think about. But I
wanted to talk to Ellen because she demystified the sort
of how and why delivery apps have overtaken the food
industry and actually, like what really struck me about our conversation.
Beyond the impact of delivery apps on restaurants was the
impact these apps have had on.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
The actual dishes that are being served to.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Us, Like delivery apps are actually influencing what we eat.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I'm very intrigued to hear what it is because I
love these I love and I'm slightly horrified by these
stories about how technology doesn't just meet our desires, that
actually shapes them.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So I first asked Ellen for a brief overview of
the history of delivery food and how we actually got
to this particular moment where every restaurant on Earth seems
to have a takeout option.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
So let me take you back through the sands of
time to the nineteen nineties when and before that the
eighties and the seventies, when delivery existed. It was something
that mostly existed for Chinese and pizza. When I grew up,
I'm from California, but I grew up and we had
like a small stack of paper menus in a drawer
(03:30):
in our kitchen, and when we got takeout, you know,
you pull them out and you're kind of like, okay,
kids who wants like Kung pao chicken? And so you
would call the restaurant, they would dispatch someone who worked
for the restaurant and they would bring you your food.
What changed in kind of the early twenty tens was
(03:50):
that it started being facilitated by this third party. So
you had a bunch of companies pop up, all at
the same time. They have since largely consolidated, but there
were six or seven companies that were like, we can
use phones, which everyone has now to facilitate delivery. We
will not be using employees of restaurants. We will be
(04:11):
using contractors. This was the era when like uber was
the future of everything, and so they were like, we
can use this army of contractors to deliver people's food
and it will theoretically be more efficient because you can
pick up from a bunch of different restaurants that are
on the platform and deliver to a bunch of different people,
(04:33):
and you have this like wonderful economies of scale thing.
So that is the big change.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
It is very sad to me that kids will not.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Grow up with the file folder full of menus that
I grew up with. That was such a You just
brought me back so much just thinking about that thick
stack of menus that you'd have to read That was
like early reading comprehension for me totally.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
And like it was such as a kid who loved food,
it was such a source of fascination. Wow, there's all
this food that I don't have. It's not food my
parents are cooking. You know, it kind of rocked.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It's also very funny to think, like, you know how
gen Z is bringing back a lot of cassettes and
even like mail order stuff. Like the one thing that
I don't think is coming back is like delivery menus.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
Probably not. I mean I think as a society we're
kind of post paper. Do what you think? Like, like
I feel like we don't even get right right, You
got a q comes from trees.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, the QR code is not I'll never get on
board with the qure kid, but whatever.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
That's taking us off track.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
So in the piece, you start by talking about the
moment that delivery apps were conceived by a college student
named Colin Wallace. So can you talk a little bit
about Colin and where his idea came from?
Speaker 4 (05:53):
Yeah, and I should say Colin did not think of
delivery apps. He just developed a piece of technology that
help delivery apps talk to point of sale systems. The
details of that are like pretty technical, but basically, this
was a guy who was in engineering school at Georgia
Tech and he really wanted a sandwich. He had these
(06:15):
long lectures. He also, you know, he was going to
football games and he kept feeling like, what if I
could just get the food that I wanted delivered to
my seat? Because you have to go, you have to
stand in line, you're missing the game, et cetera. And
so it was pretty obvious. You know, he's an engineering student.
(06:36):
This is twenty eleven. Everyone has an iPhone basically, and
so he was like, I feel like there's a better
way to do this, and so he developed this system
that basically replaced a lot of the delivery infrastructure was
done by facts at this point, which is like a
sort of crazy technology to be using in twenty eleven.
(06:56):
So he figured out how to make it work on
the phone and the rest was history. And you know,
the company he started got acquired by grub hub and
he became head of innovation.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
So I guess the question that I have is, like.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
The popularity of these apps takes off in the twenty tens,
like for those of us who kind of have always
adapted to the way that phones have changed things, which
is my generation. You know, all of a sudden, grub Hub,
door Dash, Seamless, you know, all these apps sort of explode.
I'm using them all the time to do just about anything.
(07:34):
I remember one time I broke my ankle and I
ordered a wee charger from GameStop on uber on uber each.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Oh, so, like there's no question.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Now we go from you know, like very specific foods
being kind of the ubiquitous takeout food to literally anything
you can possibly imagine being something that you can get delivered.
I mean, other than you know, Colin's invention. What is
responsible for this pivot to like everything being on demand?
Speaker 4 (08:09):
The answer, Kera is money. That is that's what's important here.
So this is again early twenty tens. This is a moment.
I was living in San Francisco in the time. There
was a lot of money, There was a lot of
venture capital, and you know, VC is kind of winner
takes all. I would say, it is a industry that
(08:30):
is very much ruled by fomo. And there was this
idea at the time that like, whoever wins the delivery
wars will get access to a market of everyone who
eats food, Right, So all of these different companies wanted
to win, and all of these people that were funding
these companies were just pouring money into it. And you know,
(08:53):
this was also the era of the millennial lifestyle subsidy
zerp Like, you know, money was very cheap, and so
Silicon Valley was just like pumping money into all of
these companies and basically subsidizing the cost of delivery. So
what you have happening is you'd open Uber Eats or whatever,
and you'd get these like ads basically that are like
(09:15):
fifty percent off your first order, or like take twenty
dollars off when you order three times in a month
or something, and so they're like really incentivizing people to
order delivery. They're basically you know, delivery costs money because
you are adding labor and computer space and all kinds
(09:38):
of infrastructure to a relationship. Right, You're adding another party
to the relationship between the party who eats exactly. And
so what was happening was was like Sandhill Road was
like eating the extra cost. And so you have this
brief period in the early twenty tens. Delivery is ubiquitous,
(10:02):
it's on your phone, and it's cheap. Like sometimes it's
even cheaper than like cooking for yourself or eating in
a restaurant. And so they basically, in a very short
amount of time, like invented a market that did not
previously exist, and then it invented the expectation that it
would be cheap. And that's very powerful. That's a very
(10:24):
good way to get people kind of like addicted to something. Right,
do you remember this era, like when delivery was so cheap.
I was going to say it was the promo code era.
It was crazy, like every time you ordered something you
could get fifty percent off.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Right, they were like please, we're.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
Begging you, well, basically pay you literally, and it was
because they wanted you to be loyal to grub Hub
or Postmates or whatever the app was, and they wanted
to lock you in.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah, we were basically eating for free at that point,
I remember this, And we were.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Ubering for free, and we were getting access to all
of these like apps for very little money. It kind
of rocked.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
After the break White restaurants were forever changed by the pandemic.
Stay with us, So the pandemic happens and then all
of a sudden, delivery is the only way that restaurants
make money, right, and then the pandemic ends and people
(11:38):
don't want to change their behavior. And so my question
for you is, like, what is the difference between promo
code era to like delivery feels expensive again, but also
like restaurants are empty, So what happens?
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yeah, I mean, as you say said, like the pandemic
was this inflection point in that like every restaurant that
had been kind of holding out on delivery for various
reasons now reach this point where they were like, oh,
we have to do this or bebo clothes. I remember,
you know, fancy restaurants, like nice restaurants were suddenly doing delivery.
(12:19):
Places that had been saying, you know, our food doesn't
travel well, or we think the economics don't make sense,
or we have enough customers already we don't need delivery.
We're now like, oh, we need delivery. And this was
also a moment when, like you know, ordering delivery sort
of became virtuous. It became like a victory garden, like
(12:39):
if you want to keep a restaurant in business, you
should order delivery from them.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yes, I remember that was right, because I mean, delivery
workers were essential workers at the time, and it was.
It was totally. It was like a mark of supporting
the economy.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Yes, exactly. It was like we're all going to get
through this together. Like order a burrito, your party has
change you wish to see in the world.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yeah, exactly, exactly exactly.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
But in answer to your question about like how it
seems like delivery has gotten more expensive, it has. Part
of that is that some municipalities have added taxes onto
delivery to account for the fact that drivers need pay
and delivery is kind of like one big externality that
(13:27):
affects cities a lot, and so various places have added surcharges.
But the real difference is that Silicon Valley stopped subsidizing
it because these companies had to make money at some point,
and so they pulled back the subsidies slowly. And so
now when you buy delivery, you're paying the true cost.
(13:48):
You are paying the cost of the food, the cost
of the labor, the cost of the overhead, the cost
for grub hub or whatever to make its cut. There's
a lot of people who need to get paid now,
and so you, the customer are paying that.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
So can you talk a little bit more about the
economics of these apps like, how how does it work?
Speaker 4 (14:13):
Yeah, if you are a restaurant and you sign up
for a delivery service, they are basically only three Now
three companies control something like ninety eight percent of the
delivery market in the US. It's basically DoorDash, Uber and
(14:38):
grub Hub is much smaller than the other two. But
you sign up for one of these companies, there's different tiers,
but basically you are paying them for listing you on
their app. You're paying them for facilitating the delivery, You're
paying them for you know, placement within the app. If
(15:00):
you open a delivery app, now you'll notice maybe that
there's a lot of kind of like sponsored listings, or
some random place will show up as like the best
Indian food in all of New York City and you're like,
this place has like two stars, Like how did this happen?
And that's because they have paid extra. The rest of
it us paid exactly, you know, And this is not
(15:23):
unique to delivery apps at all. Like this is true
on Yea and Google Maps, and it's true kind of
everywhere on the internet. But that costs money. So restaurants
are basically just turning a cut over to fees that
are paid to the delivery apps.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
And you spoke to delivery drivers in this piece like
this is not a lucrative job.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
It can be, you know, you will talk to drivers
who say, someone tipped me one hundred dollars on a
ten dollars order of wings. It's like any service job
where it can be kind of random. But no, they
are not paid by the hour. They're paid by the delivery.
That of course incentivizes delivery drivers to move quickly, not safely,
(16:12):
which can be a problem in cities. They are often
driving really long distances. You know, I talked to a
delivery driver who told me that he delivered like a
cup of ice cream, like you know, like a single,
not even like that.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
I mean, some of the things that I've ordered, I can't.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I ordered a sleep like I ordered like two crispy
cream doughnuts the other way.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
I mean, it's just salthy, And how should you pay
for them? I don't want to. And that's when you
close your eyes.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
That's between you and your God.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
That's right, yes, and the God of my understanding for
sure exactly.
Speaker 4 (16:45):
You know, he drove like something like thirty miles to
deliver this. He lives in a really rural area in
South Carolina, and he's making like three dollars for forty
minutes of work before gas and you know, maintenance and stuff,
and the person who's paying like fifteen dollars. So no,
(17:07):
it's not really a lucrative job. I think delivery companies
would say these people are independent contractors. They choose how
much they work, they set their own hours. It's a
great job for college students or people who need to
make a little bit of money on the side, but
nobody is acting like this is the first step on
a career ladder that will support you and your family
(17:27):
for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Right, and yet it's very accessible and something that people,
I mean, especially in cities like New York, it feels
like everybody I see on a bicycle, everybody that I
see in a car is somebody who's picking up something
from a restaurant to take to somebody's house. Yes, and
the lines outside of restaurants are and that's that was
one of the things that really stuck out to me
(17:49):
about your article is like, is this idea of like
not so much how delivery has transformed the way we
get food, but it's also transformed what idea of a
restaurant is and like why does the restaurant exist? So
from your point of view, like in twenty twenty five,
like what is the purpose of a restaurant and has
(18:09):
that changed on account of the explosion of delivery apps.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
That's the core of this and part of the reason
I wrote this story to begin with. I just kept
having this experience after Lockdown ended of going into restaurants
in New York City and they would be like two
thirds empty on a Friday night and there would be
like fifteen delivery guys in the front of the store
(18:36):
picking up food, and it would it didn't seem that
good for them or for the people working at the restaurant,
and it was sort of a bad experience for me
as the diner. So yeah, I mean, I think that
it often feels to me like a lot of restaurants
are kind of like glorified vending machines.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Now, like that's what it feels like.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
Delivery has changed the way people who run restaurants run restaurants,
and it means when you build a restaurant, you are
probably having way fewer tables and way more space for
delivery drivers to congregate. You're having shelving for the delivery orders.
Some of them have separate entrances for delivery versus din
(19:18):
in because you know, you're essentially kind of like cramming
two experiences into one where you're like in a restaurant
and a delivery driver's like backpack. It's like hitting you
on the head and you're like, it's just good. And
then in terms of the food, you know, I talk
to restaurant tours who are like, I'm putting more brazes
on my venu, I'm doing fewer like deep fried things
(19:41):
because they just don't travel well. This is kind of
the reason that everything's like a bowl. Now, if you've
noticed that bowls travel really well, they're kind of like
saucy and gloppy, and they're not meant to be like crunchy.
You know, anything that's crunchy is not going to travel well.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
The nineteen fifties was not a time for the US
EBOL or the Ploi.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Certainly not no, no, no no. But twenty twenty five, Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Baby, that's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Like that's basically what's in is like the thing that
is portable.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Maybe that's the best argument against delivery is that it
makes the food taste bad.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, But I guess my question is is, like,
if we keep going down this path and restaurants become
less and less of an in person experience, like what
happens to the industry. And obviously you did a lot
of reporting on this, it does seem a little bit
dire for restaurants, and like, is there anything that looks
(20:36):
like course correction post pandemic?
Speaker 4 (20:38):
I mean, really, where I see this going is I
think it'll be like movie theaters, where like, obviously people
are not gonna stop eating, people are not gonna stop
like consuming, right, but like you're gonna see restaurants close.
You're kind of always gonna be worried that your favorite
one is going to close. They'll become rarer and rarer.
It'll be this special thing that you do sometimes if
(21:02):
you are an enthusiast. And that really freaks me out
because I love restaurants.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah, that's such a good analogy. I didn't think about
it that way. But the movie theater sort of as restaurant.
It's the ease factor that's sort of cannibalizing the thing.
And if you don't care about the experience to begin with,
is it something that you're going to try to preserve.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
You know. I got a lot of email after this story,
and a fair amount of it was from people saying like,
I don't like restaurants. I don't like having to tip,
I don't like sharing space with other people. I don't
like waiting for my food, like basically a good riddance.
And I was kind of surprised by that, just because
if I have not already like tipped my hand and
(21:46):
en augh, like I love restaurants. I love going to restaurants.
So yeah, I mean, I do think some people truly
don't care. I think with movie theaters it's going to
be one of these things that we kind of like
miss when it's gone. But yeah, I think some people
just don't like restaurants. Don't care, don't care if they
go away, don't care if they change so much as
(22:09):
to be unrecognizable.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
It is such a strange phenomenon because on one end,
it is so miraculous that we live in an age
where you can have everything on demand, and then it's
also like pretty spectacular how that thing that facilitates such
an ease of sort of on demand life is the
(22:35):
thing that might cannibalize the thing we're actually benefiting from. Again,
not to sound overly romantic about it or bleeding heart,
but I think we forget the cost of the thing
when we're getting what we want.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Yes, and look, there's a whole apparatus that is designed
to make you forget about the cost of the thing.
The thing about a frictionless service is that it's designed
to alide all of the effort that goes in Tech
companies are really good at this, Like their whole thing
(23:10):
is eliminating friction. You know. Amazon is kind of the
same way, like next day delivery. If you actually think
about all of the like arms and legs and cars
and trucks and planes and paper and plastic and warehouses
that were required to get your box of paper clips
(23:34):
to your house within twelve hours, it's astonishing. But they
don't want you to think about that.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Yeah, there's success sort of rides on how little you
think about it in fact. Yeah, well, Ellen, thank you
so much for joining me today to talk about the
personal is portable.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Thank you. This was really fun.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
That's it for this week for tech stuff.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
I'm care Price and I'm oz Vlasan. This episode was
produced by Eliza Dennis, and Melissa Slaughter. It was executive
produced by me Kara Price, Julian Nutter, and Kate Osborne
for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley
mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Join us on Friday for the Week in Tech, where
we'll run through the headlines you need to follow.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
And please rate and review the show, and reach out
to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
We want to hear from you.
Welcome to text Off. I'm Kara Price here with Oz Valascian.
Hey Oz, Hey Kara. So I want to tell you
a story about young me.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Okay, I grew up in New York, and growing up,
we lived in this small apartment and.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
We had this little play kitchen for me.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Yeah, and of course like it had all the fixings,
but I guess because it was a New York play kitchen,
it had a telephone in it, so I was sort
of playing at making dinner for my family, and my
parents recall this story of me going into the kitchen
and picking up the phone and calling for Chinese takeout, and.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
That was you making dinner in the playhouse exactly exactly right.
Are your parents embarrassed or they like, She's the apple
does not fall far from the truth.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
There are things that I said as a kid that
they embarrassed them. That was not one of the things,
because the truth is is that we mimic our parents behavior,
and that's what my parents did. They ordered in So
there's a reason that I've told you the story. I
recently talked to Ellen Cushing, who's a staff writer at
the Atlantic who primarily writes about food and food trends,
and she shared with me this kind of pun intended
(01:27):
het take.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
I think that delivery and what delivery apps have done
to restaurants is the single biggest change in food basically
since I've been alive.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
I actually have some more first hand observations about this
because my stepfather owns a restaurant in London, and I
watched first hand the delivery door Dash, Uber eats ification
of his restaurant. He was actually a pioneer of doing
high quality restaurant food delivery for an Italian restaurant in
London in the kind of mid two thousands, and then
(02:02):
these tech platforms came along and it went from like
quite a significant share of the business back down to
a very small share because the margins they take are
so much that it's basically not worth It's not really
worth doing unless your business is totally optimized for it.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, I think it's something that if like you've ever
been to a restaurant, you obviously think about. But I
wanted to talk to Ellen because she demystified the sort
of how and why delivery apps have overtaken the food
industry and actually, like what really struck me about our conversation.
Beyond the impact of delivery apps on restaurants was the
impact these apps have had on.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
The actual dishes that are being served to.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Us, Like delivery apps are actually influencing what we eat.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I'm very intrigued to hear what it is because I
love these I love and I'm slightly horrified by these
stories about how technology doesn't just meet our desires, that
actually shapes them.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So I first asked Ellen for a brief overview of
the history of delivery food and how we actually got
to this particular moment where every restaurant on Earth seems
to have a takeout option.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
So let me take you back through the sands of
time to the nineteen nineties when and before that the
eighties and the seventies, when delivery existed. It was something
that mostly existed for Chinese and pizza. When I grew up,
I'm from California, but I grew up and we had
like a small stack of paper menus in a drawer
(03:30):
in our kitchen, and when we got takeout, you know,
you pull them out and you're kind of like, okay,
kids who wants like Kung pao chicken? And so you
would call the restaurant, they would dispatch someone who worked
for the restaurant and they would bring you your food.
What changed in kind of the early twenty tens was
(03:50):
that it started being facilitated by this third party. So
you had a bunch of companies pop up, all at
the same time. They have since largely consolidated, but there
were six or seven companies that were like, we can
use phones, which everyone has now to facilitate delivery. We
will not be using employees of restaurants. We will be
(04:11):
using contractors. This was the era when like uber was
the future of everything, and so they were like, we
can use this army of contractors to deliver people's food
and it will theoretically be more efficient because you can
pick up from a bunch of different restaurants that are
on the platform and deliver to a bunch of different people,
(04:33):
and you have this like wonderful economies of scale thing.
So that is the big change.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
It is very sad to me that kids will not.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Grow up with the file folder full of menus that
I grew up with. That was such a You just
brought me back so much just thinking about that thick
stack of menus that you'd have to read That was
like early reading comprehension for me totally.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
And like it was such as a kid who loved food,
it was such a source of fascination. Wow, there's all
this food that I don't have. It's not food my
parents are cooking. You know, it kind of rocked.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It's also very funny to think, like, you know how
gen Z is bringing back a lot of cassettes and
even like mail order stuff. Like the one thing that
I don't think is coming back is like delivery menus.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
Probably not. I mean I think as a society we're
kind of post paper. Do what you think? Like, like
I feel like we don't even get right right, You
got a q comes from trees.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, the QR code is not I'll never get on
board with the qure kid, but whatever.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
That's taking us off track.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
So in the piece, you start by talking about the
moment that delivery apps were conceived by a college student
named Colin Wallace. So can you talk a little bit
about Colin and where his idea came from?
Speaker 4 (05:53):
Yeah, and I should say Colin did not think of
delivery apps. He just developed a piece of technology that
help delivery apps talk to point of sale systems. The
details of that are like pretty technical, but basically, this
was a guy who was in engineering school at Georgia
Tech and he really wanted a sandwich. He had these
(06:15):
long lectures. He also, you know, he was going to
football games and he kept feeling like, what if I
could just get the food that I wanted delivered to
my seat? Because you have to go, you have to
stand in line, you're missing the game, et cetera. And
so it was pretty obvious. You know, he's an engineering student.
(06:36):
This is twenty eleven. Everyone has an iPhone basically, and
so he was like, I feel like there's a better
way to do this, and so he developed this system
that basically replaced a lot of the delivery infrastructure was
done by facts at this point, which is like a
sort of crazy technology to be using in twenty eleven.
(06:56):
So he figured out how to make it work on
the phone and the rest was history. And you know,
the company he started got acquired by grub hub and
he became head of innovation.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
So I guess the question that I have is, like.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
The popularity of these apps takes off in the twenty tens,
like for those of us who kind of have always
adapted to the way that phones have changed things, which
is my generation. You know, all of a sudden, grub Hub,
door Dash, Seamless, you know, all these apps sort of explode.
I'm using them all the time to do just about anything.
(07:34):
I remember one time I broke my ankle and I
ordered a wee charger from GameStop on uber on uber each.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Oh, so, like there's no question.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Now we go from you know, like very specific foods
being kind of the ubiquitous takeout food to literally anything
you can possibly imagine being something that you can get delivered.
I mean, other than you know, Colin's invention. What is
responsible for this pivot to like everything being on demand?
Speaker 4 (08:09):
The answer, Kera is money. That is that's what's important here.
So this is again early twenty tens. This is a moment.
I was living in San Francisco in the time. There
was a lot of money, There was a lot of
venture capital, and you know, VC is kind of winner
takes all. I would say, it is a industry that
(08:30):
is very much ruled by fomo. And there was this
idea at the time that like, whoever wins the delivery
wars will get access to a market of everyone who
eats food, Right, So all of these different companies wanted
to win, and all of these people that were funding
these companies were just pouring money into it. And you know,
(08:53):
this was also the era of the millennial lifestyle subsidy
zerp Like, you know, money was very cheap, and so
Silicon Valley was just like pumping money into all of
these companies and basically subsidizing the cost of delivery. So
what you have happening is you'd open Uber Eats or whatever,
and you'd get these like ads basically that are like
(09:15):
fifty percent off your first order, or like take twenty
dollars off when you order three times in a month
or something, and so they're like really incentivizing people to
order delivery. They're basically you know, delivery costs money because
you are adding labor and computer space and all kinds
(09:38):
of infrastructure to a relationship. Right, You're adding another party
to the relationship between the party who eats exactly. And
so what was happening was was like Sandhill Road was
like eating the extra cost. And so you have this
brief period in the early twenty tens. Delivery is ubiquitous,
(10:02):
it's on your phone, and it's cheap. Like sometimes it's
even cheaper than like cooking for yourself or eating in
a restaurant. And so they basically, in a very short
amount of time, like invented a market that did not
previously exist, and then it invented the expectation that it
would be cheap. And that's very powerful. That's a very
(10:24):
good way to get people kind of like addicted to something. Right,
do you remember this era, like when delivery was so cheap.
I was going to say it was the promo code era.
It was crazy, like every time you ordered something you
could get fifty percent off.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Right, they were like please, we're.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
Begging you, well, basically pay you literally, and it was
because they wanted you to be loyal to grub Hub
or Postmates or whatever the app was, and they wanted
to lock you in.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah, we were basically eating for free at that point,
I remember this, And we were.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Ubering for free, and we were getting access to all
of these like apps for very little money. It kind
of rocked.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
After the break White restaurants were forever changed by the pandemic.
Stay with us, So the pandemic happens and then all
of a sudden, delivery is the only way that restaurants
make money, right, and then the pandemic ends and people
(11:38):
don't want to change their behavior. And so my question
for you is, like, what is the difference between promo
code era to like delivery feels expensive again, but also
like restaurants are empty, So what happens?
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yeah, I mean, as you say said, like the pandemic
was this inflection point in that like every restaurant that
had been kind of holding out on delivery for various
reasons now reach this point where they were like, oh,
we have to do this or bebo clothes. I remember,
you know, fancy restaurants, like nice restaurants were suddenly doing delivery.
(12:19):
Places that had been saying, you know, our food doesn't
travel well, or we think the economics don't make sense,
or we have enough customers already we don't need delivery.
We're now like, oh, we need delivery. And this was
also a moment when, like you know, ordering delivery sort
of became virtuous. It became like a victory garden, like
(12:39):
if you want to keep a restaurant in business, you
should order delivery from them.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yes, I remember that was right, because I mean, delivery
workers were essential workers at the time, and it was.
It was totally. It was like a mark of supporting
the economy.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Yes, exactly. It was like we're all going to get
through this together. Like order a burrito, your party has
change you wish to see in the world.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yeah, exactly, exactly exactly.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
But in answer to your question about like how it
seems like delivery has gotten more expensive, it has. Part
of that is that some municipalities have added taxes onto
delivery to account for the fact that drivers need pay
and delivery is kind of like one big externality that
(13:27):
affects cities a lot, and so various places have added surcharges.
But the real difference is that Silicon Valley stopped subsidizing
it because these companies had to make money at some point,
and so they pulled back the subsidies slowly. And so
now when you buy delivery, you're paying the true cost.
(13:48):
You are paying the cost of the food, the cost
of the labor, the cost of the overhead, the cost
for grub hub or whatever to make its cut. There's
a lot of people who need to get paid now,
and so you, the customer are paying that.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
So can you talk a little bit more about the
economics of these apps like, how how does it work?
Speaker 4 (14:13):
Yeah, if you are a restaurant and you sign up
for a delivery service, they are basically only three Now
three companies control something like ninety eight percent of the
delivery market in the US. It's basically DoorDash, Uber and
(14:38):
grub Hub is much smaller than the other two. But
you sign up for one of these companies, there's different tiers,
but basically you are paying them for listing you on
their app. You're paying them for facilitating the delivery, You're
paying them for you know, placement within the app. If
(15:00):
you open a delivery app, now you'll notice maybe that
there's a lot of kind of like sponsored listings, or
some random place will show up as like the best
Indian food in all of New York City and you're like,
this place has like two stars, Like how did this happen?
And that's because they have paid extra. The rest of
it us paid exactly, you know, And this is not
(15:23):
unique to delivery apps at all. Like this is true
on Yea and Google Maps, and it's true kind of
everywhere on the internet. But that costs money. So restaurants
are basically just turning a cut over to fees that
are paid to the delivery apps.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
And you spoke to delivery drivers in this piece like
this is not a lucrative job.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
It can be, you know, you will talk to drivers
who say, someone tipped me one hundred dollars on a
ten dollars order of wings. It's like any service job
where it can be kind of random. But no, they
are not paid by the hour. They're paid by the delivery.
That of course incentivizes delivery drivers to move quickly, not safely,
(16:12):
which can be a problem in cities. They are often
driving really long distances. You know, I talked to a
delivery driver who told me that he delivered like a
cup of ice cream, like you know, like a single,
not even like that.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
I mean, some of the things that I've ordered, I can't.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I ordered a sleep like I ordered like two crispy
cream doughnuts the other way.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
I mean, it's just salthy, And how should you pay
for them? I don't want to. And that's when you
close your eyes.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
That's between you and your God.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
That's right, yes, and the God of my understanding for
sure exactly.
Speaker 4 (16:45):
You know, he drove like something like thirty miles to
deliver this. He lives in a really rural area in
South Carolina, and he's making like three dollars for forty
minutes of work before gas and you know, maintenance and stuff,
and the person who's paying like fifteen dollars. So no,
(17:07):
it's not really a lucrative job. I think delivery companies
would say these people are independent contractors. They choose how
much they work, they set their own hours. It's a
great job for college students or people who need to
make a little bit of money on the side, but
nobody is acting like this is the first step on
a career ladder that will support you and your family
(17:27):
for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Right, and yet it's very accessible and something that people,
I mean, especially in cities like New York, it feels
like everybody I see on a bicycle, everybody that I
see in a car is somebody who's picking up something
from a restaurant to take to somebody's house. Yes, and
the lines outside of restaurants are and that's that was
one of the things that really stuck out to me
(17:49):
about your article is like, is this idea of like
not so much how delivery has transformed the way we
get food, but it's also transformed what idea of a
restaurant is and like why does the restaurant exist? So
from your point of view, like in twenty twenty five,
like what is the purpose of a restaurant and has
(18:09):
that changed on account of the explosion of delivery apps.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
That's the core of this and part of the reason
I wrote this story to begin with. I just kept
having this experience after Lockdown ended of going into restaurants
in New York City and they would be like two
thirds empty on a Friday night and there would be
like fifteen delivery guys in the front of the store
(18:36):
picking up food, and it would it didn't seem that
good for them or for the people working at the restaurant,
and it was sort of a bad experience for me
as the diner. So yeah, I mean, I think that
it often feels to me like a lot of restaurants
are kind of like glorified vending machines.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Now, like that's what it feels like.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
Delivery has changed the way people who run restaurants run restaurants,
and it means when you build a restaurant, you are
probably having way fewer tables and way more space for
delivery drivers to congregate. You're having shelving for the delivery orders.
Some of them have separate entrances for delivery versus din
(19:18):
in because you know, you're essentially kind of like cramming
two experiences into one where you're like in a restaurant
and a delivery driver's like backpack. It's like hitting you
on the head and you're like, it's just good. And
then in terms of the food, you know, I talk
to restaurant tours who are like, I'm putting more brazes
on my venu, I'm doing fewer like deep fried things
(19:41):
because they just don't travel well. This is kind of
the reason that everything's like a bowl. Now, if you've
noticed that bowls travel really well, they're kind of like
saucy and gloppy, and they're not meant to be like crunchy.
You know, anything that's crunchy is not going to travel well.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
The nineteen fifties was not a time for the US
EBOL or the Ploi.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Certainly not no, no, no no. But twenty twenty five, Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Baby, that's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Like that's basically what's in is like the thing that
is portable.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Maybe that's the best argument against delivery is that it
makes the food taste bad.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, But I guess my question is is, like,
if we keep going down this path and restaurants become
less and less of an in person experience, like what
happens to the industry. And obviously you did a lot
of reporting on this, it does seem a little bit
dire for restaurants, and like, is there anything that looks
(20:36):
like course correction post pandemic?
Speaker 4 (20:38):
I mean, really, where I see this going is I
think it'll be like movie theaters, where like, obviously people
are not gonna stop eating, people are not gonna stop
like consuming, right, but like you're gonna see restaurants close.
You're kind of always gonna be worried that your favorite
one is going to close. They'll become rarer and rarer.
It'll be this special thing that you do sometimes if
(21:02):
you are an enthusiast. And that really freaks me out
because I love restaurants.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah, that's such a good analogy. I didn't think about
it that way. But the movie theater sort of as restaurant.
It's the ease factor that's sort of cannibalizing the thing.
And if you don't care about the experience to begin with,
is it something that you're going to try to preserve.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
You know. I got a lot of email after this story,
and a fair amount of it was from people saying like,
I don't like restaurants. I don't like having to tip,
I don't like sharing space with other people. I don't
like waiting for my food, like basically a good riddance.
And I was kind of surprised by that, just because
if I have not already like tipped my hand and
(21:46):
en augh, like I love restaurants. I love going to restaurants.
So yeah, I mean, I do think some people truly
don't care. I think with movie theaters it's going to
be one of these things that we kind of like
miss when it's gone. But yeah, I think some people
just don't like restaurants. Don't care, don't care if they
go away, don't care if they change so much as
(22:09):
to be unrecognizable.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
It is such a strange phenomenon because on one end,
it is so miraculous that we live in an age
where you can have everything on demand, and then it's
also like pretty spectacular how that thing that facilitates such
an ease of sort of on demand life is the
(22:35):
thing that might cannibalize the thing we're actually benefiting from. Again,
not to sound overly romantic about it or bleeding heart,
but I think we forget the cost of the thing
when we're getting what we want.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Yes, and look, there's a whole apparatus that is designed
to make you forget about the cost of the thing.
The thing about a frictionless service is that it's designed
to alide all of the effort that goes in Tech
companies are really good at this, Like their whole thing
(23:10):
is eliminating friction. You know. Amazon is kind of the
same way, like next day delivery. If you actually think
about all of the like arms and legs and cars
and trucks and planes and paper and plastic and warehouses
that were required to get your box of paper clips
(23:34):
to your house within twelve hours, it's astonishing. But they
don't want you to think about that.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Yeah, there's success sort of rides on how little you
think about it in fact. Yeah, well, Ellen, thank you
so much for joining me today to talk about the
personal is portable.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Thank you. This was really fun.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
That's it for this week for tech stuff.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
I'm care Price and I'm oz Vlasan. This episode was
produced by Eliza Dennis, and Melissa Slaughter. It was executive
produced by me Kara Price, Julian Nutter, and Kate Osborne
for Kaleidoscope and Katrian Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley
mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Join us on Friday for the Week in Tech, where
we'll run through the headlines you need to follow.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
And please rate and review the show, and reach out
to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
We want to hear from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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