I read a crazy stat today: In 2024, almost three out of every four restaurant orders in America were not eaten in a restaurant.
Let that sink in for a second. The vast majority of restaurant food is now consumed anywhere BUT the restaurant. On couches, at desks, alone in bedrooms.
The social ritual of dining out - one of humanity's oldest and most fundamental communal activities - has almost been dismantled in less than a decade.
And food delivery is just the tip of the iceberg.
Americans spend an average of over $5,000 annually on food delivery.
Five. Thousand. Dollars. For the mere privilege of not having to leave the house.
But it's not really about the food, is it? It's about the erosion of friction. Every app, every service, every piece of technology is designed to remove one more tiny inconvenience from your life. To optimise. To live smarter. Easier.
Except what we're actually doing is trading culture for convenience. And most of us don't even realise it's happening until it's already done.
Going to dinner is a ritual. An event. It’s almost sacred.
Sometimes the meal is actually secondary to the experience of being somewhere, dimly lit, with someone. Just the art of doing something together.
Now it kind of feels like now we just tap a button and food appears.
You eat it in front of Netflix. Or in bed. Alone. It’s efficient. Frictionless. And void of any kind of ritual at all.
Food delivery is just the most visible example of a much bigger pattern.
Every aspect of human life that CAN be turned into an app-based transaction IS being turned into one.
Dating? There's an app (or 5) for that. You no longer don't meet people organically. Instead, you swipe through a catalogue of faces from your couch.
Shopping? An app (or 5 million.) You no longer browse stores and stumble onto things - you scroll algorithmic feeds that show you exactly what you're statistically likely to buy.
Entertainment? An app. Fitness? An app. Socialising? Increasingly, also an app.
We're watching the systematic digitisation of experiences that used to require showing up somewhere, interacting with strangers, navigating uncertainty, being present in a physical space. And we're doing it willingly because it's easier this way.
But easier isn't always better. Sometimes friction is the point. Sometimes the inconvenience is where the meaning lives.
The death of the "third place" - that space that isn't home and isn't work - has been talked about for years. But delivery culture is accelerating it dramatically. Why go to a café when coffee comes to you? Why go to a restaurant when the food arrives at your door? Why go anywhere when literally everything can come to you?
We're losing spontaneity, the chance encounter, the unplanned conversation with a stranger – and then we wonder why we’re so freaking lonely.
We’re losing the experience of just existing somewhere without an agenda. Just roaming around, free to find your feet.
These things sound small, almost trivial, until they're gone. And then you realise they are the connective tissue of social life.
We're also losing embodied experiences. Being somewhere physically, with all your senses engaged, is fundamentally different from having things delivered to your bubble. Think about the smell of a restaurant, the energy and sounds of other diners, the act of moving through the world instead of having the world funnelled to you through a f*cking screen.
And maybe most importantly, we're losing the skill of dealing with minor inconveniences. These things are important. They’re the texture of life. Waiting, planning, coordinating with other humans in real-time. These aren't bugs, they're features of being a social species. But we're systematically designing them out of existence and it makes me kind of sad.
Then there’s the fact that this whole system relies on a massive class divide (as most massive systems do lol.)
The people paying $5,000 a year for delivery convenience and the people doing the delivering exist in completely different economic realities.
One group gets to retreat from public life entirely. The other group has to navigate public spaces constantly, in all weather, for sh*tty wages, so that the first group never has to leave their apartment. It's a system that quite literally pays some people to shield others from experiencing the world.
And we've normalised this (of course.) We've turned it into background infrastructure that nobody questions anymore.
So, what now?
Look, I'm not suggesting we all delete our delivery apps and return to some idealised past. That's not realistic and honestly, not the point.
But I do think we need to be honest about the trade-offs we're making.
Every time you choose convenience over showing up somewhere, you're making a choice about what kind of life you want to live. About how isolated or connected you want to be. About whether your daily existence involves other humans or just transactions with them.
Yes, the delivery economy is changing how we eat. But it’s also reshaping what it means to participate in public life at all.
Rewiring our social habits, budgets, and sense of what's normal.
And it's doing it so freaking smoothly, so efficiently, that most people haven't even noticed the shift.
Technology has proven it can reach into the deepest, oldest parts of human culture - breaking bread together, gathering in shared spaces, the spontaneous social encounters that used to just be part of existing in the world - and completely restructure them in less than a decade.
The question is no longer about what's happening.
But whether we're okay with where this is taking us.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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