Ellen Cushing, at The Atlantic (gift link):
Convenience is like sex: Once you’ve had it, it’s hard to forget how good it is to have it. As soon as Americans understood that it was possible to have any food they wanted whenever they wanted, they came to expect it. Once dining rooms reopened, many people didn’t return. Even if you didn’t order delivery yourself, you could probably see the transformation happening: The corps of gig workers moving around cities in a sort of technologically aided dinner ballet; the drivers rushing into restaurants, phones aloft; the jokes online about delivery as a lifestyle; the plastic bags on people’s doorsteps, latter-day lawn gnomes.
(What a great paragraph!)
This article about how food delivery like Uber Eats and DoorDash, accelerated mightily by COVID, transformed the restaurant industry to its current state, where "nearly three out of every four restaurant orders [are] not eaten in a restaurant". A good read with more insight than I thought might be in what could have been a very straightforward article.
The Innovation That’s Killing Restaurant Culture
Delivery has turned America into a nation of order-inners.