I concur with the article. My frequency of online ordering has increased with the pandemic, but I can't imagine doing it much after we can go back out. In some respects I'm the prime target for online ordering (young working professional) but in others I'm not (single, somewhat discerning in terms of food quality).

I've kept an informal tracker of deliveries I've received over the past year, noting issues and an overall rating for each order (good or bad).

A few insights:

1) In the past 20 orders, there has been some sort of issue in 15 of them. There has been what I categorize as a major issue in 10(!) of them. Major issues include missing items, incorrect items, >30 delay over estimated arrival, delivered to the wrong place, a delivery person entering my house (!), hot/cold food arriving at room temperature. Overall, execution quality is awful! I have basically come to expect poor service at this point, and I really question if I want to bother with the aggravation of delivery every time I order. When your convenience service is arguably not as convenient as just getting takeout yourself, there's clearly a problem. In terms of fixing these issues, I don't see an easy solution. A lot of the problem seems to stem from not having enough drivers. This is surprising since I live in the SF Bay Area, which I imagine to have a bigger driver population (perhaps mistakenly).

2) Quality varies a lot between delivery vendors and restaurants. Despite over a year of time to adjust to this new delivery-first world, some restaurants consistently make mistakes with orders again and again. Taco Bell seems to always forget an item or two, which is especially annoying given how marked up their food is on the apps. Chipotle and Sweetgreen have the best consistency. Uber Eats has the worst record among the delivery apps - I have recorded an abysmal 60% favorable experience rate with them. The biggest problem seems to be that they'll happily send your order to the restaurant to be prepared but then take 40+ minutes to place that order with a driver. That's happened to me multiple times and has led me to stop placing orders with them. The best is Doordash, though I suspect that this has more to do with them delivering Chipotle, which seems to have their delivery operations dialed in and holds up relatively well in transport.

3) Not captured in my data but of note is how many times I check the apps for dinner but decide to either cook at home or get takeout because of how expensive delivery is. I understand that getting food delivered is a luxury, but it feels really bad to pay above menu prices and then pay up to three additional fees. Often times the fees add up to 50%+ of the base food price. I think that scales a bit better if you're ordering for two or more, but in my case I get sticker shock a not insignificant portion of the time I want to do delivery.

As I read what I wrote here I realize it comes off as spoiled and lacking perspective. It's definitely true that in 2021 you can tap a few buttons and have food from any culture left at your door in less than an hour (sometimes, at least :P). It also ignores the problems encountered by restaurants and drivers. Really what I'm trying to say here is that third-party food delivery doesn't seem like a long term sustainable business post-pandemic. There are too many hard problems associated with it that simply can't be solved with technology (short of far future robotic automation).