Ordering Food Delivery

[Whey Isolate]

Just out of curiosity, how many of you order food delivery? How often do you do it? Why or why not? Personally I do it once a week max and almost always order with friends, because it's so expensive and the packaging makes so much waste, but sometimes I'm way too tired and drained to make food so I'm glad it's an option.

[bingus_baby]

Anywhere from twice a month, to... zero times a month lmao

I find myself wanting delivery on Mondays most, which is when my fav restaurants are closed!! So I don't order anything. And I only order from certain places that I know don't do togo orders and that I don't want to visit in person. (Being a single person at a trendy restaurant full of couples and parties is... Not my idea of a Monday night.)

I don't order often tho! When I had a DashPass trial I ordered every week or two, but even still the local tax, tips, etc. add up. It's cheaper to place an online order from the place's website and drive to the restaurant... Unless it's a full service restaurant that doesn't have an online togo ordering system, which is where my once a month DoorDash order comes in lmao

And if it's a matter of not wanting to drive, I just walk to the local Taco Bell. I think they're sick of me, and I'm sick of them too. Alas, I need my Cinnabon Delights...

[Rosaria Delacroix]

I've never ordered something off of the food delivery apps for/by myself. If a household member orders pizza for the group, then I'll have a nibble if invited to, but other than that, I don't bother. I similarly don't eat out at restaurants or fast food chains unless it's become a group endeavour and they insist on my participation. It's partially a financial thing, (the apps are hideously expensive, and tipping on top of it), and partially an autistic thing, because I cannot tolerate certain food textures/tastes and the element of the unknown is too agonizing to sit through. Also navigating the menu and social interactions with the cashier or waiter makes me want to tear my eyeballs out, so I prefer to use self serve checkout.

Much easier (and friendlier to my wallet, which I can then spend on things I do like, like stationery) to either purchase groceries or bring food with me to campus for lunch and such. I also become easily fixated on particular foods, and will eat them exclusively to my nutritional detriment until I course correct, (sometimes this is a Single Item Food like broccoli, pomelo, carrots, or beets, other times its a particular dish like oven roasted potatoes, these trends can last for months at a time if I'm not mindful of my diet) so it's just easier to indulge in those fixations if I make my own meals.

[bby]

i live in a very rural area so i can't do delivery unless i visit a friend in the city.

it's kind of a good thing because it saves me money by cooking at home, but it does suck when i'm feeling sick and unable to do a lot. so when that happens, i usually ask a family member to pick up a meal for me if they're going into town.

we also don't have a ton of variety of restaurants anyway; all the stuff i'd love to get delivered i'd have to go all the way into the nearest city for like if i wanted indian food or wings. 

[BlazingCobaltX]

I have the luxury of living at home and always having some sort of meal available to eat. This makes ordering food very redundant. In general, I prefer to eat at restaurants: The combination of the atmosphere, plating, and food itself makes it a richer experience. Ordering from the apps, like others have said, is also much more expensive than going to the restaurant and just sitting there to eat.

When we do order takeout, it's usually spare ribs and fries or Indian. I've eaten that so often at home that it feels weird to get that at a restaurant now.

[haumeaGeth]

I order out maybe once a month to every other month. I don't tend to do it spontaneously, I mostly do it if certain factors are present, such as feeling majorly burnt out and deserving a treat after excessive task load, not having food in the house and being unable to go shopping, or feeling sick or very sad and needing a pick-me-up.

Even then though, I tend to hesitate due to the exorbitant prices, and the fact that takeout food is always significantly lower quality than in-restaurant food, making the cost completely outrageous. And it's impossible to guess what the quality will be beforehand. The worst sushi I ever had was from a 4.5 star place I found on Uber - the squid was actually spoiled and the rest was totally dried out. Absolutely no idea how they got that rating and I'm still mad about it, it was 50 bucks

So, that being said, when I do order out, I'll only really go for a small handful of familiar restaurants or fast food chains like McDonald's or Taco Bell; at least their food is plastic and always tastes the same- xD

[Blue]

I live with my family, so we do this maybe once a month, maybe twice. There's a particular local burger restaurant that is cheaper and much better than most fast food chains like KFC and McDonald's that I love to order from a lot; they just taste really good. We also order Chinese food but i still prefer the burgers. If i lived alone i'd probably get them more often as it would be cheaper for one person, but it still wouldn't be over 2-3 times a month.

[xwindows]

Decade into the past, we used to order from a nearest branch of certain fast-food chain by phone, mainly for festive or partying occasions; sparingly, only once or twice a year maximum.

But we (me + my family), no longer do that for many years now, even before the 'rona.

Some big fast-food chain around here also no longer accept orders by phone, and requires either submitting to an attention-whore (1) proprietary software "app" on espionage slab (2), or trudging in a quicksand land (3) of their JavaS'creep-destroyed website weighing so heavy that it threatens to blow up my browser to bits at any moment. With both ways requiring us to wire-pay in advance using surveillance-ridden autonomy-violating cloudmoney (4), rather than handing the cold hard and fully-private cash at the delivery guy as he arrived like we used to do.

Never again, those snitches.

This doesn't even count third-party foreign-interest food-delivery platforms which bear all the drawbacks I just mentioned, plus being grossly overpriced and screw over consumers, riders, and vendors alike, while siphoning a sizable chunk of money that should have stayed in local economy out to the tax heaven jurisdiction of their choice...

I live in a country which is famous for its cuisine, in a city which is famous for street food, roadside restaurants, and their around-the-clock availability. Even without counting the salacious delights waiting for me at home (or carried with me in my lunchbox), with the nearest place selling something I could eat within the 100m radius most of the time, at any time of day (and always within 1 km in worst cases), I refuse to take part in a debauchery with such third-party delivery disservice.


But enough ranting.

In my household, home-cooked food has always been the staple, and the matriarch (read: my mother) is responsible for cooking. Everyone in my household have their own favorite menus, and my mother would try to pick a menu for each person according to the stock of fresh food in the fridge, economic viability, and our requests. In rarer case, it would be a big meal that everyone in the family can share.

Even that restaurants, food joints, and street food are abundant in my city; in some "affluent" area I need to frequent to, they are not exactly reluctant in hiking price in recent years; so while I used to "eat out" regularly in some meals, I have now switched to bring lunchbox from home for several years now, to save cost.

Like many others have said, home cooking is cheaper than buying a takeout, eating out in restaurant, and often way, way, cheaper than delivery. In occasions, my mother would attempt to "copy" an interesting restaurant menu by a mix of tasting a takeout, guesstimating the ingredients, searching recipes on the Internet, and "winging it" in the kitchen; and the results sometimes turned out great. My father couldn't stand eating some menus like steamed curry and ketupat at average food joint outside anymore, because the homemade ones he got used to were cooked to a standard so high that the cost-cut ones tasted crappy in comparison.

There are still some menus that we still have in very much exclusively in take-out forms however, like cattlefish floss, rat na, khanom krok and few others; but we'll just walk/cycle to the joint and order/buy them in-person rather than getting them in delivery.


The only form of "food delivery" (scare quotes intended) we occasionally use nowadays is "pre-ordering" specific fresh food items (not cooked food!) from a regular hawker vendor who regularly passes by our house; by phoning her in advance to pre-order specific items, and once she arrives at our residence, we would go pick the order up and pay in cash.

My mother like it because despite the price being somewhat more expensive than the local market, it saves a long walk and a hour that she would otherwise need in order to get just one or two missing ingredients needed for a meal; and of course, the vendor likes it because it would be both a guaranteed sale (the items we ordered) and a chance to make extra sales (as we would actually go downstairs to her vending cart to pick up the order).


(1) In a technical term: notification-ridden.
(2) "Smartphone", in their proponents' word.
(3) I refuse to call such experience "surfing".
(4) Brett Scott's term of e-banking.