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(I mean, ...Doordash SMH bad bad 😞😔)

The Innovation That’s Killing Restaurant Culture

Delivery has turned America into a nation of order-inners.

By Ellen Cushing
An illustration of a takeout bag on a corner of a city street
Illustration by Pete Gamlen
October 27, 2025, 3:15 PM ET
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Updated at 3:10 p.m. ET on October 28, 2025

Collin Wallace wanted a snack. Specifically, he wanted one delivered to his classroom during lecture (he had long lectures). This was 2006, when delivery was mostly limited to a few types of food, and it was something you did by talking on the phone and then waiting awhile. Wallace was in engineering school at Georgia Tech, and he figured his problem was one the internet could help solve. He built a way for customers to order online, automatically syncing to food vendors’ systems. That project became a company, and that company was eventually acquired, in 2011, by Grubhub. Wallace was experimenting, making stuff with his friends, and then he was in leadership at a company that would go on to help change restaurants forever.


Because today, of course, you can get not just a snack but almost anything you want sent to you just about wherever you are. You can have an ice-cream sundae, a martini, or an expertly seared Wagyu steak delivered to your door, without pausing the TV or finding your shoes. You can have coq au vin from an “extra-charming, French-inspired gastrothèque” long beloved for its perfectly styled shoebox of a space, and you can have it miles away from the very space that makes the restaurant so special. Whatever you order, it will come from a business that operates a bit differently than it once did: less like a restaurant and more like a pickup counter, the product on offer less like “an experience,” as the restaurateur Tom Colicchio told me earlier this year, and more like “a commodity.” It will, in all likelihood, be packed into paper and so much plastic, bundled up like a baby in a snowstorm, doing its best to survive a trip it isn’t entirely equipped to make. And it will probably be ferried by a precariously employed person who is financially incentivized to move quickly, not safely, and who has one of the more dangerous jobs in America. An entire commercial mechanism will have whirred to life the moment you clicked “Place order,” one that is part of an industry that barely existed 15 years ago but now brings in tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually.

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About the Author

Ellen Cushing



TheAtlantic.com Š 2025 The The Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.


Kurosaki said:
Are you going to be arresting any young black men just for being black?

That badge gives you privilege.

Wait, which kinda badge are we talking about?
Click to expand...
Dude I mean...

Like, what.
 
AbsolutEnduser said:
The Innovation That’s Killing Restaurant Culture

Delivery has turned America into a nation of order-inners.

By Ellen Cushing
An illustration of a takeout bag on a corner of a city street
Illustration by Pete Gamlen
October 27, 2025, 3:15 PM ET
Share

Save

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Updated at 3:10 p.m. ET on October 28, 2025

Collin Wallace wanted a snack. Specifically, he wanted one delivered to his classroom during lecture (he had long lectures). This was 2006, when delivery was mostly limited to a few types of food, and it was something you did by talking on the phone and then waiting awhile. Wallace was in engineering school at Georgia Tech, and he figured his problem was one the internet could help solve. He built a way for customers to order online, automatically syncing to food vendors’ systems. That project became a company, and that company was eventually acquired, in 2011, by Grubhub. Wallace was experimenting, making stuff with his friends, and then he was in leadership at a company that would go on to help change restaurants forever.


Because today, of course, you can get not just a snack but almost anything you want sent to you just about wherever you are. You can have an ice-cream sundae, a martini, or an expertly seared Wagyu steak delivered to your door, without pausing the TV or finding your shoes. You can have coq au vin from an “extra-charming, French-inspired gastrothèque” long beloved for its perfectly styled shoebox of a space, and you can have it miles away from the very space that makes the restaurant so special. Whatever you order, it will come from a business that operates a bit differently than it once did: less like a restaurant and more like a pickup counter, the product on offer less like “an experience,” as the restaurateur Tom Colicchio told me earlier this year, and more like “a commodity.” It will, in all likelihood, be packed into paper and so much plastic, bundled up like a baby in a snowstorm, doing its best to survive a trip it isn’t entirely equipped to make. And it will probably be ferried by a precariously employed person who is financially incentivized to move quickly, not safely, and who has one of the more dangerous jobs in America. An entire commercial mechanism will have whirred to life the moment you clicked “Place order,” one that is part of an industry that barely existed 15 years ago but now brings in tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually.

Keep reading The Atlantic.

Get lost in a great story, every day. Subscribe for unlimited access to writing you won’t want
to put down.

Subscribe for one year of access and a role in supporting independent journalism.
Subscribe
OR
Try 30 days free and see how The Atlantic fits into your life.
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to read this story, sign in, start a free trial, or subscribe today.
About the Author

Ellen Cushing



TheAtlantic.com Š 2025 The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.



Dude I mean...

Like, what.
Click to expand...
you’re gonna make me walk over to my mail heap and read that article in the atlantic now.
 
Elfin is wrenching, I am watching, BARFing, and drinking
 

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that's pretty awesome that you have the paper , TWT ?! But I Think the story might be too-current, too-online and will probably show up in the next issue .

I've only read the abstract so far ^ 👆
But it looks like a good story. "Everything is delivered" . I kinda didn't know you can get a cocktail or coq-du-dork whatever steak delivered... I personally don't have a DD account.

But I can get the gist already. Hollowing out of restaurants. Neighborhoods. Community. Feeling.

Was just outside myself.
Not many people walking. A car parked at the corner at the fire hydrant. A young person brandishing a cellphone in one hand and a paper tote in the other rushing to the White KIA.
 
tuxumino said:
I got take out tonight, I went to restaurant, ordered, waited then took it home still hot.
Click to expand...
Oh, I like that. I don’t like food that has been driven around for a half an hour before I can eat it. I like my food hot off the Grill. Especially toast.
 
Meanwhile, the longtime industry analyst ... told me, “you could shoot a cannon” through many dining rooms on a Tuesday night.
In effect, delivery has reversed the flow of eaters to food, and remade a shared experience into a much more individual one. ... Communities used to clench like a fist around their restaurants ...
Click to expand...

:wow
In 2024, nearly three out of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant, according to data provided to me by the National Restaurant Association, a trade group
Click to expand...
:wtf :wow
 
Butch said:
I need to subscribe to the Atlantic again
Click to expand...
Do it!!! I have been a subscriber for a long time.
AbsolutEnduser said:
that's pretty awesome that you have the paper , TWT ?! But I Think the story might be too-current, too-online and will probably show up in the next issue .

I've only read the abstract so far ^ 👆
But it looks like a good story. "Everything is delivered" . I kinda didn't know you can get a cocktail or coq-du-dork whatever steak delivered... I personally don't have a DD account.

But I can get the gist already. Hollowing out of restaurants. Neighborhoods. Community. Feeling.

Was just outside myself.
Not many people walking. A car parked at the corner at the fire hydrant. A young person brandishing a cellphone in one hand and a paper tote in the other rushing to the White KIA.
Click to expand...
Yup, Paper because OLD.
When I used to deliver weed I was talking to one of the dispatchers. People have become infantilized. They don't leave their houses. They have hot food delivered. Groceries delivered. Amazon delivers everything they might ever want. They send their laundry out for services to wash and pay cleaners to clean their apartments.
tuxumino said:
I got take out tonight, I went to restaurant, ordered, waited then took it home still hot.
Click to expand...
NICE. Unless I am injured or exhausted, I do the same. I did place an instacart order when I arrived in SF but I was dog tired and hurting. I tipped the heck out of my shopper for saving me all those steps and the hassle.
 
When you're boiling the milk , heating up on the stove


1761713467440.png


And you find out that the bathroom still has wads and stuff not flushed. : | :mad

It was slow and heavy and not going down 👇🏻.. had to press it and hold it. Little Roomies, man...
 
A song just came up on my Spotify playlist that sparked a memory driving a golf cart because Tyler, his brother and another friend played golf on New Year's day at 7am. I rolled my eyes but got my ass out of bed and joined. Cancer killed him.

Fuck cancer. Cancer took my father from me and tried to take my mother.
 
Kurosaki said:
I remember the first episode, I thought there was no way this ridiculous show about a sponge living in the ocean? Really?

And then I remembered that Ren & Stimpy was a thing they thought was child level (which it was not, as adult as South Park.)
Click to expand...
my son is 27. we watched a lot of spongebob when he was a kid.

i still have a spongebob pillow case. 😆
 
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