The thing that really impresses/surprises me about the growth of services like these is that people have so much disposable income to pay for stuff like this. In the news one reads constantly about how people are stressed financially. Maybe people are diverting money they once would have spent on other luxuries (cable tv maybe?) toward this kind of expense.
The inequality slope is increasing. There's a fairly large upper middle class of people who work+commute long hours and are prepared to pay for extreme convenience. While at the same time there's also a precariat of people for whom earning a small and variable amount outside normal working hours sounds like a good idea, providing cheap labour to these services.
2) For a larger group, consider the added cost of dining in - expectation of 18-20% tip, the wine (or other alcohol) is typically overpriced or there’s a $15-20 corkage fee per bottle. Transportation or parking is another potential expense.
3) Some foods lend themselves well to leftovers, so with marginal increase in price one might be buying a meal for the next day, too.
4) For family dining, this puts less pressure on kids and less stress on parents. Keeping the little rascals busy for 2+ hours that a typical dinner might last could get a tad hard.
- growing inequality: more people at each end of the spectrum; rich get richer (and have more income for food delivery), poor get poorer and lack full-time job opportunities (and are more incentivized to take low income, insecure delivery jobs)
- it's expensive to be poor: working more hours means fewer opportunities to buy groceries or take time to cook.
Cable TV? I am quite sure in the future we are going to pay almost the same amount what people were paying for cable TV. Not all content is available on each service so in the end people will end up subscribing for Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney whatever etc. Plus more for sports. Also, good luck to people who don't have true unlimited plans, as streaming all those high definition bits over the internet just means paying your ISP more.
