The emergence of ghost kitchens, more than anything else, is what got me to stop using food delivery services. They made it impossible for me to have enough trust, so I switched back to ordering from real restaurants that I physically go to.

For traditional restaurants, what percentage of orders are for delivery (using Doordash, etc)? Excluding pickups where the customer comes and picks it up himself.

I can't imagine it's even close to 50%.

I don't know the patterns of regular folks, but for me the prices in general have crept up enough that's it rare I want to try some new place - unless I get multiple strong personal recommendations for it. You can forget about paying extra for delivery to home!

When I worked for Dominos in the late 80s, it was a lot like this sounds. No dining room, though customers could walk in and order in a small vestibule. The place was as efficient as possible, just ringing phones, an assembly line, cooler and ovens, storage and cleaners in the back, and delivery drivers running in and out.

There seems to be something special about pizza that sets it apart from everything else, that made it seem reasonable to order it delivered from a non-restaurant even back then.

The points the article make come close to my gripe with ghost kitchens but don't quite cover it:

they feel like scams and when I've accidentally ordered from a ghost kitchen it was by design a terrible experience.

I'm talking like, you order a 15$ main that is called "creamy pasta with prosicutto" and when it shows up its buttered spaghetti with a couple stamp-sized bits of ham. Ordering from actual restaurants come with some of the downsides the article assigns to ghost kitchens, like cold food and weird presentation, but ghost kitchens never seemed to reach the bar of "food someone would actually order, even if it was teleported to them instantly".