I don't think this is entirely true, particularly when delivery sources that take a percentage cut are a large factor. Furthermore the tips would just be absorbed into the cost of the menu items.

I think rising wealth inequality is also a problem. The top 10% of america can only eat out at so many places at once.

They're going to have to fix their food quality problems too, especially if they're going to bake in (pun not intended) a wage hike for their staff. The last handful of times I've gone out to standard faire American restaurants (think Outback, Applebees etc), the price for two people before tip was anywhere from $30-$50 / person. $100 for Outback would have been a pretty steep ask even before "delivery" became a thing, but since the pandemic there has been a noticeable drop in quality across the board. The places are under-staffed and over worked and the need to cram as many bodies in as possible combined with "industrial chic" has made most of them noisier than a school cafeteria. The food is not only anemic in looks and quantity but the quality is barely better than a frozen dinner from the grocery store. I'm not avoiding the restaurants because I have to tip, I'm avoiding them because I'm being charged high end steak house prices for microwaved frozen food.

If the phenomenon was people ordering take out and picking it up themselves, I might be inclined to agree.

It's not, though - you still have sticker shock of fees/tips/etc on DoorDash (etc.) orders. Tipping is an issue in America today but I doubt it's the cause of this particular problem.

"forcing people to"? it's still more expensive in money or in time if you're getting anything more than replacement level fast food.

> The crazy tipping "culture" is forcing people to order out.

Have you seen the delivery fees? You're not saving any money by ordering delivery.

Our cities are so messed up that just leaving the house is stressful and time consuming. I can't walk down the street without seeing at least one car do something monstrously stupid. I've witnessed accidents, screaming, near misses, people driving on sidewalks, blowing through stop signs without looking, and endless drunk/high drivers weaving around.

I can totally understand why people are holed up in their houses. It feels like a war zone out there.

Honestly, I think it's more the fault of city planners. There are almost no places to eat within 10 minute walk of where I live, and I live downtown. If more apartment buildings had commercial first floors that would go a long way.

I reject the entirety of your comment but this point struck me:

>It also destroys every restaurant's natural advantage of closeness - if you run a pizzeria and your food is not horrible, you can naturally expect people from about 2 city blocks over to eat there - now, they're competing with every pizzeria in the city.

How is this a bad thing? You want businesses to compete, both in quality and price.

devil's advocate: wouldn't you want the pizzeria to feel that market pressure so they either 1. improve their product, or 2. are replaced by a better pizzeria?

At the very least, I make an effort to pick up food in person these days. Saves me a lot of money, is better for the restaurant, and since it's not my livelihood I can just show up a bit early, park properly, and hang around, ensuring that the food will be as fresh as possible when I get home and avoiding any rush.

The animosity I sometimes see between the restaurant staff and the delivery drivers can be really uncomfortable. It's not shocking, they have competing incentives and I think there's a pretty stark class/culture divide, but it's unfortunate when a system like this pits workers against each other that are just both trying to do their job as best they can.

> I know multiple people ho not well-off but effectively no longer cook and only eat premade delivered food.

I see this too. It's so stupid because there are really cheap frozen meals you can get at the grocery store.

> It's probably no accident there's videos like [1] about how every restaurant tastes the same when supplied by Sysco (national distributor versus buying fresh/local, which means higher prices...)

Sysco is a secondary problem. Restaurants are so relentlessly focused on avoiding wastage that even if they prep their food, they coalesce around the exact, same cheap ingredients in a relatively small number of dishes.

For example, every single restaurant in Austin, TX used to have chicken-fried steak on the menu--to the extent that I used to joke about restaurants that you absolutely wouldn't expect to have it (the Chinese place that I knew served it eons ago made an excellent one).

Now, presumably because beef is expensive, chicken-fried steak is a relative rarity in Austin. And, even if you can find it, it's likely to be sub-par.

Sandwich shops are slightly different but prices are driving the quality decline here, too. The problem is that their primary meat ingredients mostly suck because they are getting the lowest tiers.

I am also very interested in this change. Is it just a second order effect on engagement targeting on a wider scale?

Like it's always been the case news and the Internet slants towards the negative ends of things I think but the gap between the world represented there vs the world represented in actual real life seems so much larger now than I can remember it being.

There's also a small thought niggling away at me about if it's mainly because network effects have made the world mentally a much smaller place. All news is sort of global, rather than local, and you can always find something that's pretty shitty in the world at all times and that gets injected into everyone's narrative because whatever news you consume is all connected now to global,or at least national, consciousness if that makes sense?

It'd be interesting to see over time how much the content of news as transformed over time in terms of the local, national, global proportion of coverage/content in the average news media