Silicon Valley Turned Your Burrito into a Capitalist Nightmare

Ah yes, another 2000 word screed on how absolutely horrible and inhumane it is to order food from an app. This is the same genre of writing about how the latest iPhone is garbage or the touchpad on the MacBooks is proof of societal collapse.<p>It’s wonderful that in 2019 these are the issues people care about. It shows how pleasant our lives have become.

From a customer perspective I couldn’t disagree more. Calling on the phone to order something is often infuriating —- dealing with thick accents and loud background noise it could be awful to communicate.<p>With DoorDash and similar apps, you can place the order online and be precise about what you want, and get updates on where your order is.<p>It’s not perfect to be sure, but the “nightmare” is ridiculously exaggerated in the article. P

I agree and disagree. Doordash have opened up deliveries from restaurants that would have never hired their own drivers. On the other hand their delivery mechanism sucks. Almost every other order is messed up. Yesterday, after a 2 hr delay, in which time there was to way to contact customer service, my deliver was abruptly cancelled. Imagine a toddler at this time. Also, most of the time the food arrives cold or there are items that are incorrect. It is bizarre

Food delivery was broken - only a few restaurants did it. Now almost all of them can do it. That is truly disruptive. Does it suck sometime? Yes, probably even more than Sal&#x27;s Pizza on a busy midterm week. But that you can do it at all, that&#x27;s new and different. There will be growing pains of course.

After a few bad experiences, I only call the restaurany directly to order now. A lot of these apps show choices that the restaurants may not have and they end up giving you an inferior substitute. If I have a good experience, I often just stick with that restaurant&#x2F;order forever since I know its reliable.

I don&#x27;t know why this irked me so much, but it did:<p>&gt; the roughly 50-square-mile area surrounding the San Francisco Peninsula<p>SF itself is around 50 square miles. I know the article probably means something like &quot;the area within 50 miles of San Francisco,&quot; but an editor should have caught this.

Can see the author&#x27;s point, but I know people in their late teens who never would have bothered ringing up restaurants to get things delivered. They only do so now because its a single app with many choices ... similar to Uber in this regard - they managed to augment an existing service with a cool smartphone app &amp; location tracking.

&gt; Look, there’s a machine in our pockets that allows us to take a thousand photos a day, access the world’s information, and do things we never could have dreamed of in the past<p>None of these things originated in Silicon Valley.

The problem is cars. Food delivery works perfectly well in NYC. Bike transit times are wonderfully predictable.