Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Do you like ordering food delivery? (e.g. Skip, Door Dash, Uber Eats)

Maybe I’m old fashioned, or maybe I’m just plain cheap, but I almost never use food delivery services.

This isn’t to say that I have never had food delivery to my home before. If restaurants offer delivery as an option – like pizza delivery or even sandwich shops like Jimmy John’s – I will have it delivered but i usually avoid delivery services.

Time vs convenience

Aside from planning a date, I don’t make plans very far in advance to eat. For the most part, I’ll cook or pick something up when I get hungry. Food delivery services save one from the hassle or stopping whatever they are doing to cook or spend a hour or so to sit down at a restaurant or even go to a drive-thru for pick-up.

One of the drawbacks to food delivery services is the wait involved in getting your meal. In my experience, I usually have to wait about an hour in order to have food delivered. Personally, I feel like in an hour. I could go pick something up or even go sit down in a restaurant and eat and return to whatever I was doing. It’s just very hard for me to rationalize waiting a one hour to have food delivered to me when I can just as easily go get it myself. I feel so strongly about this that there have been times where I will be hanging out with friends or hanging out with a woman and actually offer to pick up the food myself in order to avoid waiting too long to get it. 

Delivery fees

Food delivery services are not in the business of helping out humanity. Yes, they’re there there to provide a service, but it is a service that they charge money for.

I don’t think of myself as a cheap guy. Maybe at times I’m a little bit frugal, but I have a hard time rationalizing paying somebody else money to bring me my food. Sure, they’re saving me the hassle of getting out on the road and dropping whatever I’m doing at the time, but more often than that the time that I save by picking food up myself as far greater to me than the tiny bit of gasoline in my car will consume in the process. 

To tip or not to tip

Of course, when you are having food delivered, there is the matter of tipping your delivery person. Admittedly, I’m not terribly well-versed on the various food delivery services, or their apps, but I think when placing an order, they will encourage or even require you to tip the delivery people.

I have no problem with tipping waiters or waitresses at a sitdown restaurant. Heck, I’d like to leave a tip for a the housekeeping crew at a hotel as I am checking out. I think it’s very important to provide a gratuity to employees who provide services.

However, I’ve noticed ever since Covid that a lot of places will ask give customers the option to leave a gratuity/tip when they’re paying for something with a credit card. Is it really necessary to give a tip to the cashiers at my local pizza place who hand me a pizza fast food style? I don’t think that it is. Sometimes I will, sometimes I won’t. But I think the expectation of a tip has gotten out of hand in the last five years.

Due to the extra time involved, delivery fees, and the expectation of providing a gratuity, I personally never use food delivery services. If I were sick, injured, or unable to get out of bed, I might feel differently about the matter. At that point, I would have no problem paying the additional fees involved for convenience. But most days, it’s just easier to either pick up or prepare my own food. As it stands, I’ve never had a food delivery app downloaded to my smart phone; nor do I have any intention of doing so. 

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Rob’s Retro Movie Review: This is Spinal Tap (1984) – The Movie That Scaled to Eleven
• A Death in the Family (And My Disposable Income): My Life in Comics
• The Supporting Cast: Navigating the Eras of Male Friendship
• Life is What Happens: A Look Back at My Non-Existent 2025 Vision
• The Moment I Walked Inside a Hallmark Movie

The article “The Pros & Cons of Food Delivery” first appeared in Rebuilding Rob.