DoorDash and the dilemma of affluence

A more prosperous America is also a less thrifty America, with mixed results.

How often do you order DoorDash? (Photo by SOPA Images)

When I think about ways that my life has changed for the better in recent years thanks to technology and economic growth, I’d have to say that the rise of food delivery apps is really up there.

In the very recent past, basically the only food that you could get delivered to your house in small quantities was pizza or Chinese food. It wasn’t impossible to get some other genre of food delivered, but outside of Manhattan it was pretty hard.

The reasons for this were varied, but one was a basic chicken-and-egg problem. People were accustomed to Chinese and pizza having delivery options, but not to other cuisines. So if an Indian restaurant decided to employ some delivery drivers, they would face the problem that potential customers wouldn’t realize they could call the restaurant and order delivery. And part of what the apps have done is resolve this basic discoverability problem.

Now, if the family finds ourselves (as we did late last summer) unexpectedly spending the night in Worcester, Mass., it’s easy to fire up DoorDash and have some sushi sent to our hotel rather than being limited to whatever happened to be immediately adjacent.

That being said, while one reason that I am a pretty heavy user of DoorDash is that I find it to be a useful and convenient service, another is that I am an affluent middle-aged dad. Paying someone to go to a sushi restaurant, pick up food, and deliver it to your hotel room is, in the grand scheme of things, a high-cost way of getting a meal.

Like many people, I was struck by some of the anecdotes in Priya Krishna’s recent New York Times piece about heavy DoorDash users that featured people of much more modest means spending heavily on meal delivery. Near the top, for example, she profiles a young woman who says she spends between $200 and $300 per week on meal delivery while earning about $50,000 per year.

I think it’s fair to say that if you’re spending upwards of a quarter of your gross salary on meal delivery, you are making some imprudent life decisions.

That said, there are hundreds of millions of people in this country, and the fact that you can find an article’s worth of examples of a given behavior does not demonstrate that it’s a socially significant trend. I think the evidence is pretty clear that spending on restaurant meals in general has gone down relative to incomes, so in the aggregate more spending on high cost modes of dining like DoorDash reflects growing affluence — real median household income reached a record high in 2024, and all signs are that it grew higher in 2025 — rather than growing imprudence.

But the discourse around this article generated a lot of interesting (mostly inaccurate) claims about relative costs and economic trends, and I think it underscores something important about contemporary inflation dynamics: