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A year into Donald Trump’s second stab at the presidency, and affordability remains the No. 1 priority for voters. The New York Times has conveniently found the culprit of the electorate’s dissatisfaction with the cost of living: DoorDash!
In a lengthy feature on the real forgotten men and women of America, the Gray Lady profiles the consumers struggling to afford daily personal meal delivery, just some of the many “millions” who “are struggling to put any kind of food on the table as grocery prices continue to rise.”
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“Food delivery, which skyrocketed during the pandemic as a practical necessity, has become even more entrenched in the years since as a convenience, an everyday alternative to cooking or eating out,” reports the New York Times. “DoorDash is now a verb. And the new delivery economy is transforming the way Americans live — reshaping budgets, mealtimes and social habits.”
Kevin Caldwell, a father and husband who says he spends “about $700 a week to order in” because he “can almost never find the time to make dinner,” is presented by the paper as just one of the countless working parents who have no choice to spend $36,400 per year, or nearly half of what the average consumer spent in total in 2024, on food delivery. Although the New York Times concedes that some, such as Kiely Reedy, incinerate “at least $200 to $300 per week on food delivery” out of a $50,000 salary for pure “instant gratification,” even Reedy is still sympathetically noted to worry that “the delivery drivers are poorly paid.”
There’s no shortage of data to make us all feel derision about the intellectual degradation of the population; basic math and reading scores have plummeted in children, while adults waste more time and money than ever on sports gambling and buy-now-pay-later binges for luxury goods.
Not only is the New York Times’s portrait of an economy subsisting solely on hand-delivered fast food somewhat divorced from the data, but to the extent Americans are splurging on delivery, it’s a product of consumer prices becoming more affordable than ever, not less.
Contrary to the picture painted by the New York Times, complaints about affordability aren’t much about consumer goods at all. In the paper’s own polling from last month, nearly three-quarters of respondents said that food prices are mostly affordable. With inflation trending down back toward 2% and real average weekly wages up about 1.5% since the start of Trump’s second term, broad complaints that persist about the overall economy are really about housing, which the majority of poll respondents agree has become unaffordable.
Even with the Biden administration-era increase in food prices, the cost of basic sustenance has gone down over the decades. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average share of total annual consumption spent on food has declined from 15% to just shy of 13% in the last 35 years, while the Department of Agriculture reports the share of average disposable income spent on food has declined from 12% in the 1980s to 10.4% in 2024.
Now, food away from home as a share of disposable income — spending at physical restaurants or through meal delivery — has, for the first time, slightly outpaced total spending on food at home, the category which basically means groceries. But this is not because Americans are spending markedly more money on food away from home, but rather because food at home has gotten so much cheaper. As a share of total consumer expenditures, grocery spending remains higher than food-away-from-home spending across the income distribution, even though both are declining.
OK, but what does this mean in absolute terms? Obviously, as Americans earn and spend more after-tax income, food should comprise a smaller share of those expenditures and disposable earnings.
In inflation-adjusted dollars, per capita food expenses are indeed up 20% over the last 20 years, whereas grocery expenditures are up just 5% from where they were 70 years ago. Real per capita spending on food away from home has nearly tripled in that time. But if you ignore the anomalous 2020 bust and subsequent boom in food-away-from-home spending, it followed a fairly consistent trajectory for over a decade, actually leveling off in the last two years.
These increases are exceptionally modest when you then factor back in just how much richer the average American has become. So what if real per capita food expenses are up 20% in 20 years if real disposable per capita income is up twice as fast?
Now, even though none of the government data differentiates between in-person dining and food delivery within the category of spending on food away from home, the data goes far beyond industry-sponsored or self-reported polling to indicate that delivery is consuming a much greater chunk of spending on food away from home than it used to.
In a fascinating paper on the sudden plus-15% spike in labor productivity at restaurants during the pandemic, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago president Austan Goolsbee was able to attribute the change in trend — labor productivity in restaurants had been flat for 30 years prior — to the rising share of customers spending 10 minutes or fewer in restaurants, not just an increase in demand overall. Using microdata derived from delivery apps themselves, Goolsbee confirmed that aggregate daily customer use of delivery apps more than doubled during the pandemic, but it leveled off in 2022, holding steady until at least the start of 2024.
The fact that the upward trajectory halted right as inflation broached its highest level in 40 years and as interest rates soared indicates that, unlike the dimwits featured by the New York Times, the average consumer remains at least somewhat rational, changing suboptimal or profligate behavior in the face of rising costs and declining real incomes.
The more universal problem isn’t where Americans source their meals but rather how they eat: increasingly alone.
The American Time Use Survey of 2023 found that a quarter of Americans reported eating all their meals alone the previous day, an increase of more than 50% over the prior 20 years. While Americans of all ages ate more meals alone, the increase was most precipitous among the demographic who should be the most social. The share of folks between 18 and 24 dining alone nearly doubled over the prior two decades.
The spendthrifts profiled by the New York Times notwithstanding, the real problem with food delivery spending likely isn’t that it’s growing in absolute terms on average, but rather that it’s crowding out the time and money otherwise spent on cooking meals or dining in restaurants with other people. The rise of DoorDash didn’t happen in a vacuum. Across the data, we see Americans spend less time socializing, have less frequent sex, and spend some 19% more time alone than they did 15 years ago.
Even the ostensible good news celebrated by the media that Generation Z is shunning alcohol isn’t actually a sign of improving health, but rather the increased atomization that has replaced after-work happy hour, dates, and celebrations in real life with smartphone usage.
Wasting thousands on DoorDash is far from a universal experience, and even if it were, it’s evidence of personal failures of irrational consumers rather than systemic unaffordability across consumer goods, which have mostly stabilized in price over the last year. DoorDash, as a wonderful occasional convenience or treat, shouldn’t be vilified as exploitation or pollution. But when dining alone replaces the joys of breaking bread with friends and family, that’s a crisis that supersedes economic woes.
