Convenience Costs
If something is too good to be true, it probably is. I’ve carried this lesson since I was a (very gullible) child. Everything involves a sacrifice. We just need to look hard enough, or wait long enough, to see what it is.
Convenience is a good example. Who doesn’t want convenient things? Who wants to have more work? Few of us could argue that convenience is a bad thing, but I’ll argue that too much convenience comes at a cost. Especially when you think about how instant delivery changes our relationship with food.
Lauren Kelly, founder and design psychologist at Behaviour Studio, believes the convenience of food delivery has big consequences. Let’s start with the good stuff: the pleasure we feel as soon as we confirm our order. “We experience more positive emotions when looking forward to an event”, Kelly explains, “so the act of ordering and waiting for the food to arrive can increase the enjoyment of the experience — maybe even more than the eating itself”.
However, this might create what she calls ‘dissociation’. Because everything is a click away, the experience of ordering becomes less important than the actual delivery itself. For all its conveniences, ordering food as you wait in your couch is not quite the same as going to a nice restaurant and enjoying a fantastic atmosphere. If variety is the spice of life, we need room for both.
On top of that, the ease through which we can click and order food might have consequences to our health. “The brain likes easy things. An easy decision now is a click. So you wonder about how that affects patterns of unhealthy eating, because unhealthy foods give us instant hits without us realising”. Not everything in life is about the best burgers in town — just saying.
What about when something’s so convenient you just stick with it? When researching this article, we wondered if food delivery just got people to order what they already liked, reducing discovery and turning our meals into the same old thing, over and over again.
Kelly thinks it’s the other way around. “The average household eats the same meals on a weekly basis, so I don’t think food delivery is knocking down discovery; it might be doing the opposite”. Specifically, the ‘most popular’ sections help people decide on whether to try something new. “We don’t like choice and get decision paralysis after nine options”, Kelly explains, so having a simple set of recommendations helps people feel more at ease with what they ended up choosing. A digital version of ‘today’s specials’, if you will.
Ultimately, there are good and bad effects to convenience in food delivery. Let’s finish with a big one: how food can often become a social event. In many cultures, food is ultimately a social experience. If we lose that aspect, by focusing only on what we order to our houses, we lose that sense of occasion and being able to talk to each other. After all, what’s the point of having a great convenient meal if there’s no one to enjoy it with? (And Netflix doesn’t count!)
