DoorDash, the stupidity tax, and how a decade of subsidized convenience rewired what we’re willing to pay for
When I was a kid, people used to call the lottery a “stupidity tax.”
The idea was simple enough. You worked hard for your money, then handed some of it back to the state in exchange for a piece of paper carrying astronomically bad odds of making you rich.
Fair enough.
But after watching the rise of DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub, I owe the lottery an apology.
The lottery suddenly seems downright aspirational.
At least when you spend a dollar on a lottery ticket, you’re purchasing the possibility — however microscopic — of ending up dramatically better off than you started.
Food delivery apps have perfected the opposite transaction. You pay considerably more to receive a measurably worse version of something you could have gotten yourself.
That may be the purest expression of what I’ve been writing about in this series. But it’s also where the series has to complicate itself. Because the first two parts told you this was being done to us, and this part is going to argue that we’re now paying for the privilege — and I don’t get to have it both ways without explaining how both can be true.
The Old Fast-Food Deal
Fast food was never supposed to be fine dining. That wasn’t the deal. The deal was right there in the name.
You weren’t going to McDonald’s because you expected a hand-formed filet served on china. You went because you could pull into the parking lot with six dollars, speak into a box, drive around the building, and leave three minutes later with a hot hamburger and fries.
It was cheap. It was fast. It was predictable.
There was an understood hierarchy of value. Excellent food and personal service meant a sit-down restaurant and a tip for the waitress. Convenience and speed meant the drive-through. Cheapest possible meant cooking at home.
Each transaction had a reason to exist.
Then two things happened, and only one of them was COVID.
The first is that fast food stopped being cheap. This isn’t nostalgia — it’s in the CPI data. Between 2019 and 2023, the limited-service meals category rose nearly 28 percent while overall CPI rose about 19 percent. Stretch the window and it gets worse: FinanceBuzz found that from 2014 to 2024, menu prices at major chains climbed between 39 and 100 percent against 31 percent general inflation. McDonald’s doubled. The McChicken went from a dollar-menu staple to three dollars — a 200 percent increase on the single item most associated with the phrase “cheap fast food.”
So the value proposition didn’t erode gently. The cheap part left first.
The second thing is that COVID handed the industry a natural experiment nobody would have been allowed to run on purpose. Dining rooms closed. Staffing disappeared. Hours shrank. Kiosks appeared. Apps became mandatory. And the industry got to observe, in real time, the answer to a question it had never been able to test:
How much service can we remove before customers stop showing up?
The answer was: quite a lot.
The tip screen is the tell. It’s tempting to say the pandemic invented it — I’ve said it myself — but the hardware was already sitting on the counter. Square had been shipping default gratuity prompts on counter-service terminals since the mid-2010s. The capability was installed and waiting. What was missing was a reason to use it aggressively that didn’t feel like panhandling.
2020 supplied one. Overnight the prompt became solidarity, the suggested percentages started climbing, and nobody wanted to be the guy who tapped “no tip” in front of a cashier working through a pandemic.
Remember that shape, because it comes back. What changed wasn’t what customers wanted. What changed was what companies were finally in a position to ask for.
Fast Food That Isn’t Fast
The modern fast-food transaction increasingly makes no sense on its own terms.
It isn’t cheap. It frequently isn’t fast. The quality hasn’t improved enough to justify either.
And instead of reducing friction, restaurants added it:
Download our app. Create an account. Enter your email. Turn on notifications. Join our rewards program. Scan this QR code. Use the kiosk. Enter your phone number. Would you like to tip?
No.
I would like a hamburger.
That was the whole innovation. Hand money to person, receive hamburger. We took one of the simplest commercial transactions ever devised and introduced software, passwords, data collection, loyalty programs, touchscreens, and gratuity prompts.
This is supposed to be progress.
But apparently it still wasn’t convenient enough, because Silicon Valley looked at the declining fast-food experience and asked the obvious question:
What if we made it worse and charged substantially more for it?
The Stupidity Tax, Itemized
Suppose I want Chipotle.
I can order online at roughly menu price, walk in, grab it off the pickup shelf, and leave. Call it twelve dollars.
And that path has been getting easier the whole time.Chipotle now builds a digital pickup lane — a Chipotlane — into the large majority of its new restaurants, and passed eight hundred of them in early 2024. You order on the app, pull up, and the handoff takes under thirty seconds, against an average of about 221 seconds for Taco Bell’s drive-thru — the fastest traditional drive-thru in the country.
Thirty seconds. Without getting out of the car.
Or I can summon a stranger with an automobile to perform that journey on my behalf.
Now we get to have some fun.
Start with the menu price, which is usually higher on the app — restaurants pad it to offset commissions that can run 15 to 30 percent per order. Then a delivery fee. Then a service fee. Then tax. Then a tip, because the person actually performing the delivery reasonably expects to be paid.
Here’s the part I want you to sit with. In 2023, Restaurant Business ran the experiment across thirteen restaurants, ordering identical items in-store and on DoorDash. All but two charged a delivery premium. Average menu markup: over 20 percent. Taco Bell: 56 percent. Chick-fil-A: 46 percent.
That’s before fees, tax, and tip. Once those landed, their delivered orders came to roughly twice the in-store price.
And this isn’t one outlet’s small sample. A Credit Suisse study found limited-service brands raising prices on delivery apps by an average of about 20 percent — enough that third-party delivery became margin-neutral or better for the restaurants doing it.
So the twelve-dollar burrito is a twenty-five-dollar burrito. And it isn’t the same burrito.
The first one is handed to me minutes after it’s made. The second one sits in a bag. Somebody picks it up. It rides in a car. Maybe there are other stops. Maybe traffic. Maybe the restaurant ran behind. Maybe I didn’t tip enough to make the run attractive.
Eventually my burrito arrives. I have paid roughly double, waited longer, and received colder food.
This is an astonishing value proposition.
Now, the fair version of the retail analogy — and I want to be fair, because the unfair version is how you lose an argument you should win. It isn’t “this TV costs $500 and works, this one costs $950 and doesn’t.” It’s:
“This television costs $500 and you pick it up. This one costs $950, arrives at your door, shows up later, and the picture is slightly worse.”
That’s the actual offer. Delivery is a real service and it has real value. The question isn’t whether it’s worth anything. It’s whether it’s worth an eighty percent premium on a thirteen-dollar hamburger, three miles from your house, three times a week.
In Defense of the Lottery
Which brings me back to that old line about stupidity taxes.
Consider two people.
The first drives to Chipotle, buys a twelve-dollar burrito, and stops at a gas station on the way home for three one-dollar lottery tickets. Total: fifteen dollars. He arrives home with hot food and three absurdly unlikely chances at becoming a millionaire.
The second sits on the couch and orders the same burrito through an app. Total: about thirty. He receives a colder burrito.
That’s the entire upside.
And the lottery guy is doing better than you’d think, actuarially speaking. Americans spent $104.7 billion on tickets in 2024. No state lottery returns more in prizes than it collects — but Virginia pays out about eighty cents on the dollar, the best in the country.
Eighty cents.
Against a delivery order where the documented average is roughly fifty cents of food per dollar spent.
The lottery player is getting a better return, plus a dream. His stupidity tax at least comes with a lottery ticket in it.
What Are You Actually Buying?
The obvious defense is convenience, and that’s where this gets interesting — because in most cases the customer isn’t buying time.
Chipotle is six minutes away. I can leave, pick up food, and be home in twenty. The app may take forty-five.
So I haven’t bought speed, freshness, quality, or affordability.
I’ve bought the ability not to leave my house. Not the ability to stay in my car — Chipotle already solved that one, in under thirty seconds, for free. Just the house.
And here I have to be honest about a version of this that isn’t stupid at all. Getting two kids out of the house, into car seats, back out, through a restaurant, and home again turns a ten-minute errand into thirty minutes of genuine labor. Fifteen dollars to skip that is not obviously irrational. Neither is delivery when you’re sick, disabled, without a car, working through lunch, or feeding twelve people at the office.
DoorDash has a more aggressive version of this defense, and it deserves to be stated at full strength rather than dismissed. In company-published survey research, lower-income respondents were reportedly twice as likely to skip a meal or eat snacks instead if delivery weren’t available, and 27 percent of consumers under $75,000 in household income said they use delivery because getting to the restaurant is difficult — versus 13 percent of higher earners.
Take that seriously. Transportation access is a real constraint in this country, and a lot of people have less of it than I do.
Then notice what the argument actually concedes: that the population most dependent on these platforms is the population least able to absorb a hundred percent markup. If your solution to food insecurity is a service that charges twenty-five dollars to move thirteen dollars of food, you haven’t solved food insecurity. You’ve found a way to bill it.
I’m also not going to pretend a company survey defending the company is neutral evidence. But I don’t need it to be. The independent data points the same direction.
Who’s Actually Doing This
I had a theory going in, based on nothing more rigorous than asking people I know. My theory was that heavy delivery users skew toward people who can least afford it.
The data says I was half right, in a way that’s more interesting than being all the way right.
Usage does rise as income falls. Industry survey work has found the lowest income bracket showing the highest rate of delivery app use, and DoorDash’s own published figures put platform usage at nearly 35 percent of households earning under $25,000.
But the money runs the other way. The heaviest subscription uptake and the highest lifetime customer value sit with high-income professionals and dual-income suburban households — the DashPass demographic, with average order values around $38.
So the habit is broadest at the bottom and deepest at the top.
Which kills the comfortable explanation. If this were a competence problem — if only fools paid double for cold food — the numbers would run the opposite direction. The people with the most education and the most money would be the ones opting out.
They’re the ones with the subscriptions.
The Part Where I Reconcile This With Parts I and II
So how did tens of millions of people conclude that this was a reasonable way to buy a hamburger?
They didn’t. Not at these prices. Nobody looked at a thirty-dollar Chipotle order in 2015 and said yes, this is the future.They looked at a fifteen-dollar one.
DoorDash launched in 2013. It did not turn an annual profit until 2024 — $123 million, which the company described as its first full year of positive GAAP net income.
Eleven years.
Eleven years of investor money underwriting the gap between what delivery cost and what customers were charged. Eleven years of promo codes, free-delivery offers, and subsidized fees, funded by people betting that if you make a habit cheap enough for long enough, you can raise the price later and keep the customer.
Then look at what happened once the habit was set. The following year, DoorDash posted $935 million on $13.7 billion in revenue — more than seven times the prior year’s profit. Volume didn’t collapse when the discounts ended. Orders rose 18 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2025 alone, and the company exited 2024 with more than 22 million DashPass and Wolt+ members.
Eleven years of losses, and then the bill.
That is enshittification exactly as I described it in Part I. Good to users first. Extract second. The only difference is that here the product being degraded wasn’t a piece of software.
It was our sense of what a burrito costs.
The habit was bought and paid for during a period when the economics were fake, and it survived into a period when they aren’t. That’s why smart people with money do this. That’s why the DashPass numbers keep climbing while the fees keep climbing. Nobody chose this at thirty dollars. They chose it at fifteen, and then the fifteen quietly became thirty while the habit stayed put.
Which is the honest reconciliation of this series. We are not innocent — we clicked accept, entered the card number, and kept ordering. But we also didn’t wake up one morning and independently invent a preference for expensive cold food. That preference was cultivated, at enormous expense, by companies that lost money for a decade on purpose.
Convenience Became Our Highest Value
The apps aren’t the story. They’re the evidence.
We will spend ten dollars to avoid ten minutes of effort. We hand over location, purchase history, email, phone number, and payment credentials because walking in without the app might cost fifty cents more. We replace working appliances because repairing them requires learning how they work. We pay monthly for features that used to come in the box. We scan QR codes instead of receiving menus. We check ourselves out, bag our own merchandise, show a receipt proving we didn’t steal from ourselves, and call it a convenience.
At some point “convenience” stopped meaning this saves meaningful time or effort and started meaning this spares me any immediate inconvenience whatsoever.
That distinction matters, because friction has value.
Friction is looking at a thirty-dollar checkout screen and thinking: do I actually want this?
Friction is deciding the leftovers are fine.
Friction is learning how to fix the thing instead of replacing it.
Friction is the gap between impulse and action — which happens to be the only place where a consumer decision can occur.
Technology companies spent twenty years promising to remove friction from our lives. It might have been worth asking what the friction was doing before we agreed to let them take all of it.
We Keep Rewarding It
Companies aren’t charities. If customers demonstrate they’ll pay more for worse, a company would be irrational not to notice.
If we tolerate kiosks, thinner staffing, longer waits, and higher prices, those things stay. If we’ll pay a third party fifteen dollars to deliver the degraded product to the porch, an industry will materialize to capture that fifteen dollars.
Why wouldn’t it?
We like to imagine enshittification as something done to helpless consumers by greedy corporations. Often it is. But some of it we finance. We download the app, enter the card, click accept, and then complain that everything got worse.
That doesn’t absolve anyone. It explains why the strategy works.
The $30 Burrito Is Telling Us Something
There’s a contradiction in modern American life. Everything is unaffordable — housing, cars, groceries, health care — and much of that complaint is legitimate.
But alongside it, enormous industries have emerged whose entire business model depends on Americans voluntarily making ordinary life more expensive.
We take a twelve-dollar meal and make it thirty. We take free entertainment and assemble six subscriptions. We take a product we used to own and convert it into a monthly payment. We take a five-minute errand and hire it out.
Then we wonder where the money went.
This doesn’t mean the affordability crisis isn’t real. It means there are two separate problems: things costing more, and our habit of choosing the most expensive available method of buying them. Both are true. Only one of them is fixable this afternoon.
Maybe We Did This to Ourselves
That’s the uncomfortable end of the trilogy, with one amendment.
Yes, companies discovered they could make products worse, charge more, harvest data, lock features behind subscriptions, cut staff, automate service, and make ownership conditional.
And yes, somewhere in there we demonstrated that convenience could overcome nearly every objection.
Make it worse. Fine. Charge more. Okay. Track me. Whatever. Make me create an account. Sure. Bill me monthly. Fine.
Just don’t make me get off the couch.
That’s a dangerous thing to tell a market economy. Once you’ve announced that convenience is your highest value, companies know exactly what to sell you. Not better products. Not cheaper ones. Not ones that last.
They sell you the absence of inconvenience. And there’s no natural ceiling on that price, because you can always be spared a little more effort.
The amendment is this: we didn’t arrive at that preference on our own. It was built, deliberately, over a decade, at a cost of billions of dollars in deliberate losses, by companies that understood exactly what they were buying.
They were buying the version of you that doesn’t drive to Chipotle anymore.
They got a hell of a deal.
So I hereby retract every joke I ever heard about lottery tickets being the ultimate stupidity tax.
Buy the ticket. Dream big. Eighty cents on the dollar and a shot at the jackpot is a better offer than the one on your phone.
Just pick up your own burrito on the way home.