I am somewhat confused by this. I personally much prefer delivery to going out to restaurants, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t expect a market of delivery food at equally sustainable prices to show up. It seems like on the margin a restaurant is not going to make a loss on delivery food (because if they would, why would they offer it), and I am not a counterfactual customer who would have ever visited their in-person location (except for the very few restaurants that are close-by enough to walk to in 5 minutes).
I would love for most restaurants to drastically reduce the number of their seats and all the other stuff that they can save by prioritizing delivery food, and it seems like I would be defecting on everyone who has similar preferences to me, by sustaining a market of overpriced food that is subsidizing people who go out to restaurants and need all the seating and decorations and stuff.
I think the point of the OP is not to encourage people to go to physical restaurants, but to discourage the use of online delivery services relative to other ways of placing orders . As they write (boldfaced added):
If you like the restaurant and want those working there to earn a living, and the place to continue to exist, do not order via online services like SeamlessWeb, GrubHub, Delivery.com or Caviar, if there is another way to contact the restaurant.
I do find the post confusing in certain ways; for example, the following quote expresses a view which I find hard to understand, let alone agree with:
If you would cost your local place $5 to save the cost of a fifteen second phone call, make no mistake. You are defecting. You are playing zero-sum games with those who should be your allies. You are bad, and you should feel bad.
Ah, I see. Yeah, I am also not a counterfactual customer who would have ever called them. Before the onset of “standard internet food delivery” I never ordered food, and in the absence of the convenience of that system, would just stop ordering food from any of the restaurants. As such, I am happy to subsidize and give a lot of money to food delivery companies, which seem to actually have created a highly valuable service to me (more so than any individual restaurant ever has for me).
I don’t find that view hard to understand or hard to agree with. I wonder whether we’re interpreting that passage differently from one another. Here’s what I take it to mean:
“To value 15 seconds of _your_ time more than $5 of _the local pizza place’s_ money is to be excessively selfish. If you cost them $5 to save yourself 15s, then you are making the world a substantially worse place on net for a trifling benefit to yourself. Decent people do not do that, and if you do it you should feel bad about it.”
I can totally understand how someone might disagree with that (way 1: “yes, I really do care that much more about myself than about random other people, and I don’t see any reason why I should be ashamed of that”; way 2: “in this situation the local restaurant has clearly decided that they don’t mind getting $5 less in order to save their customer a phone call and hence make it more likely that they get that customer at all, and if they’re OK with that decision I don’t see why I shouldn’t be”) but it seems clearly reasonable to me.
The view you articulate is perfectly intelligible. I’m just not sure it corresponds to the view expressed in the OP. Why invoke notions like defection, if all you want to say is that you should not impose a great cost on others when you can do so at a small cost to yourself?
Why invoke notions like defection, if all you want to say is that you should not impose a great cost on others when you can do so at a small cost to yourself?
I do observe that this is actually what defection is in the canonical game theory sense.
(No comment on whether or how that should apply to the current discussion)
In game theory, the costs and benefits in terms of which defection is defined occur in a well-defined context of strategic interaction. My objection was to the use of defection in a way that implied that the situation described in the post had a particular game-theoretic structure, when in fact no clear account was given of what that structure was supposed to be.
When I go out to a restaurant rather than getting a takeaway (whether I pick it up or someone else delivers it) I’m not (in my mind, at least) primarily choosing “the seating and decorations and stuff”. Rather, I prefer (1) freshly prepared food rather than food that’s been sat in takeaway containers for the last half hour, (2) food that hasn’t had to be optimized for coping well with sitting in takeaway containers for half an hour, and (3) not having to put up with any of the hassle of preparing a meal and clearing up afterwards.
To elaborate a little: 1. Many kinds of food will just not taste as good if they’ve been kept warm for half an hour after preparation. 2. Some kinds suffer badly enough that they just aren’t available for takeaway. 3. After a takeaway/delivery meal it’s still necessary to clean up dishes and cutlery and dispose of the containers and any leftover food (which may involve cleaning up the containers too, if they’re of a kind you feel you ought to recycle). If you go and sit down at the restaurant you get food that’s tastier because it’s freshly prepared, you have the option of having a meal of a sort that wouldn’t survive transporting from where it’s prepared to where you live, and you don’t have to do any cleanup at all.
Of course you may not care about those things, or may not think them worth the hassle of going out to eat, but it seems clear to me that they are genuine benefits (as you might think “seating and decorations and stuff” aren’t) that a person might reasonably be willing to pay for in time or money or both.
I am somewhat confused by this. I personally much prefer delivery to going out to restaurants, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t expect a market of delivery food at equally sustainable prices to show up. It seems like on the margin a restaurant is not going to make a loss on delivery food (because if they would, why would they offer it), and I am not a counterfactual customer who would have ever visited their in-person location (except for the very few restaurants that are close-by enough to walk to in 5 minutes).
I would love for most restaurants to drastically reduce the number of their seats and all the other stuff that they can save by prioritizing delivery food, and it seems like I would be defecting on everyone who has similar preferences to me, by sustaining a market of overpriced food that is subsidizing people who go out to restaurants and need all the seating and decorations and stuff.
I think the point of the OP is not to encourage people to go to physical restaurants, but to discourage the use of online delivery services relative to other ways of placing orders . As they write (boldfaced added):
I do find the post confusing in certain ways; for example, the following quote expresses a view which I find hard to understand, let alone agree with:
Ah, I see. Yeah, I am also not a counterfactual customer who would have ever called them. Before the onset of “standard internet food delivery” I never ordered food, and in the absence of the convenience of that system, would just stop ordering food from any of the restaurants. As such, I am happy to subsidize and give a lot of money to food delivery companies, which seem to actually have created a highly valuable service to me (more so than any individual restaurant ever has for me).
I don’t find that view hard to understand or hard to agree with. I wonder whether we’re interpreting that passage differently from one another. Here’s what I take it to mean:
“To value 15 seconds of _your_ time more than $5 of _the local pizza place’s_ money is to be excessively selfish. If you cost them $5 to save yourself 15s, then you are making the world a substantially worse place on net for a trifling benefit to yourself. Decent people do not do that, and if you do it you should feel bad about it.”
I can totally understand how someone might disagree with that (way 1: “yes, I really do care that much more about myself than about random other people, and I don’t see any reason why I should be ashamed of that”; way 2: “in this situation the local restaurant has clearly decided that they don’t mind getting $5 less in order to save their customer a phone call and hence make it more likely that they get that customer at all, and if they’re OK with that decision I don’t see why I shouldn’t be”) but it seems clearly reasonable to me.
The view you articulate is perfectly intelligible. I’m just not sure it corresponds to the view expressed in the OP. Why invoke notions like defection, if all you want to say is that you should not impose a great cost on others when you can do so at a small cost to yourself?
I do observe that this is actually what defection is in the canonical game theory sense.
(No comment on whether or how that should apply to the current discussion)
In game theory, the costs and benefits in terms of which defection is defined occur in a well-defined context of strategic interaction. My objection was to the use of defection in a way that implied that the situation described in the post had a particular game-theoretic structure, when in fact no clear account was given of what that structure was supposed to be.
When I go out to a restaurant rather than getting a takeaway (whether I pick it up or someone else delivers it) I’m not (in my mind, at least) primarily choosing “the seating and decorations and stuff”. Rather, I prefer (1) freshly prepared food rather than food that’s been sat in takeaway containers for the last half hour, (2) food that hasn’t had to be optimized for coping well with sitting in takeaway containers for half an hour, and (3) not having to put up with any of the hassle of preparing a meal and clearing up afterwards.
To elaborate a little: 1. Many kinds of food will just not taste as good if they’ve been kept warm for half an hour after preparation. 2. Some kinds suffer badly enough that they just aren’t available for takeaway. 3. After a takeaway/delivery meal it’s still necessary to clean up dishes and cutlery and dispose of the containers and any leftover food (which may involve cleaning up the containers too, if they’re of a kind you feel you ought to recycle). If you go and sit down at the restaurant you get food that’s tastier because it’s freshly prepared, you have the option of having a meal of a sort that wouldn’t survive transporting from where it’s prepared to where you live, and you don’t have to do any cleanup at all.
Of course you may not care about those things, or may not think them worth the hassle of going out to eat, but it seems clear to me that they are genuine benefits (as you might think “seating and decorations and stuff” aren’t) that a person might reasonably be willing to pay for in time or money or both.