We live in an era of extreme convenience. The era of fast-casual restaurants, online shopping, and the newly popular trend of mobile…everything. It’s become possible to accomplish pretty much everything on our smart phones. Lately, though there’s a new trend: a few different services have been created for the simple purpose of ordering, picking up, and delivering food right to our doors. Instead of having to physically go to restaurants like Chipotle and Noodles & Company, simply placing an order on a website will do all the work for us.
I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad idea; on the contrary, as someone without a car who lives on a college campus, I find the service very tempting. However, as a whole I’m not sure the idea of a delivery service for already (somewhat) fast foods like Chipotle and McDonalds is a totally sound one. I love efficiency and ease when getting food as much as the next person, but at a certain point I think we need to take a step back and see how necessary certain things really are. Sure, sometimes it would be nice not to have to get up and go to a restaurant, and it would definitely be nice to be able to get food from a restaurant that’s far away when I don’t have the car to drive there, but is the service really necessary?
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I don’t want to sound like the choir of people who preach about the lack of face to face communication we have these days, but I definitely think mobile ordering is a bit on the antisocial side. Again, it’s a great and convenient service, but the way it’s gaining popularity makes me sometimes question the amount of communication we have right now.
At my university I almost always have a routine after my last class lets out: get in the sandwich line, wait about 10 or 15 minutes before I can actually order my sandwich, and all the while feel angry about the people jumping ahead in line to pick up their mobile sandwich orders. It’s a forever repeating process because there is always a long line and always a million online-ordered sandwiches that have to be made before mine. And no matter how many times it happens, I never decide to switch things up and order my sandwich online. Something about it seems kind of off to me. Do I really need such speed and ease that I won’t wait in the line in front of the sandwich place? Do I really just not want to have to interact with the really nice ladies behind the sandwich counter?
I don’t know all the reasons people use mobile ordering, and I can’t warrant judgment that the practice as a whole is bad, antisocial, lazy, etc. I do think it’s innovative, and definitely makes life a little easier and more comfortable.
However, there are certain things that I think we simply don’t need…and mobile ordering is one of these things. Maybe sometimes we can just deal with long sandwich lines or deal with not having Chipotle because we can’t get to it or deal with having to actually drive to McDonalds to pick up food. I think that maybe sometimes we need little inconveniences in life, so we can appreciate all things we already have that make life a bit easier.
