Delivery is a luxury service until:

- you have school kids and a full time

- a medical condition

- work 2 jobs because economy is fucked.

- can’t drive of old age.

And a million other reasons. In old times with a working community, delivery was a luxury, in “modern” days, it is often a necessity for lack of alternatives.

When was the last time you offered the old people down the road if they need help?

Delivery is a luxury for diners but not restaurants, who now have one fewer vendor.

Occasionally for fun I'll check the price of DoorDash / Uber Eats for fast food and compare it with the normal menu prices. The difference is insane. I don't think I'd pay that even if I were a billionaire. It's absolutely a luxury and I can't believe normal people pay for it.

Entertainment is also a luxury service. I don't think that justifies the behemoth mergers/acquisitions we've seen this decade. It's about competition, not necessarily how important the service is to the people.

A few Albertsons stores do their own deliveries, but it's increasingly rare. I used to love my Abertsons deliveries. Always had the same guy (who was super friendly), and it came in a refrigerated truc, so cold products stayed cold.

I stopped using them when they switched to instacart -- the instacart shoppers really don't care about service, they're just trying to deliver orders as fast as possible so they can more to the next one. They'll pack ice cream with a warm rotisserie chicken so you end up with molten ice cream as it sits in their trunk for 45 minutes while they make 2 deliveries before yours. And in the half dozen or so times I used them, not a single order was correct.

Now I use Amazon Whole Foods because even though they use gig drivers for the delivery, the food is well packed (and they use foil lined bags for cold products that do a decent job of keeping cold foods cold.

You can be sure that delivery fees will more than cover whatever the cost of gas, the cost of the driver, and the time it takes employees to shop for you so you aren't likely saving money, but the extra you pay may still be worth the convenience.

Have you been careful about making sure that the prices you're charged when shopping online are the same as what's on the price tag on the shelves? Online shopping makes it extremely easy for companies to overcharge you based on what they think you're willing/able to pay and provides them with valuable data they can use to decide when/how much to raise their prices.

You can also run into problems where employees will select for lower quality produce, and about to expire foods that in-store shoppers will commonly pass over. It's nice that it means less food gets thrown away, but can also mean you can end up wasting your money buying food you can't or don't want to eat.

I've worked these 1099 grocery delivery gigs and you get paid around minimum wage to lug these very heavy orders of water and juice up stairs, all while adding miles to your own vehicle and bearing the full risk of injury because you're an independent contractor. I hope you tip them well at least.

You're describing what economists call multihoming. The antitrust question gp asks - which I think is relevant - is whether the combined entity would have excessive market power in the relevant labor market.

> They certainly have the power to

They tried that with WalmartPay. After about a decade, they gave up[1].

Consumers have a lot of agency. A lot of people get paid access to one of the other platforms by virtue of tie-ins with their mobile carrier, or bank, or whatever. There's low incentive to pay again to use Walmart's delivery service, which will not also bring delicious Thai food for lunch.

1 - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/21/walmart-to-finally-start-a...

Walmart asks me to sign up for their Prime equivalent every time I go on their website. I'm never going to do that.

I think a lot of businesses have adopted this. I've seen Papa John's orders on Roadie, but I'm sure they also use Uber Eats or DoorDash and their own in-house drivers.