An Order of Magnitude

Back in the early days of the web, a remarkable service launched. It was called Kozmo. You could go online and order a few movies and several snacks, and a little while later a bike messenger would knock on your door and hand over your items. Just like that, without leaving your pot-smoke filled apartment, you’d be eating and watching. My wife and I used to look out our window and giggle in disbelief as the messenger approached. Aside from our children being born, these were the greatest deliveries of our lives. Of course, today, home delivery has grown by orders of magnitude and an entire industry has been built to order to convey your every need from anywhere to your front stoop. Your power to issue orders is limitless. “An entire commercial mechanism will have whirred to life the moment you clicked ‘Place order,’ one that is part of an industry that barely existed 15 years ago but now brings in tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually.” While Kozmo deliveries occasionally changed an evening, modern delivery has changed the entire restaurant industry, and more. “The fanciest, most famous restaurants are still doing mostly table service, but just about every other establishment has been conscripted into the army that ferries hot food out of professional kitchens and into American mouths 24 hours a day, 365 days a year … In effect, delivery has reversed the flow of eaters to food, and remade a shared experience into a much more individual one. If communities used to clench like a fist around their restaurants, now they look more like an open palm, fingers stretched out as far as possible, or at least to the edge of the delivery radius.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Innovation That’s Killing Restaurant Culture. “Convenience is like sex: Once you’ve had it, it’s hard to forget how good it is to have it.” (Funny, it seems like I had a lot more convenience back in the Kozmo era…)