The Story: The Death of Dining In
TechStuff
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does the death of restaurants look like? Ellen Cushing, staff writer for The Atlantic, joins Karah to talk about the rise of delivery apps and the fall of the in-person dining experience. They discuss how delivery apps became part of the millennial lifestyle subsidy, how they reshaped what’s on the menu, and why this feels all too similar to what’s happening to movie theaters.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.0 | Welcome to Tech Stuff. |
| 0:19.0 | I'm Kara Price here with Oz Voloshin. Hey, Oz. Hey, Kara. So I want to tell you a story about young me. |
| 0:27.6 | Okay. I grew up in New York and growing up, we lived in this small apartment and we had this little play kitchen for me. |
| 0:36.2 | Yeah. And of course, like it had all the fixings, but I guess because |
| 0:40.4 | it was a New York play kitchen, it had a telephone in it. So I was sort of playing at making |
| 0:47.8 | dinner for my family. And my parents recall this story of me going into the kitchen and picking up the phone and calling for |
| 0:58.3 | Chinese takeout. That was you making dinner in the playhouse. Exactly, exactly right. |
| 1:04.3 | Were your parents embarrassed or were they like she's, the apple does not fall far from the tree. |
| 1:09.3 | There are things that I said as a kid that they embarrassed them. That was not one of the things because the truth is that we mimic our parents' behavior and that's what my parents did. They ordered in. So there's a reason that I've told you this story. I recently talked to Ellen Cushing, who's a staff writer at the Atlantic, who primarily writes about food and food trends. And she shared with me |
| 1:28.9 | this kind of pun intended hot take. I think that delivery and what delivery apps have done to |
| 1:37.3 | restaurants is the single biggest change in food, basically since I've been alive? |
| 1:49.9 | I actually have some more firsthand observations about this because my stepfather owns a restaurant in London and I watched firsthand the delivery DoorDash Uber Eatsification of his |
| 1:57.8 | restaurant. He was actually a pioneer of doing high-quality restaurant food delivery |
| 2:02.5 | for an Italian restaurant in London in the kind of mid-2000s. And then these tech platforms |
| 2:07.7 | came along and it went from quite a significant share of the business back down to a very small |
| 2:14.1 | share because the margins they take are so much that it's basically not worth |
| 2:17.6 | it's not really worth doing unless your business is totally optimized for it. |
| 2:21.7 | Yeah, I think it's something that if like you've ever been to a restaurant, you obviously |
| 2:25.8 | think about. But I wanted to talk to Ellen because she demystified the sort of how and why |
| 2:30.7 | delivery apps have overtaken the food industry. And actually, like, what really struck me about our conversation |
... |
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