> Imagine you're a customer and you're faced with choosing to buy directly from the restaurant (for $24 a pizza) or order through DoorDash (for $16 a pizza).
It's worse than that. The pizza company appears on the web for delivery with a $16 pizza. They come in to the pizza place and get charged $24 and that's a customer negative experience. The pizza company adds delivery to their service and chases off Door Dash, and now it looks like they've raised prices by $8 (and meanwhile other pizza places in the area that are getting undercut with $16 pizzas from door dash means that the pizza company isn't getting business to be able to support the delivery drivers).
Restaurants can have different prices for delivery, pick up or dine-in, and this predates delivery apps. There can be many reasons.
Some places actually charge less when you are ordering takeaway (because their costs are less because they don't have the costs of service or rent), and some charge more (like +1 USD per box).
If the restaurant has a prime location, it makes sense that if you don't use their seats / toilets / dining room / service that you don't have to pay for it.
Thinking further, why do takeaway people have to pay for the shiny location ?
Every time I eat a pizza, I sponsor the nice terrace dinner of someone else in front of the Eiffel Tower.
But I don't want the Eiffel Tower view, the pizza could be baked in a factory (dark kitchen) I'd be fine with it.
In general, how did we get to this point that it is more expensive to order takeaway food from a restaurant than if you cooked the food by yourself ?
Scale is supposed to bring the price down, not up.
The more quantities of a food is produced, the less expensive it is per item.
Popular restaurants run like factories, the 11th or the 271th baked salmon is going to be the same.
By logic it should be considerably cheaper to produce 10'000 pizza (this is 30 per day) using professional ingredients and optimised processes than baking your own pizza at home.
We got to this point of 5 USD for a beer + 20 USD for a very generic pizza in a dark kitchen.
What's wrong with that ?
Everything.
Part of the solution could be delivery companies offering their own drinks selection and restaurants opening more takeaway-only businesses (hence, more efficient).
> In general, how did we get to this point that it is more expensive to order takeaway food from a restaurant than if you cooked the food by yourself ?*
Because it costs more for the restaurant to make it. I'm not sure where you are getting "how did we get to this point" -- this has always been the case. The restaurant not only has to pay for the cost of the ingredients, they have to pay to store those ingredients, pay for someone to assemble and cook the final dish, someone to take orders, payment processing, real estate, electricity/gas, insurance, business fees, accounting, and all that. And that's just for takeout; add dine-in or delivery and costs go up even further.
When you cook yourself, you only pay for the ingredients. We don't think about the electricity/gas costs for refrigeration or cooking, or that the space in our home for our kitchen and pantry costs us money in home purchase price or rent. The main place the restaurant "wins" here is that their cost of ingredients is probably lower because of their scale.
> By logic it should be considerably cheaper to produce 10'000 pizza (this is 30 per day) using professional ingredients and optimised processes than baking your own pizza at home.
If you only consider the cost of ingredients, then yes, that's true.
It's worse than that. The pizza company appears on the web for delivery with a $16 pizza. They come in to the pizza place and get charged $24 and that's a customer negative experience. The pizza company adds delivery to their service and chases off Door Dash, and now it looks like they've raised prices by $8 (and meanwhile other pizza places in the area that are getting undercut with $16 pizzas from door dash means that the pizza company isn't getting business to be able to support the delivery drivers).