The On-Demand Economy Apocalypse Is Not A Real Thing

On-demand services are becoming more popular.

For a year when I lived in West Oakland, the only times I saw my next door neighbor Chance, a programmer in his twenties, were when he would stand out on the curb waiting for his on-demand food delivery from SpoonRocket. Squinting from the sun, he’d burrow his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and stand still as a garden gnome until a car with a little red flag festooned to the roof pulled up.

He’d approach the car (which, rather than pulling over simply hit its brakes in the middle of the road) and pick up a container of food the delivery driver handed to him through the passenger side window. He’d then head back inside, presumably to code until dinnertime, when the process would repeat.

Chance didn’t leave the house much, despite the fact that he owned a brand-new sports car the color of that necklace the old lady throws into the ocean at the end of Titanic. Because it was moved so infrequently the car racked up parking tickets each week on Thursdays for street cleaning, the little paper envelopes growing into a pile on the windshield as weeks passed. I don’t think Chance cared.

I became fascinated with Chance’s eating habits, along with those of my downstairs neighbors — all techies who knew each other though the same programming “boot camp” school in San Francisco, which they attended to the tune of $20,000 for 12 weeks of study, before moving on to programming jobs garnering them over $100,000 annually. They had all, at different times, lived on powdered diet substitutes called Soylent, Space Nutrients (Tagline: “Stop cooking. Eat like Astronauts!) and also tried the Bulletproof Diet, which I understand is just coffee and butter. They talked about their values — efficiency and optimizing their time — the same way religious people talk about faith and purity. Drinking their food helped achieve these goals.

Once the novelty wore off though, they all came to the conclusion that real food was preferable to flavorless powdered concoctions, as long as it was delivered.

Enter SpoonRocket, which was the delivery service of choice for my neighbors, along with much of the Bay Area’s techie population. It was an on-demand food delivery company launched by two Berkeley grads who intended to provide healthy, cheap, and fast meals to young professionals. Rather than a lot of other delivery options like PostMates and DoorDash, which operate as middle-men delivering restaurant food (which — oopsie — kind of cheat restaurant employees out of their tips), SpoonRocket had chefs on staff to cook the meals. Customers could choose from a couple different options each day, and it took less than 10 minutes to get the food once the order was placed via smartphone.

Last year I interviewed SpoonRocket’s founder, Steven Hsiao for a story I was working on. He told me they’d recently taken a poll, which revealed that by far their largest client base was young professionals — the majority of them in the tech industry. Both men and women used the service pretty evenly, but “we know that heavy users are male.” He said it wasn’t uncommon for young men to order it daily. He talked about how many young programmers jump into time-consuming, demanding jobs right out of college and never learn to cook or “fend for themselves.” Some start-ups ordered SpoonRocket every single day, for lunch for their employees, he said.

The Uber Model, It Turns Out, Doesn’t Translate

When SpoonRocket folded in March, the announcement spurred a flurry of “on-demand apocalypse” predictions coming from everywhere from TechCrunch to the New York Times. The end of SpoonRocket, though, actually had more to do with so much competition in the on-demand food world and a resulting lack of funding than any lack of interest antisocial techies have in getting food delivered to them for every single meal of the day.

SpoonRocket went out of business, yes, but not because on-demand services are becoming less popular in San Francisco — it’s because on-demand services are becoming more popular.

Here’s the thing: In the tech world, it’s not just computer programs that are optimized and streamlined for maximum efficiency — it’s human lives. Namely, the lives of those who earn a programmer’s salary. There isn’t any intrinsic value in running errands, according to the Tech Mindset. Take, for example, the ads for TaskRabbit, which cover Bay Area public transportation stops and are clearly targeted at techies. They are all iterations of the same theme, represented by the company’s slogan: “We do chores. You live life.” There will be an ad that will say, like, “Run Errands,” but the word “Errands” will be crossed out and instead it will say, “In the Park.”

Taskrabbit ads in 16th Street bart

It means, you should be running in the park instead of running errands, because you deserve it. Running errands is annoying. Let someone else do it for you.

The on-demand food delivery market is flooded with companies such as Postmates, Instacart, DoorDash, Grubhub, Munchery, Caviar, Uber Eats, and Sprig (a direct competitor of SpoonRocket, which was cited in SpoonRocket’s closure announcement blog post as a primary reason for their shut-down). Many are expanding into other cities. Some business models are better than others, sure, and more companies are bound to go the way of SpoonRocket, but as long as there are techies who need to eat food (i.e. aren’t robots), there will be a demand for on-demand food delivery services.

Georgia Perry is a freelance writer based in Oakland, California. A former staff writer for the Santa Cruz Weekly, she has written for The Atlantic, Vice, and Reductress, among other outlets. Follow her on Twitter @georguhperry or see more of her work here.

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