THE MORNING RANT: Musings on the Door Dash Lifestyle; Dave Barry Takes a Waymo Ride

I may not understand the “Door Dash Lifestyle,” and I certainly don’t live it, but it’s still fascinating to me. On the one hand I am horrified at the Door Dash business model and its use of illegal, off-the-books labor. At the same time, I am mystified at its customers’ spending habits, especially when we hear of the financial squeeze those same consumers are under in regards to housing, inflation, etc. From DoorDash’s own website, half of its customers have household income below $75,000 per year, and 33% of its customers are in households with income below $50,000.

So, today’s post has a few quick items related to the Door Dash / food delivery industry, including a little bit of humor. But first, here is a link to my initial Door Dash piece from three months ago titled “Behind the Restaurant Meal Delivery Industry, there is a Black Market Exploiting Illegal Foreign Labor.” In it I documented that, “If you are having restaurant food ‘dashed’ to your residence, there is a very good chance that the person delivering your meal is part of a black market of non-citizen labor, illegally subcontracted by the actual ‘independent contractor’ of Door Dash, Uber Eats, and the like.”

Meanwhile, a new revenue source other than food delivery has opened up for DoorDash drivers: “Waymo Is Paying DoorDash Gig Workers to Close its Robotaxi Doors” [CNBC – 02/12/2026]

Waymo’s cars are driven without humans. But when a departing passenger leaves a door open, the car won’t move until a person closes it. For that task, Waymo is turning to gig workers from companies like DoorDash.

The [Google]-owned self-driving car company confirmed on Thursday that it’s running a pilot in Atlanta to compensate delivery drivers for closing Waymo doors that are left ajar. DoorDash drivers are notified when a Waymo in the area has an open door so the vehicles can quickly get back on the road.

Chris Bakke sees a humorous way for DoorDash to lean in to this new revenue stream, stating that “If I ran growth at Doordash, I would pay Doordashers $5 to open doors on random Waymos so that Waymo has to hire our Dashers to close them for $6.25.” Per the Reddit post below, Waymo is actually paying DoorDashers $11.25 to close doors.

Irrespective of the door-closing opportunity, the demand for “dashed” food is growing: “DoorDash sees strong quarterly growth in sales and orders but warns of big costs” [Seattle Times – 2/18/2026]

DoorDash said Wednesday its revenue rose 38% in the fourth quarter as it gained new U.S. customers and added new services like restaurant reservations.

As inexplicable as it is to me why someone would want cold restaurant food delivered for twice the price of eating at the restaurant, or picking it up myself, I did read an explanation on “The DoorDash Lifestyle” from someone named “SightBringer” on Twitter/X that helps me see it in a different light:

The “DoorDash lifestyle” is an artifact of three massive structural shifts older generations don’t see because they didn’t grow up inside them. Let’s break the illusion.

1. The marginal cost of money changed for Gen Z. For older adults, spending thirty dollars feels like spending thirty dollars. For kids today, the psychological cost is closer to: “three microtransactions worth of friction.”

Because their financial environment is built on:
• Instant digital payments
• Low-commitment gig incomes
• Parents transferring money fluidly
• Side hustles paid in irregular small bursts
• Stimulus-era normalization of cash flow volatility.

Teenagers today often have:
• $30 now
• $0 tomorrow
• $50 on Friday
• $15 in crypto
• $70 in Cash App from someone they did homework for
• A $20 Venmo from grandma
• $60 from a weekend shift.

There is no “budget.” There is flow. And in a flow economy, a $30 DoorDash order is not a “luxury”. It is just another digital outflow in a stream of constant micro inflows.

2. Consumption is now social currency. Older generations spent money to solve problems. Gen Z spends money to signal identity, reduce friction, and avoid emotional drag.

DoorDash is not about food. It is about:
• Eliminating effort
• Eliminating planning
• Eliminating discomfort
• Eliminating logistics
• Eliminating decision fatigue

This generation pays premiums to remove negative psychic load. Food delivery is an anxiety-management subscription. And they learned this from:
• Amazon Prime
• Uber
• TikTok dopamine tuning
• Frictionless apps
• The collapse of effort-based value signals.

Convenience is the default baseline now.

3. The middle class collapsed, but lifestyle costs decoupled from income. This is the part most boomers and Gen X don’t understand. Kids aren’t behaving like they’re poor. They’re behaving like people living in a post-middle-class economy where:
• Ownership is dead
• Savings are pointless
• Buying a home is impossible
• College is a debt sentence
• Inflation destroys the dollar
• Wages do not map to adult milestones
• Upward mobility is gone

So what happens? They shift to a present-maximization mindset. If the future is unaffordable anyway, why not buy the burrito now? Younger people are not reckless. They are rational inside a broken incentive system. The real truth - DoorDash is a symptom.

A society where:
• Future stability is gone
• Wages stagnate
• Housing is unattainable
• Attention is fragmented
• Convenience is normalized
• Friction feels archaic
• Everything is mediated digitally
…will produce kids who treat $30 like a tap on a screen, not a financial decision. They’re not “funding a lifestyle.” They’re surviving inside the economy they were handed.

That is eye-opening and educational, although I don’t necessarily agree with everything stated here. When I got my first job after college in the late ‘80s, I also couldn’t fathom ever being able to buy a house, much less enjoying constant travel to destination weddings and bachelor parties as is common today. I imagined how much more lifestyle flexibility I’d have if I just made $100 more per month, which is about $300 in 2026 dollars. But neither was I serving a lifetime “college debt sentence.” (That is a brilliant phrase.) I was seeking to avoid debt, not resigning myself to a lifetime of suffocating debt inflicted by my alma mater.

Following that somber note, here is something related to today’s topic that is a little more light-hearted. Dave Barry wrote a recent piece at his Substack about his first Waymo experience:

I will reveal later whether or not I survived, but first let me give you a technical explanation of how these amazing futuristic machines work.

Each Waymo vehicle is equipped with 29 cameras as well as an array of laser, radar and audio sensors, which collect literally millions of data points per second and feed them to a sophisticated AI-controlled onboard computer, which is in constant, instantaneous contact via satellite with a 14-year-old boy somewhere in Asia — he goes by “Kevin” — who steers your car remotely with a joystick.

No, that’s probably not how it works. I have no idea how it works. I do not fully understand how toasters work. But however Waymo does it, it has to be a better system for operating vehicles than the one we currently employ in Miami, which involves using Miami drivers.

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My point is that I, for one, welcome the arrival of Waymo’s self-driving cars. Even if they’re not perfect — even if there’s some “glitch” in their software that causes them, at random times, to deliberately aim at pedestrians or oncoming trucks — they would still be above-average drivers in Miami.

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It worked its way through heavy traffic, negotiated some clogged narrow streets and got me efficiently to my destination without hitting anything. My only criticism is that it’s too polite for Miami. At one point, another car cut us off, and the Waymo merely braked to avoid a collision without making any effort to let the other motorist know that he was an idiot.

I’m a self-driving car skeptic. When Waymo hits my town, I have some mischievous ideas about summoning Waymo up the switchback mountain roads with blind, hairpin turns around Chattanooga. And if Waymo successfully gets me up and back down the mountain, I’m willing to cut a deal with DoorDash to let them close the door behind me.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:32 AM

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