Technology + A Need for Convenience = Easy Food

Online shopping is not something new. It's become common practice to order anything you can find online: clothing, gadgets, cheese sandwhiches that look like the virgin mary, ect. In this process, you usually get your item a few days later in all its shipped and handled glory. But now, as technology progresses, you can get your favorite food items fast and easy by ordering online.

Now, this isn't a very common practice. The idea of getting food online is still a little wacky unless you're ordering a gift basket. Right? Then why is there an entire section of Amazon (my favorite internet mall) devoted to grocery? This isn't just gift baskets. There's everything from cereal and coffee to a can of kipper snacks and boxed milk. The question of why order things online has always been there. Most of the time, its because you're looking for something uncommon online, something that would be very difficult to find in a real store. But we're talking food here. Unless you're ordering canned alligator or something, I really don't see the point in having to find it online. Is the grocery store such a confusing madhouse that you have to have an easy to use search box, pretty picture, product review, and price comparison to get your bag of cheesey poofs?

But that's grocery. Let's take a look at classic, speedy delivery, such as what you get with pizza and chinese takeout. The best general site I could find was campusfood.com, catering to those hungry, lazy college students. You just go online, enter your location, and are supplied with a list of local restaraunts ready to deliver your cookies, onion fries, hot wings, lo mein, and/or pizza within an hour or so. You can even text message your order! Example: let's say you're down in Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama, and you decide to order some food online. You can find the pizza place listed in your area, and specifically order a hoagie with lettuce, tomato, but no peppers, and have a small pizza with the left half green olives and the right half black olives. Which makes me wonder... are they really going to honor that? I mean, who cares which half your dang olives are on? The pizza's a circle, just flip it over!

So I found an experiment on a blog about this very thing. In this experiment, two pizzas were carefully planned out and ordered off of the Domino's website. Were they honored? Read to find out.

I guess my big question is: does ordering food online go too far? Have we slipped so far into the black hole of the internet that we can't even go to the grocery store? We can't even pick up a phone to order anymore. And why do we need our pizza toppings so perfectly distributed?