As they rush to eliminate effort from all walks of life, tech companies, including Uber, are now betting we'll soon be too lazy to order our own takeout. And the early signs are they might be right.
British start-up Delivery Hero is pumping money into a big advertising campaign – featuring large ads on several of Melbourne's trams – in an effort to open up a local market for a service that is already booming overseas.
"The way that apps, tech and ecommerce companies have educated us – brainwashed us – we want everything now," Levi Aron, a local running a similar start-up, says.
The theory goes something like this: for today's young consumer, calling up the local restaurant and ordering a steaming plastic container of nosh delivered to your door, stat, is far too hard. It's a sector ripe for disruption.
"We're a conduit," is how Delivery Hero chief executive Clive Thorpe described his business to Fairfax Media.
"It's built on the consumer. While they are sitting in their pyjamas on their couch ... they go [on the app] and look and see what takeaways deliver in their area.
"We will take orders and then we relay them electronically to the restaurants who join us, they cook the food and deliver it to the customers, simple as that.
"The old way of doing it is you'd get a load of old takeaway menus put though your door. You're unsure if they are quality. Because of the language barriers you might not be able to get your order away. You might not be too good at maths and adding up."
Orders from Delivery Hero cost exactly the same as they would when takeout is ordered from a store, with the start-up taking a cut of the restaurant's profit.
Restaurant and Catering Australia chief executive John Hart believes the sector is likely to boom in the coming years on the back of existing trends towards strong growth in the high-quality takeaway food sector.
"The time is right," he told Fairfax Media.
"There's a significant interest in having a high-quality offering that you can have at home."
Mr Hart said Delivery Hero's real killer feature was improving the efficiency of the restaurant trade by centralising the booking services of thousands of restaurants. The sector's entire booking infrastructure was disorganised, inefficient and costly, Mr Hart said, and was ripe for disruption.
"If there's any sector that this thing is going to work in it's our market."
Delivery Hero is the big player, with significant start-up capital behind it – although they have actually been quietly operating in Australia since 2011, building up a database of participating restaurants.
But there are already several local players, and one even bigger international circling.
Mr Aron is general manager at local start-up Yumtable, which launched in October last year. Yumtable have already signed up 2000 restaurants for a service that allows users to instantly reserve a table anywhere at any time.
"People these days have changed the way they behave when it comes to restaurant bookings," he says.
"In the past we used to book a week in advance, two weeks in advance, be quite organised that way.
"You want a car now, you press for an Uber and an Uber comes. It's all becoming quite instant."
Mr Aron is keen to trumpet a deal Yumtable recently signed with Uber. Users of Yumtable will now be given the option to automatically book an Uber to deliver them to their restaurant reservation exactly on time, with the app's GPS sensor and algorithms left to take care of all the logistics.
But Mr Aron may end up seeing Uber as much a foe as a friend.
Uber has begun rolling out a food delivery service of its own, currently available in LA and Barcelona. The taxi-disrupting company offers brunch, lunch and dinner options from a carefully curated menu of the city's coolest restaurants, all with the promise of a 10-minute delivery time.
David Rohrsheim, general manager of Uber Australia, said the company had no current plans to roll the service out to Melbourne.
"We have many experiments around the world ... when they are successful that means we can roll them out to other cities
"We're always asking what else would you like on demand in five minutes or less."
