The Thai place on Division has had online ordering since 2017. I know because I used it exactly once, in 2017, and then went back to phoning in my order like someone raised by wolves. In April I opened that same page for the first time in three years. It looked identical. Same layout, same photograph of the same larb, same slightly broken dropdown for spice level. Nothing about it had improved. The only thing that had changed was that now everyone in Southeast Portland was using it.
Nothing was invented this spring. Something was permitted.
This is the part of the story the trade press keeps getting wrong. Everyone has now run some version of 'the pandemic accelerated digital transformation by five years,' and the phrasing implies a technology arrived. It did not. Contactless payment has been sitting in American wallets since 2008. Curbside pickup is older than that. Telemedicine had regulatory approval and almost no patients. QR codes were a punchline for a decade, and the technology did not change one bit between the punchline and the comeback.
The barrier was never technical. It was that adopting any of it required someone inside the company to spend political capital arguing for a change no customer was demanding, and in March that argument stopped needing to be made.
I have sat in the meetings where these projects die. The proposal is sound, the vendor is fine, the cost is real but manageable, and then someone senior asks who exactly is asking for this, and the room has no answer, and it goes into the folder where projects go. That question had a right answer for one spring. It will not have one for long.
So the strategic question for the back half of this year is not how fast you can build. It is which of these behaviours survive contact with normal life. Some will. Grocery pickup solves a problem that existed before any of this and will exist after, which is that nobody enjoys the store with a toddler. Contactless payment is simply better than the alternative and always was. Those stick.
Others are hostages. Nobody prefers a QR code menu. Nobody has ever wished their doctor were more pixelated. Those behaviours are being tolerated, not adopted, and the brands reading tolerance as preference are going to build next year's roadmap on a foundation that evaporates the week it is safe to hand someone a laminated menu.
Those behaviours are being tolerated, not adopted, and the brands reading tolerance as preference are going to build next year's roadmap on a foundation that evaporates the week it is safe to hand someone a laminated menu.
Truffles has adapted to none of it. She has the same three demands she had in February and she makes them at the same volume, at the same hour, with the same total indifference to whether any of this is permanent. There is something clarifying about that.