How Long People Wait For Food Delivery Before Losing Their Patience

It won't come as a surprise to anyone who's ever worked in the service industry that (wow) many customers become inexplicably impatient. Something almost full-moon-effect seems to happen to otherwise level-headed adults when they're waiting for their food. So, waiting at home would remedy the issue somewhat...right? To a degree. When it comes to food delivery, modern consumers start losing their patience around the 30 minute mark.

A late 2024 study by Talker Research surveyed 2,000 American adults and concluded that "[I]f the restaurant is within a 10-mile radius [from their house], they start to get impatient within just 29 minutes." Perhaps notably, 29 minutes is also the amount of time that respondents said it should take them to prepare a complete meal at home. The stunted patience trend doesn't just apply to delivery, either. According to the study, 21% of U.S. adults are unwilling to wait longer than 10 minutes to be seated at a busy restaurant. Within 17 minutes of sitting down, said respondents, restaurants should have their food on the table, or they begin getting restless. 

Lengthy wait times aren't a new issue for the food delivery industry. In 2023, fast-food pizza chains like Domino's and Pizza Hut faced staffing shortages, which led to significantly increased customer wait times for pizza delivery. Still, a less-than-hot pizza is fixable. There are ultimately some foods you should just never get delivered, like fries and nachos (which are liable to be soggy and tepid by the time they actually arrive).

In one Reddit thread, most responses agree that 30 minutes is (or should be) the standard window for food orders to arrive. "For delivery, anything over 30 minutes pushes my limits," writes one of the top comments. "At that point I may as well just go pick it up." Another study by marketing firm Mail Shark echoes these findings, with 50% of respondents saying that 30 minutes was the maximum acceptable wait time. Longer waits and subsequent consumer frustration can be particularly harmful for third-party app-based food delivery drivers, who often rely on customer tips to make a livable wage. This is part of the reason why, in 2023, New York raised its minimum wage for delivery drivers to $17.96. In 2025, that number climbed even higher.

It's worth noting that some things are worse than sitting in one's own living room for 15 extra minutes. Food delivery drivers currently have one of the highest workplace mortality rates in modern America. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a food delivery driver is more likely to suffer injury or death on the job than a police officer. California-based law firm Hanning & Sachetto names assault, robbery, and traffic-related incidents as drivers' leading occupational threats. App-based drivers are also often rewarded for cranking out more deliveries within a shorter window of time, encouraging faster driving or risky, reckless e-bike riding in congested cities.

The "food delivery takes too long" debacle is more complex than selfish consumers or careless industry workers. Consumers aren't entirely to blame for their impatience, and drivers aren't to blame for delayed orders. As folks interact increasingly in the digital realm, human attention spans are shrinking. Have you recently complained to a friend that you don't read as much as you used to? In a charming recent colloquialism, Gen Zs and Millennials have been not-so-jokingly referring to themselves as "iPad babies," referring to a technology-induced inability to focus for prolonged periods without losing interest.

Dr. Gloria Mark of the University of California Irvine appeared on the American Psychological Association's "Speaking of Psychology" podcast to elaborate. In 2012, the average human attention span on any screen was 75 seconds. Over the following decade, it shortened to 47 seconds on average. As Mark explains, "We find in our research a correlation between frequency of attention switching and stress. So the faster the attention switching occurs, stress is measured by people wearing heart rate monitors. We show that stress goes up." If an order shows up late, that neurological stress and subsequent discomfort are liable to express themselves in the form of misplaced frustration at the driver, or a vow to never order from a specific restaurant ever again. Expecting digital-age gratification speed from food delivery erases and ultimately devalues the essential human component of the equation.