The internet reveals the peak time for ordering pizza
When is the most popular time for ordering pizza, Chinese food, or other forms of takeout? You might think there's no set answer, but it turns out that wherever you are in the world there’s a particular time when most people think about getting food.
Actually, that’s not completely true. There are two times.
Academics from the University of Aberdeen studied when people go online to look for food, across the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and India, and found that people in each of those places have pretty much the same habits.
The researchers discovered that people look to order takeout at 7pm, with a second spike appearing at 2am. And these times aren’t only consistent across geographic locations, but also across seasons.
Nicolas Scrutton Alvarado and Tyler J. Stevenson from the School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, analyzed Google searches to come to their conclusions which they say shows how "foraging" behavior appears to have switched online.
"Successful foraging behavior has been favored by natural selection, which shaped innate, species-specific decision rules that maximize energy gain," Alvarado and Stevenson write in the journal Royal Society Open Science. "Across the animal kingdom, predator-prey interactions have resulted in several decisions that attempt to optimise the energetic gain per unit of time."
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