[Insert burrito financing joke]

DoorDash’s buy-now-pay-later deal with Klarna revives an important question: Is food delivery a luxury or necessity?

(Photo Illustration by Emily Dulla/Getty Images for DoorDash)

On Thursday, DoorDash announced a partnership with payments company Klarna, which lets customers pay for purchases — now including orders placed on DoorDash — in installments. By Monday morning, I found a host of jokes about financing burritos and taking loans for pizza delivery in my inbox and group chats. (Hi, Dave.)

It was an easy announcement to mock, especially considering the recent “burrito taxi discourse,” as coined by Garbage Day. The gist: it is not fair to complain about the slight inconveniences involved in food delivery if you’re literally calling a taxi to deliver your burrito, a move that maps directly to a perceived culture of entitlement and unreasonable demands on service workers.

Klarna eventually clarified that its installment plan, dubbed “pay in 4” will not be available for orders under $35, still a low threshold where inflation and high operational costs are pushing food costs — especially food costs for delivery — to new highs.

But all of this reignites a fundamental question about deliveries, long considered a convenient luxury: Are they instead a need? And could the sort of buy-now-pay-later option DoorDash plans to offer its customers become helpful enough to move the needle toward more accessible food for those who need it?

Several United States Senators tried to tackle the high cost of delivery last spring.