My lunches would be much more interesting. Fancy some sushi? Why not teleport to a Tokyo food market?
Because at your lunch time they’re all closed?
As somebody upthread already said, darn near any popular spot would turn into a 24-hour operation to accommodate all the people flitting in from across the globe at locally inconvenient times of day.
OTOH, if power / compute consumption was proportional to transmission distance it might be affordably cheap to transport across town, but insanely expensive (i.e. 1000x) to transport halfway across the globe.
I might spend $8 to transport out from my downtown office to my favorite sushi joint in the 'burbs. I’m not gonna spend $8000 to transport to Tokyo.
Why? If such a technology existed, it would be very, very expensive. For the first many years I’d imagine only the top 5% of wealthy Americans, Europeans etc. could afford to use it, and Syria might be lucky to have one in the whole country.
An unforeseen consequence would likely be accidental pregnancy if they try transporting groups and there were any reassembly glitches. Try explaining to your husband or wife that you didn’t cheat, the machine just made hash of you and your travel companions’ DNA!
Because the place will be so crowded that no one goes there any more.
Great username / thread topic / post content combo!
A Trifecta of coolitude! 
I’m taking out the neighborhood creep before he gets into my teenage daughter’s bedroom. Or the shower with my wife. And before cameras are left by the area pedophile.
You guys aren’t even thinking big picture. You’ve got to think economics.
Industries - and therefore employment - destroyed by cheap & easy teleporters:
- Transportation of all kinds. Airlines, trucking, cabs, Uber, ferries.
- Manufacturing. Car manufacturing is out, ditto for aircraft and such. Plus all the firms that service those - engineering, safety inspection and so forth.
- Extraction. Why drill for oil when your biggest users aren’t buying anymore? Ditto any form of mining. Why dig when you can just teleport it out?
- Infrastructure. Why maintain roads, bridges and so forth when no one’s using them?
Total extra unemployed? Hundreds of millions? A billion? Depends on how far the Magnificent Depression spreads.
Industries that would benefit:
- Tourism. Anyone, anywhere could hit the Grand Canyon on ten minutes notice.
- Crowd control. See above.
- Real estate outside of major cities. Why live in some crappy walk-up in Brooklyn when you work in Manhattan? Live in Wyoming and get to work on time every time. Corollary: People would stop complaining about rents in NYC, London and SF and such because those prices would collapse.
I agree with all that I’ve snipped out. But IMO #3 would play out differently.
Folks still want to *be *in cities for the work, the money, the action, the energy, the vibe. What they no longer need to do is *sleep *in or near those cities. So yes, residential rents & condo prices on, e.g., Manhattan will collapse.
At the same time everybody everywhere in the English speaking world (plus a lot of Chinese tourists) will want to take in a Broadway show & drink at a well known watering hole. So there’s going to be an explosion of demand for that stuff to grow and expand at the same time as residential demand collapses.
Net, net, real estate in desirable locations will do just fine. It’ll be repurposed, but it’ll still be valuable. It wasn’t that long ago that lower Manhattan was full of sweatshop factories.
What’ll suffer and may not recover in a single lifetime is the now-expensive distant outer suburbs. e.g. semi-rural New Jersey or CT in the context of NYC. Those will become ghost towns and it’s implausible that even the combined worldwide population of transporter-enabled day trippers will grow NYC proper out to encompass Parsippany, Peekskill, or Stamford.
But it’s highly dependent on the exact cost of the transporter. Yes, if you can transport from Wyoming to Tokyo cheaper than you can take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, then bedroom communities near big cities collapse. But there’s a price point where transporters are cheaper than flying, but still cost more than the average person wants to spend on their daily commute. Then you get a steep economic stratification–people who need to live near to their work, and the elite who just pay to travel by wormhole. The elite live in various isolated places all over the world, and the working stiffs still have to cram into shitty apartments.
Same thing with shipping. Wormhole might be cheaper than air freight, but still more expensive than container ship.
Any sort of “biofilters” or “replicators” just means that we now have the ability to scan and print and edit matter on the atomic level, and it only takes a few seconds. The implications of this are much, much greater than mere transportation. Yeah, you can travel from Brussels to Quito in 30 seconds. We could also just make a duplicate of you at Quito, and not bother to disintegrate the version of you in Brussels. If we can filter out micro-organisms, then the version of you that emerges from the transporter on the other end could be anything. Of course, if we disintegrate you in Brussels, and an Eldritch Abomination appears in Quito, then maybe we haven’t turned you into an Eldritch Abomination after all. Maybe we just disintegrated you and built ourselves an Eldritch Abomination. How close does the thing that steps off the platform in Quito have to resemble you to count as you? Does just remembering being you count as close enough?
Unanticipated results? hhmm Perhaps smelly puddles or piles on the pad after first-timers tried TPing?
To further complicate things, the entire concept of cities becomes questioned.
Cities exist where they are - largely - due to geography. Ports, rivers, whatnot control where people settled and how industry developed. But with teleportation - if it’s cheap enough - such problems become moot. Why the hell put your trendy boutique in Charleston when it could be located anywhere and save money on rent? Why put your manufacturing near the dock in NYC when you don’t have to ship anything?
Now, cities get momentum, certainly. It wouldn’t change overnight. But the rollout of cheap and reliable teleportation will spell the death knell of large cities as a whole.
If everyone has an independent transporter that beams you anywhere, site-to-site on star trek, you could have issues with people trying to occupy the same space.
Who says you have to go there? Just have the food delivered.
As it was writ in The Hitchhiker’s Guide: