Giving in to convenience
It started with the eggs.
After a few snowy days of spotty bananas loitering on the counter setting off a binge of banana bread baking, I decided to start breakfast and found the eggs were gone. This presented a hardship, not just for me and my two-eggs-and-tomatoes breakfast, but also for Fippy the elderly dog; he’s grown picky enough to eschew his kibble unless I add some scrambled eggs.
And so started my love affair with Instacart. I think I was the last holdout, but there I was.
Having lived through the pandemic like the rest of us, I was aware of the grocery delivery service that allows shoppers to select and pay for an order online and then have it deposited on the front stoop within a few hours. While my children, and many friends, were going that route to avoid COVID, I did things the hard way, donning my mask and heading into the stores. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to pay for the convenience; I just didn’t trust someone else to select the best-looking strawberries.
In the years since, Instacart and other delivery services have become even faster. Over the holiday, my daughter was headed here to do laundry, and called to ask if I had detergent.
“Probably enough to get you through,” I said.
“I’ll just Instacart some to your house,” she said.
Wait…what? She would pass four stores between there and here and could run in to buy some. But the convenience is so tempting.
I’ve come to loathe driving in the snow. Up here on Mt. Crumpit, things are windier and colder and get icy before the land down below. I decided not to drive down there to the store. And without eggs, Fippy and I might starve for lack of protein. And so the last of my resistance dissolved, and I logged in.
On my computer screen, the contents of a large grocery store rolled out before my eyes. I was strolling through the aisles without having to walk or push a cart. I’d make one selection and then a whole page of similar, better or less healthy things would be revealed. With just a click of the mouse an item I would never reach for in the store could land in my virtual cart. This was too easy.
As someone who is not an adventurous cook, I tend to buy the same 20 things every time I go to the store. Unless I’m cooking for friends or my kids, I mostly eat the same things every day. My weekly trip to the store takes me 20 minutes, tops, because I know exactly what I need and where it’s located. I’m not easily distracted by the cookie or the ice cream aisle. I just keep rolling past.
But then the moose track ice cream appeared on my screen, and I thought about the creamy-crunchy texture of that. Deluding myself, I told myself I wouldn’t have to eat much, just keep it in the freezer and have a spoonful now and again. I swear, that ice cream popped itself into my cart.
The grocery stores are good at this. They put the stuff they really want to sell at the ends of aisles in the store. Online, the items seem follow us around.
I removed the ice cream from my cart, honest I did. I totaled up the other 10 or so items. I paid, added a 20% tip for the shopper and then waited. Two hours later the bags were on my porch.
The strawberries were as nice as I would have picked. And the eggs? They were there, too.