Yes, I can get a can of chickpeas brought to my door in moments. But what have I lost?
Iremember very clearly my first pineapple on ice at a corner deli in New York. It was on the northeast corner of Columbus and 57th Street, a sprawling store front spilling flowers and fresh produce that, along with the diner next door,stayed open all night. There is pineapple in London, and 24-hour shops, but this was different. In the first flush of enthusiasm for my new city, everything about that deli seemed outlandishly great. Abundance! Convenience! Pineapple, freshly cut and packaged on ice! I might as well have arrived from somewhere still under rationing.
Fifteen years later and the city has changed. (I have, too. I would never buy cut fruit from a deli these days; I’m far too fussy about whether the prep area meets food safety standards.) Corner delis remain, but under pain of competition from a new generation of delivery alternatives that make getting up off the sofa to walk half a block for some milk seem like Captain Oates striking out on the ice floe. And it’s not only Instacart and FreshDirect, with their lumbering two-hour delivery windows. It’s the new fleet of bike-enabled apps – among them GoPuff and Getir – that promise to deliver any item within 15 minutes.
This kind of service is referred to as the “instant needs” market, a misnomer that, given the hyperbole of startups, one should at least admire for resisting the word “emergency”. One ingredient down for your stew? No need to turn off your stove and put on your shoes! Instead, for a nominal fee, order a person to your door bearing a single can of chickpeas. One of these services – which has already gone bust in the face of so many others in New York – was branded Fridge No More, but might as well have been called Legs No More and been done with it.
The decadence of these services, and their reversal of the ethos of the bulk-buying years during which, it seemed to many of us, it was a good idea to get in 75 cans of chickpeas while we could, are changing cities at the level of landscape. In the US, hyper-fast delivery has sprung into a multibillion dollar business that is spreading, via companies such as Gorillas and Weezy, to the UK. It means more bikes on the street, tearing at breakneck speed to make tiny delivery windows. It means large areas of real estate being turned over to so-called “dark stores”, centrally located mini-warehouses that you walk past every day on your way back from the subway, but can only buy from via an app once you’re home.
The threat to New York’s iconic delis remains indistinct. In Britain, corner shops have gone into partnership with some of the rapid delivery services such as Deliveroo to survive the drop in trade. In the US, this seems not to be happening; most of the hyper-fast delivery services in New York won’t deliver from local delis. And yet, despite witnessing nearly every shade of business, from diners, to bookshops and even banks close their doors over the last 10 years, only the New York delis, with their mysterious economics and even more mysterious single-brown-snacksin-cellophane at the counter, remain largely untouched.
Still, the pressure must be intense. Mission creep from companies such as UberEats, which won’t just deliver your curry, but will go to the 7-Eleven or the pharmacy for you en route to delivering your curry, is extensive. Our own expectations are changing as the Overton window (for laziness) expands. Just as reliance on satnav destroyed our ability to remember directions, read maps, or know where we are or where we’re going, so instant delivery is, one assumes, making us slightly worse and more useless as people. I’m not proud of this, but last week, when I discovered I’d run out of milk and couldn’t leave my sleeping kids to run out, I ordered the delivery of a single coffee from Starbucks.
I gave myself a pass because it was coffee. But if these things are quicker and more convenient, they’re also sadder and stripped of the bare minimum of human contact needed to hold neighbourhoods together. And, like so much innovation in technology, they can run counter to the point of the very thing they enable. It’s like that moment on the beach when your Kindle runs out and you think: wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a way to read stories that didn’t require a charger and was impervious to sand? Wouldn’t it be great if you could shop for stuff in advance and actually see the state of the vegetable you’re buying?
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist