CONFESSIONS OF A GROCERY APP ADDICT

I’d seen the adverts for weeks – a new wave of ultra-fast grocery apps promising 10-minute delivery. Their slick marketing campaigns and silly names made them, somehow, hard to resist: Gorillas, Weezy, Zapp, Gopuff, Dija, Jiffy, Getir. And, when I gave one a go last year and received my haul (a sandwich, three apples and a pear) in just five minutes, I was totally sold.

I began recommending them with such fervour that friends assumed I was working for them. Some asked why I needed to order anything, given I have every supermarket just seconds away from my door – but the speed fascinated me. It took four minutes for one order of 16 items to arrive, prepared, bagged and biked over. It practically defied physics.

Such apps are not cheap. Basics don’t exist: the cheapest milk I could buy yesterday was a litre of Yeo Valley for £1.50 – more than 50 per cent dearer than Waitrose Essentials. On Gorillas, the cheapest loaf of sliced white bread is £1.20 and nothing in a tin is under a pound.

There are now at least three grocery app warehouses a short walk from my north London home, all capitalising on my car-less and “weekly shop”-shy cohort who live in spaces too small to bulk buy. Inured to being overcharged by “local” and “express” stores (which regularly charge 20 per cent more than the larger stores), and used to organising our lives via our phones, grocery app addiction was perhaps inevitable.

They also solve a range of first-world problems such as when my seven local shops all ran out of jalapeños. I’ve received make-up wipes at midnight; oranges at 8am for breakfast. I keep four accounts open on my phone, for when a need strikes.

A £50 bottle of tequila is among my harder orders to justify, I’ll admit. But the speed with which it arrived made it taste all the better.