There’s a pathetic but satisfying thing that occurs when you stop using an online service you’re used to frequenting. This was Facebook a few years ago, when plummeting engagement whipped the social media platform into a frenzy of desperate invitations and prompts. It’s Fresh Direct when you fill your basket with groceries and – I can’t recommend this enough, if you’re looking for the tiny high that comes from withholding – don’t check out, triggering a bunch of wheedling automated messages, begging you to come back.
This week, in my life, it’s Uber Eats. For the past couple of years I’ve ordered from them once a week and now I’ve stopped, causing the food delivery service to issue a flurry of semi-hysterical special offers. Each spam text, each begging notification, reminds me of the money I’m saving. If you like rejecting things (I like rejecting things) then this exercise will thrill you: rejection without the human cost of hurting someone’s feelings.
The bigger picture, obviously, is a consumer trend away from the convenience-related services that surged during the pandemic. Companies that boomed and attracted millions in investment are starting to wither as our online habits change. In the US, instant delivery startups such as Buyk and Jokr, which briefly boomed in 2021, are declaring bankruptcy or pulling out of the US market. The meal-kit company Blue Apron has seen its share price plunge as food costs have risen and consumer interest in pricey convenience products has dwindled. The same goes for Stitch Fix, a service for clothing delivery that briefly boomed during the pandemic. And all of this in the context of mass lay-offs in tech at a time when those companies, seemingly, have nowhere left to expand.
Though it may be bad for the economy, from the perspective of an individual trying to have a life that entails leaving the house, this trend is perhaps an encouraging sign. The same encouragement might be taken from the slowdown at Netflix; many of us are capped out after too many hours of watching TV. I’m not exactly out there every morning taking invigorating walks, but I am reading again, feeling more inclined to work rather than pass out on the sofa, and to seek out real-world rather than online experience. If habits inculcated during the pandemic were supposed to augur the future, as Derek Thompson wrote in the Atlantic last month, “the post-pandemic economy has been much weirder than most people anticipated”.
For me, the weirdest of these impulses has been a desire to return to supermarket shopping. This is partly money-related; the downturn in fast-food delivery earnings is clearly linked to pinched household incomes. It’s also a health thing; many of us are still trying to reverse the damage done by all the junk food we ate during lockdown.
But of all the habits adopted in the past couple of years, it seemed as if grocery delivery might be the obvious keeper. Post-pandemic, maybe no one wants a hulking great Peloton in their living room and the appeal of the third place – be it the gym or Starbucks – is enjoying an obvious bounce-back. But supermarket shopping, at least in New York where I live, has rarely been a pleasure. It has always been time-consuming, stressful and over-crowded, with in-store prices not much lower than what you pay for delivery. And yet, every Monday, I feel compelled to stand in line at Trader Joe’s, and stagger home carrying six bags of shopping.
All I can put this desire down to is a combination of the small satisfaction that comes from making even minor economies in the present climate; and something less tangible to do with the joy, withheld during those two years of disruption, of going to a place and doing a thing. The expense of energy has itself become a virtue. Its inverse – ordering in; falling back on convenience and paying for it – seems not only to belong to a sadder period but, at this point, when one can go out, using one’s actual body, to feel like a moral failing. If it’s a hair shirt, perhaps it feels good simply in contrast to our pandemic wardrobe. Meanwhile, I suspect watching Uber Eats freak out will never get old.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
