This Side of the Pond

“I’m not doing the groceries today,” said my husband last week, a look of pride upon his face. I didn’t think a great deal of this comment; after all, it was cold out and the roads were slippy and I was fairly sure we still had at least one bag of green beans at the back of the freezer.

I told him it wasn’t a problem and went back to what I was doing, setting myself a mental reminder that we’d need to replace the bag of beans. We do a lot of our shopping locally, you see, but every so often we make the journey across the border to stock up on bits and pieces we can’t get in town.

The husband, however, wanted to tell me exactly why he wouldn’t be hitting the road with his grocery list. It turned out that he had stumbled across the idea of online food shopping.

He had discovered that he could browse the cereal aisle from the comfort of our living room, then turn up in the parking lot and wait for his selection to be brought to the vehicle. At no point would he be required to set foot inside the store.

This in turn meant that he would not need to inflict upon himself the monthly hell of trying to find items on the list he didn’t recognize in aisles he wasn’t sure how to navigate. He also pointed out that the store in question had just rearranged itself for no immediately evident reason, which meant he wasn’t even sure where the cereal now lives.

Even if he hadn’t been set that particular navigational challenge, no longer would he need to dread the very idea of me discovering a new recipe or an exciting low calorie snack that I was interested to try. As long as he can spell it, he can find it, he said, and someone will bring it to his car.

“We’re living in the future,” he exclaimed, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him look so pleased. They even gave him a goodie bag, not that it lasted long enough for me to see what was inside.

For me, however, this was living in the past. Back when I lived in London, I did the vast majority of my grocery shopping online and had it delivered to my home – an easier thing for a business to accomplish when the population is so dense.

Good old British customer service being what it is, this usually consisted of a bad-tempered delivery driver grunting at me before dumping plastic bags on the porch, their contents spilling out all over the floor. Replacement items were something of an enigma: I’m not sure what would be going through someone’s mind to send a box of crackers because they’d run out of toilet paper, but that’s the sort of thing I came to expect.

Still, my cans of spaghetti were considerably closer to the kitchen cupboards than they would have been otherwise and one can always make use of crackers, so I couldn’t really complain. I also had good reason to want someone else to do the carrying.

I lived for half a decade in an apartment located three quarters of the way up one of the tallest hills in London, you see, and the grocery store was right at the bottom. I didn’t own a vehicle, so I had no choice but to lug a week’s worth of shopping in a vertical direction until I arrived home with red marks on my wrists that were in danger of breaking the skin.

The advent of cold storage trucks and grumpy drivers was a miracle for me, as you can imagine. But I never thought to wonder if I could find the same thing here because, all of a sudden, I had the convenience of a vehicle at my disposal – and a husband who would let me send him to the store when I didn’t want to go myself.

I was thrilled for my long-suffering spouse that he had finally found a solution to his monthly torture thanks to the marvels of technology. Then it occurred to me that this isn’t a new idea at all; in fact, we’ve come full circle.

Both here and back in the motherland, it used to be the case that a person would wander into a store and hand their shopping list over the counter. I suppose you had to guess what might be in stock, because a lot of it seemed to be “out back”, and your friendly store clerk would disappear and come back several minutes later with neatly packed bags of edibles.

We still do something similar back home in a store called Argos, where you can flip through a catalog of home furnishings, toys and jewelry and then mark down your selection on a piece of paper using the world’s smallest pen. Hand it to the clerk, stand in the corner and eventually the tiny lift will ping and your item will appear inside as if by magic, ready to be handed over to you. Nobody knows where the items come from, we just assume there are pixies in the flooring.

But while this all seemed to work fine for our ancestors, at some point we all must have thrown our hands in the air and shouted, “No! I do not approve of this magical system, I want to make choices for myself.”

Perhaps we’d gotten fed up of the store clerk picking out the smallest donut and the most shriveled tomato in the box. Maybe we just wanted to poke the vegetables and compare two boxes of laundry detergent that differ only in terms of the colored packaging.

Whatever our motives, we sparked a revolution that was always going to lead us to giant superstores with mile-long walks between the milk and carrots. A grocery trip now takes hours instead of minutes and is something many of us have come to dread.

And so, here we are, once again giving up the idea of choice for the luxury of convenience. I don’t know about you, but I’ve decided it’s worth it, if only so I don’t have to comfort my husband’s tears every time he gets home.