Returning to Simpler Times at the End of my Road

I might not be able to opt out of society but I am opting out of delivery apps

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Well, I’m off the apps.

Not the dating ones, that’s for another time.

I mean the ones where someone brings you pretty much anything anytime. Elaborately-packaged Wingstop, a wet wet burger steaming its own bun in the bag, a single coffee, really whatever you want. Perhaps you’d like your groceries at roughly 60% accuracy?

Delivery apps, whether for groceries or prepared food, are a perennial discourse topic. Are strikes ableist? Are Instacart drivers misogynists?

I won’t dwell on the grocery delivery of it all because I’ve gotten personal groceries delivered exactly once, and I didn’t like it. I recognize that it’s fairly Martha Stewart pearl-clutchy of me to be like, “why would you ever let someone else pick out your produce?” but like, why would you ever let someone else pick out your produce?

I’ve certainly done my fair share of ordering dinner. I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever had a truly bad delivery habit, and I’ve never done any of the really sick shit I see online like Doordashing a coffee, but I look back on periods of my life, especially in the last few years, and I think that was too much delivery.

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At the ripe age of 29, I’m old enough to remember a life before delivery apps. I’m old enough to remember when getting food brought straight to your door meant you were getting a pizza. Before the Domino’s delivery tracker, even! Some restaurants did deliver but they did it themselves, meaning they had a delivery radius that reflected reality. Recall Elaine Benes taking up in a supply closet in the building across the street so that she could get her hands on that Supreme Flounder. Delivery meant calling the restaurant and tipping the driver.

About a year ago, I decided I’d been ordering too much Deliveroo, my app of choice. I decided I would get delivery once a month or so and more importantly, I would only open the app if I knew exactly what I wanted. I had been having one of those nights where you’re hungry and bored and feeling very lazy and you kind of just scroll on the delivery app for an indeterminate amount of time, getting more and more overwhelmed by the possibility before you. I could get basically anything brought to my house right now and none of it sounds good. I did really well on this schedule, until a redeye return flight, a COVID booster, and a general feeling of malaise led me to a period of several days where I didn’t leave my house and ordered delivery every night. On the third evening, my order from a beloved local Vietnamese institution arrived very poorly prepared. I looked at my gloopy Bún chả and my recycling bin, full of gratuitous packaging, and I was just like what the hell am I doing here?

So I deleted the app. A few months later, a gentleman caller told me he’d had a hankering for Chinese food. Could I pick something for us to watch while he picked something for us to eat? Something soooo scary about being alive and single is that you can go to any given handsome, gainfully-employed man’s house and he’ll ask you to pick something to watch or listen to and he’ll hand you some sort of Xbox or Playstation controller. We sat there scrolling on our respective devices for what felt like an hour, but was probably five healthy minutes, my brain oscillating between gaming-related icks and the overwhelming thought that there is simply too much choice. I gave up and clicked on Seinfeld and he found something to order and I got over the gaming of it all. The food was nice. On my empty train home, I found myself Carrie Bradshawing, struck by just how much this delivery app doomscrolling had become a feature of modern dating. If he couldn’t choose a place to order from, could he ever truly choose me?

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I don’t actually want to talk about delivery apps. The issues with them are widely reported¹. I liked P.E. Moskowitz’s account of quitting the apps earlier this year. Whoever writes the Male Instacart Shopper Discourse long-read will need to be stronger than I am.

No, instead I want to talk about the Indian restaurant at the end of my road. I won’t say its name because despite constant posting that essentially triangulates my location, I’m still trying to maintain an air of mystery about my literal home address.

I’d ordered Indian food a fair few times on Deliveroo. Each time, I found myself doing that scary scroll. It’s hard to compare a dozen similar looking restaurants with similar reviews that are a similar distance away. They were all pretty good.

Then I had google maps open to my neighborhood because sometimes you just need to open google maps and look around, and I was like, what the fuck is wrong with me that I’m ordering Indian food for a five pound surcharge and making some poor guy just bring it to me when I can just go get it myself? There’s an Indian restaurant at the end of my road!

It’s a perfectly serviceable restaurant in that it is at the end of my street and the food is pretty good. This restaurant has one of those delightful Graphic Design is my Passion type websites and when you place an order, a little dancing ladle accompanies a twenty-minute timer for your food to be ready. This means I can either sit on my couch for another sixteen or seventeen blissful minutes before I walk over, or if I’m feeling frisky, I can order right as I cross over Queensland Road on my walk home from the bar.

I can order several vegetarian mains, pilau rice, and a bread or two and have dinner plus tomorrow’s lunch for less than £15. The gentleman behind the counter now knows me as Rebecca, always with a wry smile. The food is good because it’s well-cooked, but also because it’s suited to being boxed up and sat in a bag for fifteen minutes. That’s another thing that gets lost in the discussion of delivery apps because the ethics and the economics are decidedly more important. But allow me to say girl, the quality. Most dinners are not made for transit! COVID made it so that every restaurant had to pivot to delivery, but can we pivot back? A burger shouldn’t go in a man’s backpack …

Delivery apps are bad—bad in a really well-documented, unavoidable way. But it’s also one of those things where being right doesn’t mean you don’t sound preachy and annoying, and the people who are wrong are preachy and annoying too, so sometimes it’s best to just leave it. Lots of things are bad and our world is set up such that living in society means navigating your participation in them. It’s just good to remember that you straight up don’t have to participate in something just because life is saturated with it. I don’t need to over-tip some guy to bring me dinner in order to justify my use of a platform I know is bad. I often feel the things people bring up when they rationalize delivery app usage: overworked, overtired, some shade of chronically ill. I find myself recumbent, wishing someone could prepare me a load of vegetables, but also a lot of ghee, knowing that the sweetness of a Peshwari naan could fix what ails me. Leaving the house for a few minutes, feeling the night air on my face, smiling at the guys outside the pub, and having a human interaction with the gentleman behind the counter also go a long way, even if the naan is doing the heavy lifting. 🫒

1. On Camera: US Official Shoots Delivery Driver Asking For Directions (NDTV)

‘It’s a sweat factory’: Instacart workers ready to strike for pay and conditions (Guardian)

Two Days After Its Shoppers Went on Strike, Instacart Eliminated Their Bonuses (Eater)

Revealed: Deliveroo encouraged restaurants to call police on strikes (OpenDemocracy)