Special delivery
Because of where I live in New York City, I receive lots of coupons to use services like Jokr and Gopuff that promise to deliver groceries to your door in 15 minutes. Usually I have a hard time imagining who wants this, because I'm the sort of person who likes going to the store and has nothing better to do. But then the coupons start to fill me with a kind of moral revulsion and shame; I am forced to recognize myself as the sort of person expected to want to have servants at my beck and call through an app. It's like my zip code has made me complicit.
The delivery services usually promote themselves by promising "convenience and speed," as this New York Times report suggests, and of course there is a pandemic-related pitch of protecting yourself from all the virus you might encounter by going into commercial spaces. Likewise, one could try to make the case against the delivery apps and their "dark stores" (i.e. warehouses close to residential areas that sometimes crowd out stores open to the public) by making a case against convenience. In an editorial for Bloomberg, Lev Kushner and Greg Lindsay argue that "addictive convenience that threatens to transform downtowns into dark cities, where the everyday commerce that gives streets their vitality has evaporated from view and been reconstituted on an app."
That seems a bit hyperbolic, but I get the point: Delivery apps operate at a loss to try to undercut existing stores and ultimately drive them out of business, leaving city dwellers with no choice but to use the apps. "No city has yet found a way to balance the short-term benefit of personal convenience against the long-term costs of eroding community life through decreased social interaction," Kushner and Lindsay argue. But maybe there are other kinds of social interaction that could replace commercial ones? Maybe convenience could, in theory, be construed as freeing time for more "meaningful social interactions" like the ones that Facebook likes to boast about?
I'm hardly a fan of "convenience" as a value, but the claim that it is "addictive" seems to concede exactly the point that should be contested. Convenience is not addictive at all but a deliberate choice, a structured way to express social superiority and the prestige that is attached to selfishness: My time is more valuable than someone else's; I can offload aspects of my self-maintenance to others. And when the dark stores win, it won't be because convenience has trumped people's desire for sociality; it will be because the ultra-wealthy were able to fund businesses based on deep social inequalities and the availability of precarious labor, and make those inequalities and those disempowered workers seem inevitable, if not desirable.
Convenience is an alibi for how the apps articulate a class divide, offering users the experience of being a part of the gentry rather than the servant class. They are part of what has been called, since the rise of Uber and other gig work platforms, "the servant economy," for example in this 2015 Vox piece and this more recent article by Alexis Madrigal in the Atlantic. Thanks to the ubiquity of servant apps, Madrigal writes, "the haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand." This is not an unfortunate by-product but an integral aspect of the value proposition for the "demanding": In the face of economic instability and uncertainty, you can remind yourself with every delivery that you are in the "master" class rather than the "servant" class.