I saw a commercial the other day that showed people shopping for food and the narrator saying, "people are at the GROSS-ery story right now." It was an ad for one of the ever-popular home food services out there right now--don't recall which one. The ad insinuated that people who still grocery shop are incipient fools, because all the cool people get food delivered to their home. Never mind that those new online food services operate on modern sweat shop labor, with employees working at such a furious pace that they occasionally break out in fights.
Home meal delivery is a new signifier of wealth in today's economy, another example of the alleged triumph of time over money. Shopping for one's own food or cooking that food are now considered undesirable wastes of time by a growing segment of the population. It is indeed now a sign of smartness and, one could argue, ostentation, to order meals delivered to your door instead of the quaint notion of shopping and putting a meal together oneself. Or so the marketing folks behind these services would have you believe. No one has the time to meal plan, these services seem to say, how nice to have complete meal ingredients and instructions delivered to your door, all you do is put them together, easy peasy.
Whether or not it's true that no one has time to meal plan is uncertain; what is more certain is that people are no longer choosing to devote the time to this task like they used to. One could argue that people have been trying to save time with meal prep for generations--the microwave, Betty Crocker, TV Dinners, InstaPots are a few examples of 'shortcuts' that have become popularized over the years. These meal services would have us believe that life would be easier if we submit and surrender to their monthly meal plans. We would have more time! To spend with our kids! To spend with our spouses! Sure, maybe, God forbid we actually spend more time with these people. But what we for sure will have less of if we subscribe to these meal services is money.
Once upon a time people loved driving and shopping so much that malls with huge parking lots were built. People would leave their homes and drive out into traffic to select their own clothing, furniture, appliances, and food. Now the idea of the physical act of going shopping in public has become so distasteful that people actively complain about it, even apropos of nothing (mention the mall in passing to a group of middle-aged women and wait for the acerbic vitriol that spews forth), and are ever-vigilant for ways to evade The Mall. I want to know why this has happened, because it makes no goddamned sense. In my particular area, we are on our third mall. Each time a new mall was built in this town, the old mall became defunct, dying a slow death, until finally taken over by server farms or career schools. The very idea of fighting traffic to get out of your car, walk inside of a mall where there are many things to look at, is horrific to women, even women who probably used to love shopping when they were younger!
Since the millennium, we have somehow grown disenchanted with the idea of malls, of being among a mass of people, of vying with the public to get goods and services required for life. I think it is because people who managed to obtain goods and services without leaving their home, especially if they're at a lower cost, feel somehow more clever than all of the 'fools' who dare to go out shopping among the masses of humanity. And so it goes. We are all worshipers at the altar of Amazon and the free 2-day shipping; it's like a dream! You want something, it appears two days later, no effort required, just a credit card. And so we order things, sometimes singly--a planner here, headphones there, a book--and we are mostly happy. Who cares that multiple shipments like that are bad for the environment? We didn't have to drive anywhere, never mind that your stupid self-help book had to be shipped across the country to get to you in two days.
But certain things--clothes, shoes, bathing suits--are not so easy to order online, no matter how hard we try. Because the human body comes in all shapes and sizes, and manufactured clothing does too, online shopping can make 'the right fit' even more elusive than it is when we shop in person for these items. I can speak from experience here. I tried online shopping for shoes, but have been so disappointed with the results that I now refuse to shop for shoes this way. It seems like a giant waste of my time and resources, because I will inevitably have to ship something I ordered back because of a lousy fit. I still occasionally fall prey to the lure of 'cheap' clothes on Amazon, but when they arrive 3 weeks later and don't fit or look much like their picture, I am frustrated and have to return the item, which Amazon half the time just tells me to keep because it's not worth the cost of returning it to them. Sucker!
I worry that if we stop going out and selecting the items we purchase, especially food, we become even more removed from the world and from reality. And are we really spending that time in better ways? We're probably just watching more TV, since there's so much of it now. Someday, when all of the brick and mortar stores are gone because of our lazy need for online shopping, we may regret that there is no place to go to physically view/feel/try on the items we seek; it is then that we will mourn the Shopping Mall That Once Was. There will be no more public interaction, no longer will we enjoy the feel of airing ourselves out in public; everything becomes an endless loop of clicking, buying, returning, repeat.
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