As a resident of New York City, I am inundated with ads for fifteen-minute grocery apps. These are services that provide, well, delivery of groceries to your door in fifteen minutes or less. A lot of apps, including JOKR, 1520, Gopuff, and Buyk, have thrown their hats into this ring. Even DoorDash has expanded its operations to join the fray.
For these businesses, the boom in e-commerce means an opportunity to branch out into grocery delivery. But of all the convenience-trolling that modern life has wrought—the same-day delivery and the endless array of services, from massages to blowouts, that can show up on your doorstep—this one seems the most deranged.
If you live in one of the world’s big cities, as I do, your grocery store is already likely to be less than fifteen minutes away. Just GO TO THE GROCERY STORE. Seriously, how far will we take our quest for convenience? How is it that the grocery store down the block is not convenient enough?
A bodega in Brooklyn, New York.
One of the mainstays of urban life in New York City is the bodega. I have succumbed to so many urges at the bodega—like a late-night Twix bar or, in my darker moments, full pints of Häagen-Dazs coffee-flavored ice cream. I’ve rushed into their warm embrace all too many times when I’ve run out of toilet paper. I casually waltz in when I need a cup of coffee. My relationship with my bodega has lasted longer than most boyfriends. That’s the beauty of dense urban living: You are never more than a block away from a fresh roll of toilet paper, candy you shouldn’t eat, and emotional dependence on a bodega clerk. It’s part of the reason people pick cities in the first place.
These fifteen-minute “grocers,” in contrast, are not even really grocery stores. They’re delivery services with “dark stores” that regular civilians can’t enter. These locations are designed for delivery staff to run in and out at lightning speed so they can bring groceries to people who for some reason don’t ever want to leave their apartment to enjoy the city that they chose to live in.
Local bodega clerks and small grocers rightfully argue that they have been catering to this same fifteen-minute crowd for the whole of urban history. It’s not fair that these apps can swoop in and take their hard-earned dollars.
And it’s not like things are rosy on the other side of the equation. The reason these grocery delivery services are so cheap is that the people rushing to provide them are underpaid—at or slightly above the city minimum of $15 an hour. The real profits are going to the companies.
We already have no idea how a chicken thigh comes to market or how buttery powder coming out of a box makes a sheet cake. We are utterly disconnected from the process of food production; these apps create yet another layer of abstraction. Fifteen-minute delivery effectively removes the humanity out of everything you consume.
What about the actual products? What ever happened to touching the melon to see if it’s ripe? What about the weird thrill of seeing what’s in someone else’s cart? What about the thrill of just seeing someone else? During the pandemic, grocery stores were my savior. I relished a chance to go shopping because their essential service of providing food also made me feel less alone, another essential service.
The choice comes down to this: You can have the fifteen-minute delivery app or you can have the fifteen-minute city—where everything you need, from groceries to cafes to movies, is within a fifteen-minute walk. Let’s not ruin the beauty of the fifteen-minute city with overpriced groceries that you can already get around the corner. As every parent has said, “Come on, don’t be lazy.”