Homebodies

‘Amazon knows, if you’ve bought the game for the last three years or whatever, that you’re likely to buy it again.’ So they’ve already got it packaged up for you, waiting for you to press the button. You do that, and they’ll stick your name on it, and it’s gone.”

If that doesn't boggle your mind, then there is something seriously wrong with you!

We live in a science-fiction world in which we search, click, and order ... and our orders show up on our porches within a couple of days. And if you pay more, they could reach you within even a few hours.

Pause for a minute and think about your own childhood. 

If you are old enough like me, then there years when milk was delivered. Newspapers were delivered. Mail was delivered. They happened according to a present schedule.  For everything else, we went looking for the stuff.  We walked or took buses or drove cars or whatever to the store to buy clothes, gadgets, utensils, shoes, ... And that is how people lived for the longest time.  It was primarily only what they bought that changed over the years.

In seemingly no time at all, this model has already flipped here in the US and increasingly all over the world. 

Milk delivery stopped a long time ago.  Only old fogies like me even bother to check the mailbox and use the postal system!  Malls are dead already.  

If ordering stuff online and expecting that to be delivered within a matter of hours becomes the norm, what might the future hold?

Eventually, we will want our deliveries to be so prompt that we will practically be sitting on top of the products we will order. At Chetwoods, the architecture firm, a managing director named Tim Ward told me about “brownfield” sites in London that the e-commerce industry can swallow: real estate that has fallen into disuse, and that can be repurposed to hold inventory and sort deliveries. Car parks, for instance, that will empty out as people drive less, and which can be converted into fulfilment centres for half-hour orders. Or multi-storey towers, each floor connected to the next by a ramp, so that vans can drive goods up and down the building. Or underground storage caverns, one of which is already being prepared near Heathrow. Other companies had mined the area for minerals, Ward explained. “Why fill that void in? Why not use it for logistics? It makes an ideal use, and then you can put a lovely park across the top of it.”

Our push for this is also why there is an increasing level of surveillance that we willingly allow:

Which is why we are not taking any notice that the apparatus of buying will soon be everywhere in our lives. It is already under our thumbs in our apps, and in most delivery vans in most streets. Soon it will be in our fridges, washing machines and printers, ordering refills; it will be beneath our feet in storage canyons and delivery tunnels; it will tower above us in multi-storey city blocks.

Those are not the only changes in how things connected to the internet "serve" us.

Meanwhile, the pandemic has further accelerated electronic interactions of all kinds. 

Back in the "old" days before Covid, if we could not cook quality food at home, we went to restaurants.  The pandemic has upended even our relationship with restaurant food.  Instead of only pizzas and Chinese food that we ordered in, there has been a rapid evolution (?) in food delivery.

The advent of appealing, user-friendly apps and tech-enabled driver networks, coupled with changing consumer expectations, has unlocked ready-to-eat food delivery as a major category. Lockdowns and physical-distancing requirements early on in the pandemic gave the category an enormous boost, with delivery becoming a lifeline for the hurting restaurant industry. Moving forward, it is poised to remain a permanent fixture in the dining landscape.

I wonder what the reasons might ever be in the future for people to step out of their homes!