I could've just used Instacart
Published on 2025-12-31
Content warning: gestures at everything
December 30, 2025. Day before New Year's Eve. I've been back in town for a few days now and it's taken me as many to find the energy to make it out to the grocery store. I didn't leave my cabinet in good shape when I left, leaving only half a box of cereal and a few packs of dry beans for my return. Rather than spend another day rotting in my apartment I thought it'd be nice to get enough food to make something real.
Maybe my favourite story to tell about my first apartment was grocery shopping with my partner. We lived on the top of a pretty big hill, the sort of place where all the more fortunate people in the city lived. Unfortunately for us, we didn't own a car. Getting to the grocery store meant taking a twenty minute walk down hill to the University, where we could take a forty minute bus ride into town. Making it back meant taking a forty minute bus ride back to the University and what felt like a much longer walk back up the hill to our apartment, now with all our groceries. In the annual 100-year heatwaves plaguing the valley during the summer, I figured I'd lose my mind if I had to go each week so I tried to plan around going grocery shopping only once a month. That had some obvious trade-offs.
I'm not sure why I like telling that story so much. Maybe it made me feel better about where I lived. Indeed, my neighbours didn't really understand how it felt, because everyone on the hill owned or at least leased a car they could use to drive wherever they want. Despite the neighbourhood's incredibly bougie name, it was actually a really awful place to live; it's just that it was awful in a lot of ways that are kind of hard to talk about.
Yesterday, instead of going to the grocery store, I ordered food on DoorDash. I managed to put off registering for DoorDash or something like it for quite a while, but sometimes it's the only way you can order ahead. I don't begrudge people for using it, but I've always felt gross about it. I know it's bad for the economy. I know gig work is somewhere between the cause and consequence of much of the social precarity we see in the world today. Something about having to look a real person in the eye, knowing all that, as they hand you your pizza feels… it's not a feeling I have an easy time describing, or one that I like to think about. Someone once reminded me that I can always check a box to have them leave it by the door. No contact. Funny enough, sometimes they'll wait for you anyway, even if you checked the box. A kind gesture, or a human mistake. Some places use delivery robots now, presumably so you don't need to worry about people being real.
Whenever I open DoorDash, the website likes to remind me that I can use it to order my groceries online and have someone pick them up for me as well. In fact, I think that's part of what makes my story about walking groceries up the hill even more difficult to talk about than the one about my noisy neighbours. Often times when I tell it, people will ask: "why didn't you just use Instacart?" My usual answer was that I don't have the money for Instacart, but that was never very convincing. Apparently, the delivery fees aren't actually that high, with all that entails. Again, I don't begrudge anyone for using Instacart. I pick up groceries every week now and that's not a punishment I'd wish upon my worst enemies. The reason I don't use Instacart is kind of hard to explain… not something easy to whip out in a conversation about grocery shopping.
One of the older entries in my master list of article title ideas is "Walking for Transit," about different kinds of transit and the kinds of people who take them. At a previous living arrangement, I lived in what one might call a bad neighbourhood… not just because it had a lot of boarded up houses with a surprising number of cars outside, but also because there was just a general lack of public infrastructure. You had to do a decent amount of walking to get anywhere, and it was heavily paved with shockingly few trees to provide cover. Lots of arterial roads. There was a natural hierarchy of modes of transit, from private car, to bus, all the way down to foot.
Sometimes people will gawk at you if you tell them you take the bus here; it's not Vancouver by any means but the bus system is still considerably better than it was where I grew up. Usually you can catch a bus every fifteen minutes, or at least during peak hours. Not a comfortable experience by any means, though. Still, I think it's the people who walk everywhere who are the strongest among us. I often see people who walk everywhere singing in public, meeting friends, striking up conversations with strangers… generally being unencumbered by the social taboos that keep me alienated from my community. Reminds me a bit of being transgender, funny enough. There's probably an article in there somewhere.
As you're coming in to the grocery store by bus you can get a pretty good look at the property, which I usually take to see if anybody's hanging out near the entrances. There's lots of people who hang out around the grocery store who'll try to strike up a conversation with you if you pass them. I don't begrudge people for trying to strike up conversations with strangers, but it tends to trigger my social anxiety, so I like to plan around it as I get off the bus. That, or I'm just afraid of poor people. I guess I don't like to think that I'm afraid of poor people, so I choose to believe it has to do with social anxiety instead. Maybe it's a bit of both.
Canada's annual 100-year polar vortex hit particularly hard and early this year and we're still feeling the affects of it late into December. And needless to say, things are pretty grim. I almost felt like I owned a private car the way the bus driver kept driving past groups of people huddled in bus shelters tonight. Nobody was singing; everyone looked like they were in a lot of pain. Fortunately for me, the bus had good heating. In fact, it might have even been a little too warm. I resisted the urge to crack open the window.
After I'd finished my grocery shopping, I walked back to the bus stop and waited. Someone had written a message in paint marker over an ad for a government career pathways program explaining they were passed by three buses before deciding to make their journey on foot. I read it, and re-read it several times as I waited.
There was a few people at the bus stop with me, and a few minutes later, a man who seemed to be having a hard time walking joined us. He sat with a woman on the bench and tried to make small talk, before she got up and left. Then, he walked up to me. I looked at him and said "hey," but he didn't say anything. We locked eyes, and sort of just… looked at each other, for a good twenty seconds. Finally, the bus came, and we both got on.
I like taking the bus at night. This is another thing that surprises people at times, especially women, who tell me it's not safe. I usually feel pretty safe on the bus at night; there's rarely more than one or two people who take my bus line in the evening so it's usually pretty peaceful. Maybe that's just the residual male privilege I keep hearing about. But to be honest, I was feeling pretty scared tonight. My mind started fixating on visions of the man getting off at my stop, following me, trying to hurt me… but when I looked up, I saw that he'd already left. The whole rest of the way back, I couldn't stop thinking about the way he looked at me. While he sounded angry, he didn't look it. He looked scared, or sad. Maybe a bit of both.
Also interesting was the way I imagine I looked to him. I'm told I have a pretty deadpan expression, and I think this is especially the case when I'm feeling anxious. Clearly I was feeling all kinds of things—enough things to write this article—but in the moment I didn't feel like I was feeling anything at all. I suppose if I didn't want to feel anything, I could've just used Instacart.
Another article on my master list is something along the lines of "Is the world really better than ever before?" I think this article would have attempted to respond to the way people invoke various indicators of social progress to argue that even if things feel bad, or worse than they were in recent history, the world is objectively a greater place today than it ever has been. I haven't written this article yet because the topic has only felt more absurd the longer I put it off.
Clearly the world is not a great place right now, and I have a feeling things are going to get a lot harder in the near future. There exists a spectrum that goes from "ha ha guys the economy is going to collapse!!" to "do any of my friends know how to grow potatoes?" Somewhere on this spectrum is the widespread use of "buy now, pay later" schemes to buy basic necessities. Also on this spectrum is a petro state investing hundreds of billions of dollars of oil money into a physically impossible megaproject that the West sort of just went along with, at great cost to the environment and human life. In any case, it seems hard times are coming, and for many they're already here.
So, what do we do? I have no idea, but I'd hate to drop an incredibly depressing article without any kind of silver lining. Personally, I've got two things in mind that I hope to stick to. Call them New Year's resolutions if you'd like:
- Build reciprocal relationships. Find ways to take care of the people in your life, and let people take care of you too.
- Take care of yourself. We need you now more than ever.
Happy New Years friends.
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