Web Surfing For Groceries Has Some Bugs
I’m all for online shopping. I have purchased a computer online. I have purchased concert tickets online. I am thinking seriously of purchasing my next dog online.
However, I draw the online line when it comes to the newest online phenomenon: grocery shopping. It is now possible to order all of your weekly groceries from the comfort of your computer. Just like everything else that ends in dot-com, your grocery.com is supposed to become a multi-billion industry soon. Either that, or it will be a hugely expensive and tragic miscalculation that is doomed to fail because it COMPLETELY IGNORES THE REALITY OF HUMAN NATURE.
The latter, despite being in capital letters, is just a guess, based solely on my own particular human nature. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want some guy in some warehouse picking out my groceries for me. I don’t want him sniffing, prodding, kneading and otherwise fondling my grocery items. I enjoy sniffing and prodding them myself far too much.
But not only that, I want the thrill of coming home with stuff that we don’t have on our list, can’t afford, and don’t need.
“Honey!” I’ll say as I arrive home from Albertsons. “Look what I found! An entire packer-trimmed brisket, and it was only $29!”
She’ll just stand there, wordlessly watching as I wrench my back trying to lift it on to the counter.
“We can invite the whole neighborhood over for a barbecue!” I’ll enthuse. “It’s practically an entire half-a-cow!”
She’ll continue to look at me, arms folded.
“Or, maybe, half a pig,” I’ll say, enthusiasm faltering. “Or whatever a `brisket’ is.”
Anyway, that’s the sort of adventure I enjoy when it comes to grocery shopping, and I don’t intend to give it up. Also, I don’t intend to give up what I call the intellectual challenge of grocery shopping, that stimulating exchange that takes place in my own brain as I stand in front of, let’s say, the pasta aisle.
“All right, let’s begin,” I’ll say to myself, hand thoughtfully on chin. “We’ve got the Merlino brand, the American Beauty brand, the imported Consigliere brand and the cheap Noodles-In-A-Sack economy brand. We can eliminate the Consigliere brand right away, because it costs approximately 23.5 percent more than the mid-level domestic brand, and besides, chances are the wheat was grown in Steptoe, shipped to Naples, made into noodles, and shipped back here. So I should buy American, although we can eliminate the Noodles-In-A-Sack brand because half of the noodles are broken and I’d end up with a bunch of powdered noodles at the bottom. So that leaves us the two comparably priced mid-level brands, which, based on my fondling and prodding, appear to be of roughly comparable quality. Now, based on the location of manufacture I can deduce that the Merlino’s is possibly the fresher of the …”
This sounds like a lot of trouble to go to for a sack of macaroni, but God help me, I love it. It keeps my mind active and helps me to stay current with my mathematical skills. Unfortunately, I tend to irritate the other shoppers, who can’t gain access to the macaroni without shoving me aside with an “accidental” elbow, a maneuver which I refer to as the “macaroni elbow.”
Social interaction - that’s the other thing I love about grocery shopping. Most of us wouldn’t know our neighbors at all if we weren’t constantly running into them at the grocery store. I’m constantly having nice chats with my neighbors, as they glance with vague alarm at my grocery cart which contains nothing but an ale called Kilt-Lifter, a jumbo pack of Twizzlers and a 19-pound packer-trimmed brisket.
I’m sorry, but I think ordering groceries from some kind of computer list sounds even more fraught with peril than handing a grocery list to your kid and expecting him to return with something that resembles food. I have heard of 12-year-olds, dispatched on their bikes to pick up Parmesan cheese, who have returned with Mad magazine, a Pez dispenser and a squirt-can of Cheez-Whiz.
“There was all this weird cheese,” the kid said. “So I just picked one.”
That’s probably what the grocery.com guy will say when you end up with Alsatian goat-flavored limburger instead of the Parmesan you ordered.
“We were out,” he’ll say. “So I just picked one.”
I suppose this computer grocery shopping scheme makes sense for shut-ins, but for the rest of us, it ignores a basic human fact. We are a hunter-gatherer species. When we go grocery-shopping, our primitive brains think we’re scouring the countryside, searching for the best berry patch. We are fulfilling a deep, instinctual need. Clicking a button won’t hack it.
And there’s one more huge drawback to this scheme. How will we know whether Elvis’s baby is living on Mars? In the virtual checkout-line, there’s no sneaking a peak at the tabloids.