Deliveroo culture is out of control – a friend of mine ordered a single onion
I was caught up in the Gatwick bomb scare last weekend. I’d flown to New York for a very quick work trip and was due to land back – discombobulated and exhausted – at 6am on Saturday morning. Unfortunately, because of the scare, my return journey was delayed five hours, which promised to make a potentially torturous flight much worse.
I was in economy (are you joking? Journalists don’t fly business), and on Norse Atlantic, the no-frills Norwegian airline which flies between London and certain American cities. You don’t even get blankets and pillows on Norse unless you cough up for them. The thought of several hours at JFK, followed by seven uncomfortable hours in the air, dismayed me a great deal as I sat in a trendy New York hotel bar, drinking martinis with a couple of friends who live there.
“Tell you what,” cried my friend Chris, “I’ll just DoorDash you a blanket.”
“Eh?” I replied.
It turns out, DoorDash is a bit like Deliveroo. Or Tapp. It’s another one of those delivery service apps which means you can order almost anything, at any time you like.
A few weeks ago, while staying in Palm Beach with friends, I’d observed this growth of delivery culture with amazement. An hour or so before a dinner party, my pal Emily realised they didn’t have enough wine. No problem. She ordered a few bottles on her phone; they arrived half an hour later. She did the same the following morning when their Nespresso pods ran out. And now here I was, in a New York hotel bar, with a friend showing me blanket options on his phone. There were dozens of them available from various shops nearby.
“How many feet is 90 inches?” I asked, unable to work it out through the fog of gin and vermouth, wondering if a blanket that size was too big and bulky to get through security.
Blearily, we decided that it was probably manageable.
“Can I have a pillow too?” I asked, emboldened by the idea that I could make my trip back more comfortable so easily. And probably also emboldened by the martinis.
Click, click, click. Chris bought me a full-sized pillow and a large fleecy blanket for just over $40, plus an extra $2 for speedy delivery, which arrived in Target bags on the back of a moped 40 minutes later. This was the first embarrassment: taking delivery of such bulky items in a fashionably, dimly lit New York bar (where I’d spotted Benedict Cumberbatch earlier), partly because we’d somehow managed to order two full-sized pillows. Weighed down by my new bedding, I looked like an overgrown child off to a slumber party.
“I don’t need two pillows, what shall I do with this one?” I asked, waving it around the bar.
“Give it to the hotel receptionist,” suggested Chris, “they always need pillows.”
In the end, I offloaded the spare pillow to the Uber driver who took me to JFK airport, and waddled through security clutching the other, the blanket draped around me. Remember when people used to dress up for air travel?
When we eventually took off, these items unquestionably made my trip back more comfortable. The blanket has since been commandeered by Dennis, who likes sleeping on it at my feet, under my desk. There was also a thrilling, almost unbelievable convenience to the experience. Forget Amazon Prime and being delivered something the next day. If you’re in America, at least in certain cities, you can now have whatever you like in your hands in just half an hour. But isn’t it extremely lazy? Isn’t it bad for the environment? Isn’t it going to worsen the developed world’s obesity crisis?
I have, once or twice, used Deliveroo in London for items that I could have fetched from the shop myself. Ice cream, once, during the pandemic. Also, several bottles of red wine, after a long lunch party at home when we’d run out and everyone was feeling idle. At a friend’s house for dinner the other night, she ordered a couple of packets of cigarettes via the app. That’s quite a common one. The same with vapes.
But immediately after the pillow and blanket incident, thrilling and convenient though it was, I consoled myself that we Brits aren’t quite as bad as the Yanks. Not yet. Not quite as torpid.
Then I made the mistake of quizzing a few pals in the UK about the most ridiculous items they’ve ordered via an app, and I’m sorry to report that things don’t look very good here, either.
A journalist friend says she once ordered a single croissant via Deliveroo. Another friend said that she summoned a single onion when she was cooking bolognese and realised she needed another one. Potentially embarrassing chemist items are popular, too. “I had my gall bladder out this summer, and after the morphine, the constipation was so bad I had to Deliveroo suppositories,” says one. Anusol, whispers someone else, “but please can we keep this between us?” Also, Imodium. But I guess when you need it, you need it, right?
We Brits have no right to feel superior at all, it turns out, because while the delivery service here might not yet be quite as slick as it is in America, we’re certainly trying our best. Other friends have ordered single burratas (“because the Italian deli had run out”), pregnancy tests, nappies, pomegranate molasses, a single slice of cake (“I was having a bad day”), nit shampoo, Bloody Mary ingredients and cans of Irn Bru, “whilst hosting a Burns Night dinner. One of the guests had never tried it so we managed to get in a last order before 11pm.”
The delivery men (or women!) must occasionally be baffled by the contents. One friend ordered dog poo bags and teeth whitening strips together. Another’s 11 month old, playing with her phone, managed to order wasabi paste for 11p from Deliveroo, plus £4.20 for delivery. “I couldn’t work out why a man on a motorbike gave me a large paper bag with one sachet in it,” she says.
You see? Even babies are at it now, ordering single items from a bike instead of walking to the shops. Friends in the country report that it’s just us lucky, cosmopolitan lot in the cities who can get hold of luxuries like dog poo bags and burrata so easily. But I bet it’s not long before you can whistle up a tube of Anusol even in deepest, darkest Suffolk. Is this progress?