Copyright information: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html
We are losing touch. And we don’t even realize it. On Wednesday evenings, after the children are asleep, I go alone to the third floor of our 105-year-old Victorian and do what no previous inhabitant of this house has ever done. I sit in front of a fourteen-inch color monitor, log on to the Internet, and type in the Web address of my online grocer. When the home page appears, the image of the mother and smiling infant reminds me why this is the best way to shop.This new way of putting food on the table—or at least in the cupboards —should net me more time for playing. Funny, though, I feel more rushed than ever.
I enter my password and cruise the virtual aisles, scanning product names under headings like “fresh,” “packaged goods,” and “household accessories.” It takes only about twenty minutes to fill my virtual shopping cart. This approach to tackling the weekly supermarket list has taken some getting used to. (Who knew that Tony Tiger cereal is properly called “Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes of Corn”?) Nonetheless, it’s remarkably trouble free.There is no heavy lifting, no worries that those two cases of caffeine-free Diet Coke will crush the bread or, as happens to me in the real store by the time I reach the soda aisle, won’t even fit in the cart. I even get a running total of how much I’m spending. I don’t have to haul anything home; it is all delivered the next day.
But probably the biggest pitch for online grocery shopping is that you don’t have to deal with other people. Forget the folks who park in front of the dried pasta or abandon carts in the middle of aisles.There’s no wait for the person at the bread counter to select the sourdough baguette with tongs from behind a plastic case. People slow things down. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. The appeal of interacting with a computer or a machine instead of a human has caught the fancy of vendors from McDonald’s to the local turnpike authority. In my state of Massachusetts, the former turnpike director made no qualms about the draw of skipping the required interaction at the tollbooth by using the Fast Lane transponder. “With as much as people have going on in their lives, sometimes stopping and interacting with other humans is dif- ficult,” he said. “You would rather deal with a machine. People would rather not deal with humans if they don’t have to.”
There is something trying, even exhausting, about human interactions. Why meet when you can e-mail? And digital video makes it seem like you’re there. Right? Certainly, we are still sorting out all the new technologies we’ve been endowed with.The novelty is wearing off, and when they become absolutely mundane, we will have incorporated them all into life. It’s just the way things are done. Nothing special. It’s not special to use a cell phone or to get e-mail. This is how we communicate with each other. But the transition from in-person to online is not just trading slow for fast but is renegotiating the terms of engagement and the ground rules for living. More often than not, the new rules leave less time and less opportunity to connect—with other people, with the physical world, and with ourselves.
A CEO of a firm that helps established companies build and market an online presence works nearly all the time. He spends fourteen-hour days at the office, comes home to eat dinner with his wife and four children, and then goes upstairs to check his e-mail and keep working. He’s not so unusual. He loves the speed and the excitement of the work. It is fun to be involved with something hot. Problem is, he hardly has time to connect with anything else. He likens his link with his job to a T1 connection—as opposed to a dial-up—and says he won’t have any meaningful time of his own until after retirement. (He’s only fortynine.) He savors the forty-five minutes a day he spends commuting because, he says, it is “the only forty-five minutes I can control.” The rest of the day, he behaves like a human pinball ricocheting from one thing to the next, reacting instead of contemplating. But that’s the way business is today, he says: “We are making half-assed decisions because we are responding to stimuli.”
Much has been written about how time-starved Americans are today. Like the CEO, many of us don’t have time to think, either.We, too, respond. No wonder e-tailers, hungry for people’s attention, must make each Website “stickier” than the last. It is no accident that time is what the e-commerce world peddles: “Spend your money and they’ll give you time” is the message.Who wouldn’t find that appealing? That’s why I bit when the flyer arrived in the mail offering trial online grocery service. But now, months later, I’m not sure what’s happened to the time I used to spend grocery shopping. I don’t feel as if I have a great surplus of minutes to savor. Other things just seem to fill the space. I don’t play with the children any more than I did before. I don’t take long, soaking baths. And I seem to have more, not less, trouble finding time to get through two daily newspapers and the scads of magazines that arrive. In the end, I haven’t gained that much. And I’ve lost some.
When I first started grocery shopping online, I thought I would miss handling the food, judging one Granny Smith apple against another or debating the appeal of Cheez-Its over Cheese Nips. But a funny thing has happened: I have found that the ritual of grocery shopping doesn’t have much at all to do with the food. As with other aspects of daily life, the value and meaning of this chore are camouflaged by its very ordinariness. I now find it interesting—even fun—to go to a supermarket. There is the whoosh! of sensory stimulation that strikes when you enter, those odd bluish lights, the colorful pyramids of fruits, the sheer stunning display of product choices.
More profoundly, what I miss is the life of the supermarket. I used to see the same people working the cash registers. I miss hearing the boss, named Joan, coordinate break times or appear momentarily stressed by the absence of an advertised product. Despite my frustration with other shoppers, I realize I do miss peering into other people’s carts to see what they’re buying. I miss having other shoppers look at me, acknowledging my existence and confirming my inclusion in society. People used to ask me the ages of my children, notice when they helped load food onto the checkout counter, or nod as they managed to absorb their disappointment when I said no to candy. I miss the public experience of the supermarket.
Certainly, it is easy enough to do without grocery shopping in person. But it is less easy to do without what grocery shopping allows us: to be involved in the details of our own lives and to feel part of the human world. I know there are people involved with the process of getting my food to my home, but I do not see them. I order, then go to work. When I get home, the food is there. And what has happened in grocery shopping is happening in other areas of domestic and com- mercial life: In the name of efficiency and convenience, we are taking the interactions out of our days. The background noise of the supermarket or the chitchat with the cashier may seem meaningless. But it’s not. It is exactly what makes us feel connected.
I realized this when I made a supplementary trip to the supermarket where I used to make my weekly bulk purchases. I brought two of my children, my infant son and five-year-old daughter. As we cruised through the aisles, my daughter loved picking items off the shelf and placing them in the cart. People babbled with the baby and asked my daughter how it felt to be a big sister. At the dairy case, I searched with another woman for unsalted butter, which was in short supply because it was near the holidays, when even the least talented bakers feel moved to produce sweets. At the checkout, the cashier watched and chatted as my daughter unloaded the cart onto the conveyor. As we walked out into the cold and dark late autumn afternoon, my son strapped to my chest and my daughter with her small, ungloved hand in mine, she looked up at me and said, “Those people are so, so nice!” Her observation was her own, out of nowhere, a simple thought that tumbled forth.Yet she had captured the experience perfectly.We had both had a wonderful time—yes—grocery shopping, simply because we were there, engaging with other people. Grocery shopping had made me feel happy.
The experience with my daughter came as I found myself increasingly frustrated by online shopping. There were mistakes, especially with produce. The avocados for making guacamole arrived as hard as rocks; more than once I received someone else’s chilled food order instead of my own. I resolved to do more grocery shopping in person. This is how I have gotten to know Richard, a supermarket employee who appears to be in his late forties. He is a solid man who often wears khaki pants and strong, sensible shoes. Because he is mentally handicapped, Richard is given jobs like collecting carts, sweeping the parking lot, and raking leaves. His voice has a slight nasal quality. The rhythm of his speech is awkward, perhaps because he grows impassioned about topics many people care too little about to even discuss: the legality of burning leaves and—a favorite—the rules of operating a motor vehicle (I gather he is not allowed to drive). Nonetheless, we have had important conversations, too.