Lately I feel that most of my day is swallowed up by waiting for deliveries. It's the irony of online shopping convenience . Point and click, and poof you're done. Except if you miss that 8 hour window of delivery, you spend a day tracking down packages, and poof your day is fucked.
I know that it's not just a New York thing, but living in New York intensifies the cult of delivery. Not having a car just makes it inevitable. If one has more than eight blocks to go and more than an armload to carry, shopping becomes a frigging pain. Especially grocery shopping. Hence the popularity of
Fresh Direct.*
Last year I sampled one of the more self-indulgent sub-groups of the cult of delivery; sending out the wash. Our coinless on-site laundry was really no more than a washer and dryer stuck in a shack, and my roommate and I discovered belatedly that we wouldn't have access to our on-site laundry during the winter because the water would be shut off. Moral: ALWAYS READ THE FINE PRINT.
For some reason (and this is still the case) the idea of spending a day at the laundromat was unthinkable. I've always had on-site laundry, coined and coinless, but always, always in or near the the building. So the concept of walking two blocks, paying to do my laundry, and losing a day of reading (or whatever) was just unacceptable. Being me, I went to Google and discovered yes indeed, one could in fact, schedule a laundry pickup and delivery, all online. It was a bit odd actually. Nobody aside from my mom has done my laundry in years and the idea of people touching, and possibly losing (er something), articles of clothing was troubling. But strange as it my seem, my roommate and I decided that it was worth a shot for the price. So we did. And for a while it was. It was very decadent to receive a bag of neatly folded, freshly washed clothing, and not have to the bear the indignity of hauling, washing, and folding. The drawback was, of course, the four hour pick up and delivery window, amounting to a total of eight hours of being held hostage in our house. It seemed worth it at the time. And then service fell off.
Yeah, it was bound to happen. Clothes came back late and damp. Pickup times were missed. Luckily right around then we got our laundry room privileges back. So things were good. Until I moved and had to figure out how to get laundry done again.
It's inevitable. Unless you physically have control over something i.e. buying it and bringing it home, or carrying and folding your own damn laundry, you are at the mercy of screw ups and even without mistakes, you still end up waiting. And paying for it.
Lately I've been splitting the difference. If I can buy it and bring it home I do. For some things, there's just no way around the delivery thing. Like the bed frame and mattress I bought. Books and stuff though are easily dealt with. On the laundry front--well--I still contract that out. Oh well.
But I do drop it off and pick it up myself,.
*Freshdirect is probably the one service I could wholeheartedly participate, if they would ever see fit to deliver to my zip code.
