The other night, in a restaurant, two friends of mine confessed, in the face of growing alarm over the coronavirus, to having indulged in a little light stockpiling. Bright-eyed, if not absolutely zealous, they spoke of tinned haricot beans as the future, and of fresh orange juice as (RIP) the past. After this, someone made a joke about scurvy, at which everyone laughed rather too loudly. But the moment swiftly passed. Our dinner – beef with roast potatoes and hispi cabbage – had begun arriving at our table in quantities generous enough that our talk had suddenly started to seem a bit ludicrous.
On the way home, I laughed about this: how we love a drama. If I could have remembered it, I would have hummed the theme to Survivors, the 70s TV show about a plague that has spread across the world thanks to air travel. But the next day, it was my turn to start worrying about vitamin tablets and shelf lives. At Ocado, Britain’s biggest online supermarket, shares had apparently jumped thanks to the fact that so many customers were placing “particularly large” orders. Delivery slots were selling out. Suddenly, I was receiving the message with zero distortion: basically, only a fool would risk having to go into a 14-day quarantine without ready supplies of – we’re talking about Ocado here! – organic couscous and those new-fangled bags of frozen avocado I’ve seen advertised.
Ever since, I’ve found myself wondering whether, whatever else it achieves, Covid-19 will come to have a permanent effect on shopping habits. I think it will certainly lead to an increased interest in vegetarianism. But might it also succeed where Ocado, Tesco and others have seemingly failed, by getting more people to try online shopping, and thus to convince them that it isn’t, after all, such a bad idea? For this – that it’s a bad idea – is what a lot of people do indeed seem to think. A decade ago, it was thought that 40% of the grocery market would have moved online by 2025. Last month, however, one industry body revised this figure downwards to just 7.7% by 2024. Unlike the rest of the high street, growth at supermarkets lies not in online shopping, but in convenience stores, and discounters such as Lidl and Aldi, which do not deliver.
To be honest, I was much more amazed by this fact than I was by the revelation that people I know are hoarding fusilli. No one could be a pickier shopper than me: I’ve only to see a melon to sniff it. And yet, I always shop online now. There are still things I only buy in my local shops – croissants, cheese, salad, herbs – and our milk is delivered in glass bottles. For everything else, however, I get out my laptop. This saves me money – I make fewer impulse buys online – and it means, too, that I don’t use my car for a short journey (to be as green as possible, I only book a delivery if the van is already in my area). Above all, it gives me the gift of time. I can order my shopping in hotel rooms when I’m working away, or at home late at night, and this has changed my life to the point where bricks and mortar supermarkets have become almost alien to me. I can’t seem to navigate them any more.
Earlier this year, I walked around a Co-op, dazed and slightly confused, wondering where the nutmeg was, and longing all the while for my virtual basket. At the till, I kept having to run back for things – items my online account would have reminded me I needed, and which I was going to struggle to carry anyway. I was in Yorkshire, and the woman serving me was patient and lovely. But for all that I’m a deracinated northerner, I found to my surprise that her accent was not much more comforting to me at this point in my life than another all-too-familiar sound: that of plastic boxes being humped from van to pavement. Thunk, thunk they go – a noise that turns my thoughts inevitably to supper and, just lately, to my own (I admit it) nascent stockpile. It is rather teabag heavy at the moment. Nevertheless, it grows exponentially, with every other unsettling headline.
rachel.cooke@observer.co.uk
