The Pandemic Soul

Imagine: it’s 8:30pm on a Sunday night. You’ve just spent the whole day at Long Beach pride in the sweltering heat, and your face is burnt crispy. You’ll be peeling for weeks, which is gross. Moreover, you wore flip-flops because you wanted to look super hot for all the studly men with no shirts on, but in the end you just made yourself look like someone who had run their feet through a meat-grinder. Then, you had to take your dog for the world’s longest walk (this time in running-shoes, thankfully), because he likes to see you suffer before he poops.

Okay, now imagine you’re at home, you’ve eaten through everything appetizing in your kitchen (which included two mugs of goldfish crackers and — well, that’s it), and you’re hungry as hell. God, pizza sounds amazing right now, doesn’t it? But wait! You’ve lost 20 pounds in the last few months from all the walking you’ve done with that stubborn dog! You already drank a gallon of soda today, so don’t throw away the rest of your gains! What’s a guy to do?

Search the internet for home grocery delivery, that’s what. I could really go for some cut strawberries right now and something else really good for me. But I’ll be damned if I’m going down to the local Ralph’s just to find out that they’re out of any produce that isn’t wilted to shit. Jesus, my face looks like I bathed in a fountain of fire today.

So, imagine my surprise when I search for “Grocery delivery in LA” and “yummy.com” pops up, stating that they deliver 8am to midnight 365 days a year within 30 minutes. Shitmonsters, how have I lived without this?!

With a quick registration — the only annoying part of which is the username portion, which has to be under 10 letters, WTF? — I’m able to browse the available goods. I’m annoyed to find that the coconut cake is, apparently, out of stock, mostly because through some horrible fluke of programming retardation, they have the coconut cake listed but non-intuitively “frozen out,” so that you can’t click the “buy” button. Why not just have it, ohIdon’tknow, NOT APPEAR? Just tease me, why don’t you?

I pick the following: one pint of “fresh strawberries,” a package of red seedless grapes, a roast beef sandwich on pretzel bread (when ordering sandwiches, they let you put a ‘note’ in there, but don’t really specify what for, so I took a chance and told them no tomatoes), and a “Brownie Cheesecake Dessert” thing, since the coconut cake was all sold out.

You have to order at least $15, and there’s a $3.99 delivery fee, which is a little deceptive, since they also then tack on a “fuel surcharge.” I’m not sure if that’s pro-rated based on your location, but mine came out to be $0.80, and I live near Franklin & Western, and this store is apparently in West Hollywood.

Once on the “checkout” screen, here’s what my tally was:

• Brownie Cheescake Dessert: $3.99
• Roast Beef Sandwich: $7.99
• Fresh Strawberries: $4.98
• Grapes - Green Seedless: $3.99
• Delivery Fee: $3.99
• Fuel Surcharge: $0.80
• Tax on Delivery: $0.40
• Total: $26.14

I removed the grapes, as I wanted to be under the $23 w/tip that I normally pay for a small pizza with delicious Parmesan-garlic bread-sticks swimming in heart-stopping seasoned oil with a garlic-butter dip. The system then took me through a few-step process to enter my credit card and even gave me the opportunity to enter a coupon, and schedule a time for delivery, or deliver now, before telling me that my order was on the way and helpfully offering a phone number in case I needed it.

In the meantime, I pondered how wise it was to order food from a company I’ve never heard about, so I took a look at their “Help” page and found out that this is actually the re-branded HomeGrocer, which had started in the heady internet boom of the 90’s with day-after delivery. I also found some very positive reviews on Yelp, Yahoo!, and CitySearch.

The food arrived in approximately 25 minutes. A clean-cut blonde-haired, blue-eyed twink in a clean green shirt (! — you never get THAT with Papa John’s) with the yummy.com logo on it, and khaki pants. He had some kind of yuppy name like “Brad” or “Scott,” but I didn’t commit it to memory. Amazingly, the receipt had a place to put a tip (convenient!), but I gave him $3 in cash. He was cheerful and smiley from the moment I opened the door, and even wished me a “good night” when he helpfully closed my screen door carefully and walked down the stairs.

I don’t condone plastic bags over paper bags (why create more plastic waste?), but I must admit it was easy to carry (more convenience! ooh!). Once I opened it, I found two pints of strawberries (whoops! did I order two?!), the small cheesecake thing, and my sandwich packaged in one of those cute white take-out boxes. Also included were a catalog of food, a useful number of napkins, and a fork. Wonderful!

The sandwich was not on pretzel bread, which was a little bit of a bummer, but nonetheless was yummy and fresh on what looked like a baguette. The strawberries were a bit bruised, but I cut up one batch and found them more flavorful than the ones I normally get at Ralph’s, so I was okay with it. The cheescake brownie thing was delightful and just big enough to top off a good meal, but not big enough to feel guilty about.

In generally, I’m pretty pleased with the experience. It’s certainly healthier than Papa John’s, for the same price, and in less time. The food was altogether fresh, well packaged, and delivered with a smile. The website could use some tweaking — for example, there’s no way to review a past order, as far as I could tell, and general conventions like putting a link to your account at the top of the page near your username were apparently deemed unnecessary. But it got the job done.

I give it an A-, and recommend it to all. I will definitely be using it again!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that if I hadn’t accidentally ordered two pints of strawberries, I would have been under the $23 limit, with tip, that I mentioned above. Also, there were no tomatoes on the sandwich, just as I asked, and the little receipt you see on the sandwich box in the photo was apparently for the sandwich artist, as it includes the note on there. Huzzah!