Amazon obviously doesn’t need my endorsement; they’d be doing fine even if I never said that #actually they’re pretty good. But…it was Friday evening, and we were going to be having people over on the 4th for barbecuing and cocktaillery and such, so I placed a Whole Foods order at 9:57pm, and it was delivered to my apartment before 8am on Saturday. That’s magic. I expected that something about the process would break: maybe, at the moment I placed the order, it would turn out that there were no slots for early on the 4th, because everyone else had the same idea that I did. Or maybe, at the moment that they started shopping for groceries for me, there would be no Beyond Beef on the shelves, because—again—everyone else had the same idea. But no! Everything came to my door just fine!

This included, incidentally, 1.75 liters of Bulleit bourbon and a nice bottle of Amaro Nonino, with which to make slushy paper planes. I would have gotten Aperol through Whole Foods as well, but I gather that it doesn’t live up to whatever their food standards are: maybe an unnatural coloring agent? In any event, I order most alcohol that I need through Whole Foods, which makes me wonder how something like Drizly could ever have survived; they used to have some sort of leg up in alcohol delivery, but now they very much don’t.

We started using Whole Foods delivery in earnest—like so many other people did—during Covid. Then we had kids. Before I had kids, maybe I would have sneered at people who ordered diaper cream or baby wipes for delivery, but it was awfully handy to not have to leave a baby’s side when the need for a grocery occurred to me.

It’s also just very handy to do grocery delivery when the alternative for me—a non-driver—is walking 15 minutes to the grocery store, loading up a granny cart (or the excellent baby stroller we used to use), and then schlepping 15 minutes back home. And we’re quite lucky with our grocery-store situation: within a short walk of us there’s a Whole Foods, a Trader Joe’s, a Shaw’s, and until recently a Foodie’s. Folks in the suburbs seem to be used to loading a child or two into a carseat, driving to the store, driving back, etc.; as a pedestrian, I’d just rather not, especially during the winter.

Whole Foods has arguably gotten worse since Amazon took it over, so I reserve the right to throw out my praise of Amazon and Whole Foods in the future. And I don’t really understand how the Whole Foods business model (put a lot of beautiful produce on shelves in artful display) continues to exist when (to my eye) most of the people doing the shopping in the store are doing it for people who get groceries delivered: wouldn’t you think that they’d cut out the store and just have robots pick things in warehouses? Nevertheless, it persists for now, and I for one would like to give a shout out to Whole Foods for making this part of my life a little easier.