Or rather, it arrives by a faceless ghost named Toni, who, for a meager fee of $3, has ventured to Starbucks before 8 a.m., bought me an Americano with a splash of skim milk, and left it outside my building without rousing me from my Saturday-morning slumber - like Santa Claus, or a very good boyfriend.
By the time I get her text and lumber downstairs in my pajamas, Toni, who works for the D.C.-based delivery service Fetch Coffee, has vanished, leaving behind only a mysterious 1970s-era thermos with my morning jolt inside. This receptacle creeps me out a bit, but I am pleasantly surprised to find my drink still hot inside, as promised. I leave the thermos by the door, as a note instructs, so Fetch can, uh, fetch it eventually.
Fetch is my first foray into the fledgling world of on-demand services, and a success. It gives me just enough of a buzz to keep going. For a week, I order various items at whim, then sit back and wait for them to arrive.
Across the country, swarms of Tonis are weaving through traffic, racing to doorsteps and hauling away our dirty clothes or delivering our roasted-cauliflower sandwiches and handcrafted-in-the-Alps vermouth at almost the exact moment we decide that we want them.
On-demand delivery is the rage of Silicon Valley, which means that it will soon probably be the darling of Washington, where everyone works too much, no one ever has any time and just about the only consensus we've ever reached is that waiting in line is a self-inflicted torture best left to tourists and other suckers.
Now we can summon breakfast tacos, Korean fried chicken and even Shake Shack to our doors with services such as DoorDash, the Palo Alto, California-based company that also operates in Phoenix, Boston, Houston and dozens of California cities. (So high are investors on delivery services that the company picked up $40 million in funding earlier this year.)
Then there's Google Express, which will dispatch pregnancy tests from Walgreens or an Urban Decay Naked eye-shadow palette from cosmetics candy store Ulta. Glamsquad or Veluxe will send makeup artists and manicurists to your door. Drizly and Ultra and other liquor services will bring over bottom-shelf vodka or peaty Japanese whisky in an hour or less. Washio, the self-proclaimed Uber of laundry, sends "ninjas" to retrieve your unmentionables. And there is, of course, Uber, which in addition to the occasional for-kicks delivery of kittens and ice cream, is now using its drivers to make food drop-offs through a service it has dubbed Uber Eats.
I'm living the liberated dream.
Even Etsy, that often bizarre craft marketplace, is set to test same-day deliveries in New York of ... well, we don't know what yet, but probably flower crowns. Definitely flower crowns.
This, we're told, is the beginning of a future free from the humdrum obligations of previous generations, from the indignities of having to hunt for quarters for the dryer, eat in restaurants and get dressed in the morning.
The tech news site Re/Code has called it the Instant Gratification Economy, and it will transform us. Imagine the time it will give us to pursue our hobbies and our dreams, to improve our relationships. Imagine what we'll create!
I'm mulling what I'll do with all my newfound leisure time as I wait, and wait, for Postmates to deliver my roasted acorn squash and Brussels sprout tacos.
I'm living the liberated dream.
Except that Postmates, the San Francisco-based start-up that just expanded to 40 U.S. markets, has posted the wrong menu for the restaurant I selected, and there are no squash tacos. I get two calls and a text informing me that although I can't have the squash, I can have mushrooms.
Except that I have to hangrily explain to Postmates each time they call that I'm allergic to mushrooms. By the end of the second confused exchange, I'm not feeling liberated at all. I'm reaching for the Benadryl.
The inconveniences of the convenience industry prove to be a theme throughout the week: One night, as I wait for my Washio dry cleaning for an hour beyond my allotted delivery time, I find myself obsessively checking my phone in case my ninja texts. He doesn't. (In this way, he's like a bad boyfriend.)
My order for French vermouth and gin through Drizly goes far better: I get my pristine bottles in a slick Drizly bag 10 minutes into the delivery window. Cool trick, I think, as I lug the bottles upstairs, but how often will I use it? What I need is someone to spare me the drudgery of buying toilet paper.
Which is where Instacart would seem to come in. But this time, I didn't even get to the ordering. The cat litter I can get IRL for $8.99 at Giant is somehow $13.49 at Safeway through the service, plus at least $5.99 in delivery fees if I want it within the hour. (Drizly charges $5; Google Express charges $4.99 for each store you order from.) I'm all for someone else lugging 20 pounds of pet paraphernalia for me, but, I realize as I scan the prices, I'm not too good to save some money.
Mick Jagger was right: You can't always get what you want. Worse, I can't even get the things I need. (Unless I'm willing to pay 40 percent more, plus a delivery charge.)
On Google Express - delivering more free time! - I can't find the unbleached cone coffee filters I like, and the Hint of Lime tortilla chips that do make it into my online cart just as quickly go out. They've sold out before I can place my order, and besides, Google Express informs me, it can't bring my Star Wars character-shaped macaroni and cheese today, anyway. All of today's delivery times - which would have me chained to my apartment for a four-hour window - are sold out, too.
Mick Jagger was right: You can't always get what you want. Worse, I can't even get the things I need. (Unless I'm willing to pay 40 percent more, plus a delivery charge.)
I give up and drive to the store.
Delivery isn't new, of course. For decades, we've opened our doors to find newspapers, flowers, pizza, Chinese food and singing telegrams. Peapod, founded in 1989, had delivered a million grocery orders by 1998. And technically, a few entrepreneurial zealots launched on-demand delivery in the late 1990s with websites such as Urbanfetch and Kosmo.com, which could bring you Pop-Tarts and DVDs and prophylactics as fast as you could get a pizza delivered.
But now we can enter our credit card numbers directly into an app (conveniently, they'll probably be stored for all eternity). We're not afraid to tap our phone screens once or twice and be done with the whole exchange. When it comes to flagging a cab, we increasingly prefer it.
That cultural shift, says Tony Chen, co-founder of Fetch Coffee, has opened the door for a wave of these new purveyors of convenience. It's just unclear how they're going to make any money.
"The margins are not high," Chen says of his coffee business, which charges $3 per delivery and currently has only a few dozen regular subscribers. But then, he says, "most delivery companies are working on very low margins."
Photo / iStock
Low margins weren't the problem for services such as Kosmo.com, which flamed out in 2001 after losing buckets of investors' money: They were simply too early for a society that was still wary of shopping online, Chen insists.
Er, yeah, but now, even though I can have a coffee dropped on my doorstep - as long as I only want Starbucks, and as long as I want it delivered before 10 a.m. - I can't help thinking that I could just walk to the corner and get it myself.
So why do I feel like I don't have the time to do it?
Because we're working for as many hours as our bodies will let us.
"The expectations for everybody at work have really ratcheted up over the past 30 years, so then you really have no time for the stuff of life," says Brigid Schulte, a former Washington Post reporter and author of the best-selling book "Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play When No One has the Time."
It's probably not a coincidence that on-demand delivery is the brainchild of Silicon Valley, where companies offer lunches, nap areas, shuttles to work and other "perks" designed to keep employees on the job instead of stuck in traffic, or you know, working on their social lives.
What's lost in the name of efficiency? I have no friendly chats with a neighborhood barista, or the owner of my favorite sandwich place. I can't explain to the dry cleaner how sentimental I've become about my fair-trade batik-print dress from Africa. My various ninjas can text me, but I can't ever reach them.
Delivery offers speed, and escape from duties long considered drudge work, but interacting with others, says Schulte, has been proven to boost happiness.
Delivery offers speed, and escape from duties long considered drudge work, but interacting with others, says Schulte, has been proven to boost happiness. The delivery economy "does really raise those questions about human connection," she says. "Could it be that this frees up more time so that we can be with the people we do love and care about? That could potentially be a good thing.
"Or," she asks, "is it just another coarsening and distancing of ourselves from other people?"
A week into my little experiment, I wake up hungry for a banh mi. There's one restaurant in town that delivers a solid one, but it's closed on Mondays.
I've already begun to accept that delivery culture requires a lot of settling. I pretend I'm capable of going with the flow and decide that I can probably go for some Mexican food instead. But the restaurant down the street isn't open either, or so says my DoorDash app.
On a whim, I call. As it turns out, they're not closed at all. I order an avocado torta for carry-out, and just before hanging up, I ask when it will be ready.
The woman on the other end pauses. "Um, five minutes?"
As I hang up and grab my keys, I'm almost giddy. Finally, I've found the thing I've been looking for: instant gratification.
