“Customers are increasingly demanding quicker answers to their needs. They don’t want to plan, and they don’t want to wait.”
In a recent blog post, Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal, explained his rationale behind joining the 10-minute delivery rat race. The announcement was met with criticism on social media, with many raising the question of utility of such a service as well as the possibility of putting delivery partners at risk on roads. However, the statement above from his post seems to have largely escaped scrutiny.
While Zomato was among the first pan-India companies to offer home delivery for food, the 10-minute race was set in motion when Zepto secured $100 million in funding in December last year. The Mumbai-based startup was set up by two 19-year-olds, Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra, almost exactly a year ago and they are already worth $570 million. Their ground-breaking idea? Delivering your groceries in 10 minutes. Blinkit, formerly Grofers, followed suit and the other major player in the market, Swiggy, too aims to deliver many such essentials in 30 minutes or less through its Instamart service. In comparison, likes of Big Basket may be seen as dinosaurs because they can take up to 24 hours to deliver your orders.
Zepto founders, both Stanford University dropouts, got their idea during the pandemic-induced lockdowns last year when they were unable to get their groceries at home. Right away, then, they set out to service the online groceries market in India which is estimated to grow to $25 billion by 2025. But pandemic or not, we have to ask ourselves — do we really need our groceries that quickly and if yes, then why?
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Goyal’s statement offers some quick food for thought, albeit worryingly so. Journalist and author Paul Roberts in his book The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification, goes into detail about the origins of a market economy structured around the individual and its social, political and financial impact on the society. According to him, the story starts with the man responsible for the rise of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, in the early 20th century. While Henry Ford’s cars were more like Nokia’s durable but boring-looking phones, Sloan’s Chevrolet cars seemed to mimic the modern-day aspirations around Apple’s shiny iPhone. It was not accidental but very much intentional. He didn’t just want to sell a car to a consumer but wanted the same consumer to buy and replace a car every few years. To do this, he targeted the consumer psyche and hired “armies of sociologists, psychologists, and even Freudian analysts to catalogue the whole battery of inner conditions that play a dynamic part in a person’s buying or not buying”. Sloan would introduce a minor new feature in a new car and build a narrative of higher status around it, goading status-climbers to purchase it if they wanted to be seen as more successful.
So, what connects Sloan’s cars to 10-minute online groceries delivered at your doorstep in India? The very same targeted manipulation of the consumer psyche. Once the addictive drug is administered, there’s no escaping the addiction. No wonder, then, since food deliveries started becoming more and more ubiquitous in India, consumers started demanding quicker response rates, as evidenced by Goyal’s admission. More and more, Roberts’ wrote, individuals had the capacity to gratify their desires at society’s expense and in this case, it’s not hard to see how 10-minute deliveries can put the delivery partners at risk on roads.
Many social media users also pointed out that they would rather have 10-minute ambulance services. But while investing in ambulances requires investors and entrepreneurs to think about the larger public good, there’s much more money to be made in the market of the self because of the bottomless appetite of the individual self to demand more and more satisfaction. To re-read how Goyal looks at his consumers and panders to their demands, like the rest of the VC funding fuelled e-commerce market, it is easy to see why there is a need to pause and rethink not just the 10-minute deliveries but a society increasingly being hooked to instant gratification.
We’re constantly being hit by advertisements and aspirations to buy a product or use a service. These calls-to-action are being sent our way in an increasing number of ways, more aggressively, and more sneakily. From storytelling marketing to make us feel good about consuming, daily prompts to order pizza for dinner, the promise of social media likes if we take a trip to that coveted destination that season, and EMI options to buy the latest gadget — the consumer psyche is constantly being poked to consume more and more and as quickly as possible. We indulge in fast fashion, fast food, smart tech, and so much more because we’re either too busy to care or high on adrenaline of one kind or the other.
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In the West, where the treadmill of instant gratification has already crashed to a great extent, if not entirely, there are many ‘slow living’ movements that have arisen in response. As early as 1989, there was the Slow Food manifesto and following that, there have been many more such movements such as a recent call for Slow Books to read books slowly. Getting our needs or desires, whether those of hunger, status, or projecting an ideal self-image, met in the quickest possible time is probably not what we really want. However, in our quest for instant gratification, we may cause untold damage to ourselves and the environment which may not be easy to reverse.
This is not mere cautioning towards our collective short-term sustainability but for our long-term survival as well. Pandering to the merest of individual whims and fancies at the cost of larger public interests and resources is sure to cost us stability of our economic, political, and socio-cultural systems. With its volumes of market, India can probably be much more sensitive to fractures that can crop up as a result of the cult of instant gratification than a relatively homogenous and smaller Western population. For this reason, the next time a unicorn comes around bearing shiny new things, it may be wiser to check if its gilded.
Garima Garg is a Delhi-based journalist and author. Her upcoming book Heavens and Earth: The Story of Astrology Through Ages and Cultures, formerly a Westland Publications title, will be published in 2022. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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