MAGAZINE Voices Anand Neelakantan Sheila kumar Ajai Sahni neha sinha sunaina anand Mata Amritanandamayi Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment NEW DELHI December 22 2024 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Delivery of Instant Gratification The de-personalisation syndrome in Indian society is happening faster with instant delivery apps becoming the norm, leading to the dwindling of social interaction, neighbourhood bonding and tactile shopping experiences I By Vernika Awal magine this. Your son has forgotten his homework at home. You are dropping him to school and there is no time to turn back. You pull out your phone and click on Blinkit. In less than a half hour, printouts are hand delivered to you on location. Effort is superfluous beyond opening a widget. Your wife tells you she heard the reviews of Gladiator II were super. You go to Zomato to book the tickets. Wait, isn’t Zomato for food orders? Not any more. Feeling lonely, or are too lazy to romance? Book a speed dating evening on BookMyShow. Meanwhile, you’ve heard of the kite flying in a 200-year-old haveli. It’s there on BookMyShow, too. Someone is coming over for dinner and the curtains look shabby—no time for dry-cleaning. Zepto will deliver new curtains of your choice on time at your doorstep. Amazon Fresh will deliver vegetables and groceries of your choice. So will Swiggy. Uber Eats deliver food home, giving Zomato competition. In the age of instant gratification, where millennials and GenZ are too impatient to wait or don't feel like making the extra effort to go out to buy a pack of smokes or a Coke instead of Netflix and chilling, and GenAlpha wants a pizza (extra cheese please) without putting down the PS5 Pro, life waits at your fingertips. Have cell phone, will not travel. Just order. Mental health experts say that the syndrome has caused a shift in the overall customer mindset. Deeksha Kalra, a clinical psychologist at Gurugram, Haryana’s Artemis Hospital points at the psychological trade-offs associated with quick commerce. “The process of grocery shopping, for example, once involved planning, adjusting to what was available, and money management. These activities taught us important emotional skills such as patience, resourcefulness and flexibility, which come useful in stress management. Today, instant availability has made us less tolerant of waiting, and less organised in managing our resources and time,” she warns. The triumph of instant gratification is the ease with which desires are satisfied faster than you can rub Aladdin’s lamp. Take Lego lover Anisha Jennifer Sharma. On a hot August morning earlier this year, the 36-year-old corporate professional living in Delhi spotted Lego toy sets on the 10-minute grocery delivery platform, Blinkit. Sharma, who is also a hobbyist toy collector, was about to place an order for coffee—but ended up buying six sets of Lego kits. Eventually, she ended up spending four times the amount she had intended to. Had she made the threeminute walk to the local grocery store right next to her apartment and buy the coffee that she wanted to buy, she would have saved the money. But hey, that’s the fun of shopping, and shopping in comfort. Sharma has no complaints. “It is an immense convenience to get anything you’ve run out at home be delivered to you in 10 minutes. Apps such as Blinkit feel like an extended departmental store, and I love that,” she chuckles. Sharma’s is one of many, ever-growing instances where quick commerce is transforming retail therapy in urban and suburban India with smartphones. Says 32-year-old Bengaluru resident and home chef Aarzu Sadana, “At two in the morning, I had this sudden craving for gulab jamuns. I ordered the only available pre-mix in the vicinity through Dunzo, and it was with me in just around 20 minutes!” The 44-year-old Raghuram Kalleta from Hyderabad was visiting a friend, and wanted copies of photos they had shot during a trip. “I simply ordered a pen drive on Blinkit, and it was there with me in 10 minutes, without needing any of us to break a sweat,” he says. Another friend story is more versatile. The 36-year-old Bengaluru-based corporate professional, Eric John, was getting ready to leave his friend’s place and turned to Uber. No cabs were available. His solution was: “I booked a parcel pick-up request on Dunzo from my then-location to my residence. Once the delivery agent arrived, I requested him to take me along in exchange for a tip. I Dunzoed myself across town, and it was a lifesaver,” he says, in what is probably one of the more innovative applications of quick ‘commerce’. Each of these diverse instances represent services that were once either unavailable, or required a quick run to a local store which has specific closing times. A slew of venture capital-backed startups are here today to fulfill a rising demand for fast and curious. Some of these have been around for a while. There is Urban Company which will send you a plumber or carpenter at a time you like, or a massage or a haircut. Drinking water company Drink Prime will lease and install ROs at home; no need to buy one. The push for adopting instant commerce began with the advent of e-commerce at the turn of the previous decade, when homegrown Flipkart started to replace physical bookstores with online deals. Soon, Amazon joined the party—by 2014, e-commerce was not only picking up pace, but raced full steam ahead. This further accelerated after demonetisation in 2016 by pushing widespread adoption of online shopping, even for groceries and vegetables. The rise of digital payments through Google Pay, Paytm and other such apps gave money its Star Trek moment—“Beam me up Scottie!” E-commerce platforms today account for over 50 per cent of all smartphones sold in the country—meaning that more buyers prefer to buy their phones online, as opposed to going to a shop to check out an expensive purchase in the flesh. The benefit? Sheer convenience over the risk of getting a defective item. The idea of instant services has spread to every field you can imagine. Tata-owned online pharmacist 1mg home delivers medicines in select regions within an hour. Fresh meat and poultry upstarts do doorstep delivery across India within 15 minutes. Even local courier services are being replaced by parcel services of Uber, Porter, Borzo and WeFast. Such competition has forced legacy outstation courier providers such as DTDC to offer doorstep pickup within hours. Even pet services are going digital. Startups such as Sploot today offer at-home pet grooming services, while botany and plantation ventures such as Ugaoo sell exotic home plants directly to home. The ‘instant delivery syndrome’ is creating wants over necessities. It promotes a bunch of low-value transactions of things not really needed: the more you see, the faster you get, is the golden mantra of the new retail revolution. Hence phone screens have become shop windows and sellers are happy with Google Pay; even the local paanwallah will send you the QR code. These transactions may not be of low value for too long, since most quick commerce startups are delving into categories such as jewellery and electronics to ramp-up their overall order values, while bringing more and more people under their umbrella. The sight of the delivery boy whizzing past traffic signals on busy city roads has become synonymous today with quick commerce How It All Began In an investor note on quick commerce ventures published in February this year, Mumbai-based brokerage firm JM Financial explained why quick commerce is primed for success. It seems the impact of Covid-19 is still unfolding in more ways than ever. Turn to page 2