Tag: online shopping

Death of a Pig

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(Apologies to E.B. White, and my mother, who considered his to be a perfect essay)

I spent several minutes this morning with a disemboweled stuffed pig and I feel I might account for this stretch of time, though I threw away the pig, and I was only mildly inconvenienced, and things might never have gone the other way round. Only thanks to technology, and the video I made, at 10:30 a.m., can I recall the minutes sharply. This certainty afflicts me with a sense of personal responsibility; if I were not so distracted I could have saved the stuffed pig.

The scheme of buying a stuffed pig online, from Wag dot com in December of 2014, and giving it to Captain on Christmas morning, was an impulse, following the success of their online marketing.  It was a transaction enacted by many households with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder of the stuffed pig, being premeditated, is perhaps only remarkable in its delay. Captain’s vigorous attempts no match for the tough toy, lasting years and years, but the quick and skillful destruction came from the teeth and jaws of the much younger Fellow, and the strewn stuffing and disemboweled pig met an unceremonial ending in the trash. 

In the baffling sameness of days during this pandemic, today might have been yesterday or the day before. Fellow visited the basket of stuffed toys that sits on top of his kennel. He began to play with it, with Eggi looking on. The Bacon Provider, who never stops working now and certainly never did before, gravely tapped away at his laptop keyboard, answering a final email before his next call. Otherwise the kitchen was quiet. I looked over out of presentiment. Stuffing surrounded the busy young dog. Eggi, wholly innocent at this point, made eye-contact with me. The loss we felt was not the loss of a toy but the loss of tidy room. She stood and took the pig-shaped pelt from Fellow with a quick, low, bitchy growl, and set to work rending it herself.  But I am getting ahead of my story and shall have to go back.

From July of 2013 to April of 2017, I happily bought all of my dog and cat food from Wag dot com. What a convenience to have the drudgery of regular monthly errand replaced by a UPS delivery.  When Wag dot com was acquired by Amazon, the pet food specialty site was shut down, and absorbed into the soulless, impossible-to-search morass of the world’s largest online retailer. Surely this is the sort of anti-competitive behavior America has laws against? Oh well, the country had its hands full, utterly avoiding being ready for several of the main challenges we face today. I switched to Chewy.com and did not mourn the loss of another online retailer. 

It was in early December, 2014, when I bought a large Tuffy Polly Pig Plush Dog Toy, without understanding quite how large it was. It was quite large. You can’t always tell with online shopping. The dog it was intended for was Captain, and he enjoyed it, and was unable to open it and pull out the stuffing, which was a thing he did back then. In the years since, other dogs visited and played with it, and the pig endured. We got a puppy, who preferred smaller stuffed toys, and grew up. We got another puppy, and he is a large boy of almost two and a half years now. He plays with everything.

Fellow has my riding gloves

Is there a sock that came off with your muddy boots on the floor in the back hall? Fellow will bring it to you. Or, he will sneak it to his bed and chew it gently, eventually tucking it into the folds of the dog bed to save for later. Is there a stick in the yard, between the sizes of postcard and fencerail? Fellow will take that in his mouth and trot around the yard, clacking it in his jaws, or plowing up the turf and swinging it mightily and dangerously, with no regard for his or others’ safety. Is there a small, forgotten, cat-nip filled stuffed mouse in a basket of neglected cat toys? Fellow will have a romping good time with it, until you take it away on the grounds that he might swallow it. Fellow has a large basket of appropriate dog toys, too, and will on occasion, play with these, choosing one for himself after a studied selection process whereby he picks and rejects other stuffed squirrels and novelty plush sandwiches until he finds, at last, the one he was looking for. 

There is a blur in time now, as you may know, and our pets all love how much we are all staying home. Frankly, I might have forgotten the pig had not Fellow recently been picking it and shaking it and leaping about the kitchen with it. It seemed intact the last time I chucked it back in the toy bin at the momentary burst of tidying I do at the end of each day. Was it actually torn, or weakened in the seams? 

Fellow was silently pulling out the stuffing and going in for more. Stuffing expands as it is removed, and this plush pig had been made taut and hard as a drum it was so well-stuffed and sturdy. The fabric of its exterior, once penetrated, surrendered completely to the plucking teeth of the dog. Fellow surrounded himself with the extricated filling.

In the next moment, Eggi asserted herself and took it, settling nearby to rip and chewy and  involve her teeth in the texture of the fabric. 

I knelt, taking the pig from her without scolding. Though I didn’t see either dog eat any of it, it isn’t safe to let this continue. Eggi seemed disappointed, but Fellow had a mild look, expressive of the deep pleasure of toy-having and toy-killing, and no more hurt by my taking it from Eggi as he was in surrendering it to her. 

I carried the pig to the trash and went back for the stuffing. Two armloads. 

It is Thursday, my blog posting day, so the news of the death of this pig can travel faster and farther than in generations past. In my email, I was able to track down the stuffed toy, where and when obtained, and order another, to be delivered with our next shipment of kibble and cat litter from Chewy. 

The pig is so easily replaced it will be as if it never left. 

The good, the bad, and the ugly of Fresh Direct

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People like to say that you can get anything delivered in Manhattan. I think they say this to avoid saying something more important: getting stuff into your apartment is a huge pan in the ass.
My car (beloved replacement of a previous car) lives in a near-ish garage, rides up an elevator to a grubby and cramped parking spot, and costs as much to keep in the city as anyone might pay for an apartment in someplace less ridiculous. Driving anywhere around here is almost always unnecessary, and almost always fraught with peril, so I see my car once a week or less, when I go to the country to ride horses. For the purposes of running errands, I schlepp like other New Yorkers and I buy things and have them delivered.
I can carry four very full bags of groceries if I can pack them myself in canvas bags and use my folding luggage cart. Grocery checkers in New York City realize that those of us who come with bags and carts of our own expect to pack ourselves, so the smart ones stand back and let us do it. The walk home is tricky, though, since there are so many kinds of pavement in my neighborhood (cracked, smooth, asphalt, granite, old granite, cobblestones) and then there are all the manholes. Finally there is a high curb on my block that must be navigated. Usually, I have the whole thing tip over at some point.
One expensive grocery store will deliver everything except the frozen food for a minor fee, though they often have a five hour backlog, which requires planning ahead by half a day. If I can plan ahead by a bit more, I can order my groceries from FreshDirect.com, and they will be delivered to the counter of my kitchen for the same fee and will arrive within a pre-arranged window of my choosing, about 1 ½ hours long.
The good things about Fresh Direct are centered on the convenience of it.  You can work from a list; you can search on an item by name from the comfort of your chair.  They remember that you like Newman’s Own Pink Lemonade and show it to you whenever you ask for lemonade. When eggs arrive broken, you send an email and they give you credit immediately. They have most of the staples you might need, and many of the cleaning supplies.
The bad things about Fresh Direct are many little things.  Because you do not choose your produce, your eight yams may range in size and shape making them hard to peel and handle.  A couple of your pears will be misshapen and unappealing. They choose huge bananas, and you can’t ask for smaller ones.  Since you do not actually see the items you are buying, the packages of bacon may be just the sort of all-white, fatty, broken slices that you would set aside while you looked for pink ones.  Quantities are sometimes not apparent, so when you casually click on four non-fat vanilla yogurts, they might be 32 ounce containers instead of the expected 8 ounce containers.  How many jalapenos is ¼ pound? Fragile things like bananas come carefully wrapped in a layer of plastic foam packing material which was probably never intended for use on food and certainly doesn’t protect from bruising. Once you’ve bought something a couple of times, the site calls it your “fave” and highlights it with a star, even if it really isn’t your “fave.” Eggs are more expensive and often arrive broken.  FreshDirect doesn’t have everything I want (rooibos tea, Shout Color-Catching sheets, organic buttermilk), and while I can request as many items as I want with their handy form, I feel like I’m shouting into a well. Everything comes in cardboard boxes that must be broken down and recycled. 
Things get downright ugly when items are suddenly not available and so are not delivered, leaving you without any Italian sausage when you are making marinara. You do get an email telling you that you will receive credit for the missing items, but at that point you might be so peeved that you have to go out and buy a replacement that you come close to sending an all-caps reply. One night I got an email saying that “due to a power outage your order was cancelled,” and went on to describe the simple steps for placing the same order. As it was, I was leaving town the next day and could not get a new delivery window, so I did fire off an angry email. For my trouble I got a hefty discount.
My biggest problem with shopping for groceries online is that there is no store to walk through, so I consistently forget things I would ordinarily not miss. I want a 3D store, with a tiny 3D shopping-me who can walk the aisles, see the cauliflower and the Rice Chex, and hold the orange juice carton in her hand.