Sunday, April 26, 2020

New Services

Delivered groceries were just coming in. Our local chains quickly became overwhelmed, and began only taking orders to be scheduled a week out.  As many people, of any vulnerability category whatsoever, are going to prefer to order things online more and more, there will be more of these services and they will employ more people.  I am not saying that your local supermarket is going to be obsolete, but hybrid forms are going to be more common.

This will also be true of restaurants.  There will be more specialising in takeout, and even fabulous room-based chefs are going to star figuring out how to make meals that can move across town. We are not quite ready for the virtual reality of pairing meals with rented environments of "London 1898,"  "Paris 1927," and "NYC 1960," but it's not that far off, either.

No, of course it won't be the same as actually being there, but as we can't go there even in its modern form at the moment, and even when it comes back it will be very expensive, there will be a market.  Here's the fun part:  there will be a market for Faux London, Faux Paris, Faux New York. In the same way that pizza and Italian food are not all that authentic, nor is Chinese food in America* very much what they eat in ...Hunan, the VR market will cater to what people think is authentic. Chef Louis isn't stupid.  Anyone can quick-google what the rich actually did eat in London in 1898, but he will prepare what you think was authentic and will spend money on. Enterprising young souls will also figure out what the children will eat that you can advertise to them as Florence 1568 or Jerusalem AD 63, so you can make it a repeatable history lesson.

Our church is already planning to keep the online services going even after we can get together.  This is not only because many of us will not want to go to the high risk of weekly contact in an enclosed area with 300 other people, some of them quite close, but because even after all that risk is reduced to as low as it's going to get**, some folks will decide that staying home and clicking on the church's Sunday menu is what they actually want. Compare, watching the NFL on TV versus going to the stadium.  People increasingly view going to the stadium as an occasional adventure, while preferring to stay at home. Whoa.  Maybe churches that provide replay, commentary, and analysis are going to start finding a niche!

What else is going to become delivery vs in-person going forward?

* I have read that the American version of Chinese food is now available in Chinese cities

**I think that means, even after a vaccine, two annual diseases that kill lots of people.  Doesn't that clearly imply a third and a fourth?  We will live different from here on in.

4 comments:

Grim said...

...nor is Chinese food in America* very much what they eat in ...Hunan

China is quite like the USA in having regional cuisines that are markedly different from one another. The food is spicy in Sichuan, bland in Zhejiang (although Hangzhou in Zhejiang has a nice fish dish with a sweet glaze). I did have some good yak in Singapore.

It's a pretty alien cuisine all around. In general I liked everything I had no idea what it was, but anything I thought I knew what I was getting disappointed because it wasn't what I'd expected. Once I bought what I thought were french fried potatoes, but turned out to be chickens' feet. Why would you even fry chicken feet? There's hardly any flesh. But they do.

Once I recognized mid-meal that I was eating stomach, which as a haggis-eating Cimmerian doesn't bother me a bit. My lunchtime comrade, a fellow teacher at the college where I was working, asked me how I liked the food, and I shrugged. "Well, it's offal," I said. "Awful!" she cried, looking very upset. I had to explain about the homonym.

My favorite thing was a garlic eggplant dish that we got at a place whose name I never learned; we just called it "the Yellow Restaurant." That and a street food egg pancake this one lady made, with God knows what in it. It was fantastic, whatever it was. My least favorite things were the breads, which were steamed instead of baked; the cakes had almost no sugar in them, because of a deathly cultural fear of getting fat.

Donna B. said...

Grim, I supposedly ate haggis once, but I suspect it was the tourist version -- mostly oats, little meat, poorly seasoned, and almost without flavor. I was told that the lack of flavor was what made it authentic. Could be true.

Grim said...

The stuff is great if properly presented. With lots of Scotch, that is. I have no reason to complain about any haggis I’ve ever eaten.

Seriously, it’s been a pleasant experience every time.

Christopher B said...

Two thoughts.

Subscription delivery of various semi-essentials is probably also going to get a boost. I've been getting coffee and shaving products that way for a couple of years.

Taking a long view, we've always had multiple respiratory viruses that killed vulnerable people. We just chalked them up to the same generic 'flu' or 'pneumonia'. As recently as 2009 we had a round of H1N1 (even if most everybody ignored it for some reason). 2017-2018 was another big year for deaths attributed to influenza. The big change came when we started being able to track these bugs genetically and then developed influenza vaccines. Since our experience with vaccinations for the last half-century is primarily with childhood disease vaccinations that have all but eliminated those as a cause of death, our initial expectation is that influenza vaccinations should do the same thing even though we know it doesn't work that way. C19 is a reminder that in order to eliminate a disease you have to develop herd immunity, either through exposure or vaccination, and that it takes years of work to accomplish.