I have been boycotting delivery services for the past few weeks. Well, not all of them. My milk delivery continues daily, and I have a new fruit guy on Mondays and Thursdays, but most of the others are on my own personal blacklist due to their repeated failure to provide me with anything of acceptable quality, if the goods even show up at all. In short, I am really sick of sh*t stuff.
It started with a school bag I ordered for Jasper. I saw it on amazon, and it caught my eye because I recognised the design. I was searching the terms ‘elephant kids backpack’ and I found exactly what I had in mind; a small blue and grey velvet backpack that I had seen in Boots in Jersey. Excited, I completed a speedy purchase and sat by the door for three days awaiting its arrival. As I knifed my way through the tape and tore open the excessive packaging, my heart sank. The colours were wrong, the size was far larger than the ones I had seen in Jersey, and the zips showed clear signs of being permanently misaligned. Inside, the fabric looked like scraps cast off from 2020 and 2021’s hazmat extravaganza and the stitching on the straps didn’t look like it’d survive a week. I checked back on the amazon app to compare the product with the picture and realised my mistake; I had naively judged the product by the image alone, and not by any of the misspelt description, lack of brand name and bad reviews.
Jasper started to use the bag to carry his snacks, water and spare clothes to and from school and within a week, the elephant had no eyes. One strap broke and was sewn back up by Seema. The other strap broke and was similarly repaired by me. I bemoaned my poor judgement to a fellow mother in our compound, and she pointed me in the direction of a website which in her words “has very nice things” for babies and children. It was a site I was already familiar with as I had previously had great success with Jasper’s bookshelves from there. Buoyed by my first-hand positive experience, I found a similar backpack, but this time in the form of a tiger. No sooner had I opened this latest of deliveries when I noticed that they had taken an interesting approach to avoiding the eyes falling off; the tiger had no eyes at all. The quality was almost identical to the sad elephant, except this tiger was already blind. I didn’t have the energy to complain or return the blind tiger and chose instead to donate it to our housekeeper’s niece, while adding that website to my blacklist. I briefly removed it from its semi-permanent sin bin in order to buy an outfit for Jasper to wear to the latest festival we attended. But when the website cancelled my order one day before the festival, with no explanation, I tossed it straight back on the ‘Do Not Waste Your Time’ pile.
In between these slightly bigger ticket items I had ordered and been similarly disappointed by many small purchase such as a book that never arrived, a gift for a school friend of Jasper’s which showed up broken, a supposed pack of pritt stick-type glues which turned out to be just one stick, but sent together in the same parcel as a supposed single bottle of arts glue which turned out to be an army of 10 bottles. Paints which called themselves ‘Finger Paints for ages 3+’ turned out to be supported by very small, small print which warns that while they wash off skin, the same results should not be expected in the case of clothing, walls or upholstery. Bye bye finger paints.
And what wouldn’t I give for a trip to a normal supermarket? The grocery delivery apps are all well and good if you don’t mind waiting around all day for the delivery and are not bothered if half your order turns out to be unavailable on the day you chose for delivery. If a roll of tinfoil was in my basket at checkout on Monday, why isn’t it still there on Tuesday? It is impossible to gauge quality on these apps too. An item which is listed as one brand and with one image one day, suddenly changes colour, design and quality the next day. A single tissue box from a 4-pack that I ordered a few weeks back was crippled with the unceasingly irritating affliction of being poorly perforated. The result was that every other pull gave you two and a half torn tissues. This incident happened to take place while Tony was in Mumbai and Dylan initially put the problem down to operator error, accusing me of being a substandard tissue puller. The laughs couldn’t have been heartier for Tony and I when Dylan suffered the very same operator error as he grabbed for a tissue to wipe a rapidly retreating toddler nose. He did eventually concede that the error lay with the tissues, not with me, and that box migrated round the house being repeatedly replaced by a better box of tissues each time its hiding place was discovered until finally, the last two and half tissues were pulled.
On the same grocery app, Big Basket, for those of you who care, I am locked in battle with a brand of toilet paper and kitchen roll that uses the exact same packaging for both products. The first time I ordered 8 rolls of kitchen paper I was still relatively fresh off the boat and I put my error down to jet lag or simply being new around here. The second time I did it, I told myself I could do better. So the third, most recent time, when I added to our ever-growing collection of kitchen towels instead of salvaging our potentially dehumanising lack of toilet paper, I decided to give all the offending packages to Jasper to play with. At least that way someone is getting some use out of the lifetime’s supply of kitchen rolls we still have to find storage for. I tell myself that I will pay more attention when I order next, but I know that I won’t.
I long for a visit to a proper supermarket. To be able to wander the aisles, perusing the day’s products in order to decide what to make for dinner. To touch and feel produce for freshness or signs of transit damage. To be able to buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the same place as some kitchen cleaning products and some toiletries. I have to buy shampoo from the pharmacy, toast bread from one supermarket, and breakfast cereal from a different one. Our preferred flavour of salad dressing has recently taken an extended leave of absence from all stores and apps. I have to order laundry detergent off amazon, and meat off a different website from the one that sells fish.
And don’t get me started on the names and state of pharmaceuticals here. Yes, it’s nice that the pharmacy delivers 24/7 and that they correspond on WhatsApp. But no, it’s not great that they don’t have something as consumer-friendly as Calpol or Benylin for little’uns. Here it’s all Paracetamol Paediatric Oral Suspension and Levosalbutamol Sulphate, Ambroxol Hydrochloride & Guaiphenesin Syrup. Even if I just want to buy some basic paracetamol I have to specify how many milligrams I want per tablet and by the time I have done that, I forget to ask how many tablets there are in a tray. Last time I ordered I opened the bag to find 4 tablets in there. No box, no pamphlet. Just 4, lonely tablets. They were thrown into our box of similarly poorly labelled mystery medicines and will almost certainly be past their use-by date, whenever that was, before we get around to being desperate enough to use them. Give me a box of off-the-shelf anadins, someone!
I have learned that I can't necessarily acquire something quickly here too. While on some occasions, an amazon delivery appears the next day, other orders seem to take days, if not weeks. And they keep this, I would say, important information from you until after you have completed the purchase sometimes. A couple of weeks ago I was in the market for the necessaries to make some horse ears for Jasper. I dutifully ordered myself some coloured paper and felt with which I felt sure I could fashion some ears. As I scrolled, I saw promises of 'Next Day Delivery', or 'Guaranteed Delivery by Thursday'. But once I had clicked the buy button, the deliveries were suddenly scheduled for a couple of days after the horse was required. Thankfully, our driver is proving himself to be a willing and intuitive scavenger and he came up trumps with some sparkly brown art foam and some ribbon. I am now rich in horse-coloured felt, I suppose, so if anyone does find themselves in need of becoming a horse at short notice, I am your woman. As long as you are in Mumbai. I haven't dared go near the postal service yet.
It breaks my heart that even our now regular Sunday habit of ordering freshly baked pastries from the Mag St Cafe is also tinged with the prospect of disappointment. Most weeks the pastries arrive oven-fresh, still warm and soft and ready to fragrance our apartment. But a couple of times they have arrived crusty and cold, stinking like they were bedfellows with a caramelised onion tart the night before. The french never have to take this kind of sh*t! Get me to a boulangerie!
Deliveries are fine when they are an optional convenience. When they are the only way to receive your goods, they lose their appeal. I dream of visiting a proper supermarket. I long to make an impulse purchase. And more than anything, I can’t wait for the day I finish the last sheet on the last roll of kitchen paper. But alas, I fear we may already have left India before that day comes. Until then, it mocks me.
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