You Can’t Hide in Clothing Racks on Instacart

A few weeks ago, during our family’s bi-annual clean and purge, my 10-year-old asked if we could get them another binder so they could tidy their Pokemon cards off the bedroom floor. Within minutes I had gone on the Staples website, found the biggest binder they had in stock and paid for it to be delivered the following day.

Our weekend of organizing every loose item in the house into “yard sale,” “donate” and “decide later” piles continued without a hitch. No risk I’d be tempted by any of the clearance items or back-to-school displays around a Staples store. I didn’t even have to put my shoes on. And wonder of wonders, some but not all of my kid’s cards actually made it off the floor and into the binder.

This was a miracle of technology and logistics that could rival anything on the Jetsons, but it was also a little missed opportunity.

When I was around the same age as my kid in the mid '90s, sometime between endless house renovations, the birth of my little sister and cousins getting either married or baptized, weekends were filled with family errands. Whether heading to JCPenny for baby stuff or going to a dozen different stores for home stuff, like tiles and light fixtures, I was constantly being dragged along by my parents and then left to my own devices when we got there.

Running loose in those stores with open-ended instructions like, “Stay where I can see you,” were some of my first experiences of freedom in the real world. I remember searching Service Merchandise (R.I.P.) for anything that might pass for a toy section, killing time looking at the day-glo Swatch display or seeing if the Sam’s Club sample lady would give me another SnackWell’s cookie.

Every store could have the wonder and excitement of Discovery Zone if your dad was several aisles away. They were museums with exhibits we could touch until we were scolded by the 17-year-old with butterfly clips stocking shelves. Unknowingly, we were learning boundaries, how to interact with strangers and how to shop — all the while quietly absorbing how our parents handled the world.

Did mom let the clearly angry guy at CompUSA cut ahead even though you’d been waiting longer? Did dad quietly slide the Aladdin Golden Story Sound Book you ripped back onto the shelf, or did he march you up to the register to make you fess up? We got to see firsthand how these familiar bits of everyday drama didn’t always play out as neatly as they did on Nick at Nite.

Services like Instacart, DoorDash and curbside pickup are genuinely convenient — and I’m not about to pretend I’d rather try to get my kid excited for a Costco run on the weekend — but there’s a lot more happening on an errand than the simple exchange of money for goods. While my kid may not appreciate those little moments yet, they have picked up on the fact that any errand longer than 30 minutes has a really good chance of dad getting a coffee. And most places that have coffee also have hot chocolate. My wife and I agree that it doesn’t count as a bribe if we never really say it out loud.

There are a thousand small, mostly invisible lessons packed into a single trip to Home Depot. Lessons about boundaries, strangers and watching your parents be human in public that don’t have an equivalent when the whole transaction happens on a screen before anyone has even put their shoes on.

I don’t think I’m going to start manufacturing errands just to recreate weekends of furniture shopping for my kid. But I’ve caught myself on occasion taking my time in HomeGoods just to give them a bit more unsupervised time to disappear into the clothing rack. At least until they get on some other customer’s nerves.