Seamless Web
It is an enduring part of the mythos of Manhattan that you can have anything imaginable delivered to your doorstep at any hour of the day or night. In practice, there are many qualifications to this rule, but it remains a huge element of the city's appeal, and a major counterbalance to the sacrifices city-dwellers make on issues such as square footage and cost of living. Case in point: many urban professionals are familiar with Seamless Web. This is a web-based service that allows you to peruse the menus of many local restaurants and delivery joints, order what you like, and charge it either to a credit card or a firm account. This is the primary mechanism by which large professional service firms provide their most pervasive perk: if you're in the office late at night or on the weekend, the firm (or more typically, the client) pays for your meals. It works like this: after a certain hour of the day, the Seamless Web website is open for you to place an order, up to a certain dollar limit, at any one of many local restaurants. The restaurant delivers your order to your office, and the cost of the meal gets billed directly to your firm's accounting office. You just pop down to the lobby to pick it up.
I've made a lot of use of Seamless Web during my time here, but I increasingly get the feeling that there's something horrifically immoral about all this. It comes down to a basic lack of respect for the process of eating. It disrespects the restaurant that prepares the food, whose cooks and management work in thankless anonymity. It disrespects the animal that died to have its carcass shipped across the country only to be chopped up and wedged into a plastic dish or styrofoam tray and hung off the handlebars of a rickety bicycle. It disrespects the deliveryperson who speeds that bicycle into oncoming traffic, riding headlong the wrong way down a one-way street, to bring dinner to my door, even though he and I will never meet face to face. It disrespects the person whose job it is to sit in the lobby and place anonymous phone calls informing perfect strangers that their dinners are getting cold forty stories under their feet. It disrespects everyone who paid a little more to heat their homes because my firm used up so many kilowatt-hours of energy to run an elevator carting me, alone, down and back up forty stories to pick up my meal. It disrespects the client, who shells out an extra twenty or thirty dollars to keep me at my desk for another hour or two of work (for which they are already paying several hundred dollars). It disrespects me, who accepts the twenty or thirty dollars in exchange for getting my sustenance this way.
We are not meant to dine alone. Food is pleasure; it wants to be shared. Shared pleasure is the most intimate and fulfilling category of human experience, and letting someone else prepare food for you is an act of trust. This is why dining, at its best, must ultimately be about hospitality; my most memorable meals have left me feeling not only satisfied, but grateful. These connections between guest, host, and meal are all bound up in an essential sense of respect -- for the life we consume, for the skill of its preparation, for the trust in that skill, for the pleasure of the shared experience.
What Seamless Web says about city living is that these basic human interactions -- hospitality and gratitude, pleasure and sharing -- have a price, and can be readily traded away. An economist might call this efficiency, and they would be right, for what it's worth. But we who live in the city, who gorge at our desks on the labors of a faceless multitude, are on the wrong end of this bargain. Each time I click in my order, I am commodifying -- disrespecting -- both the multitude and myself. Even though I never spend a dime out of my own pocket, in a very real sense I am paying for both sides of the exchange.
Comments
Oh, this was a beautiful post, Jeremy!
As a frequent user of Seamless Web, it's always made me sad to have to use it. Thanks for putting your finger on the reasons.
Posted by: teahouseblossom | February 22, 2005 09:58 PM
late night takeaways to the office are sad indeed. i am not looking forward to my first use of seamless web.
Posted by: j-a | February 23, 2005 08:04 AM
I have to disagree. Seamless Web is a convenient way to order food. It saves time because it's on the Internet and because users don't have to pay cash up front and get reimbursed later. Otherwise, it's the same as ordering take out from a menu. How does using Seamless Web disrespect a cook, or a lobby attendant, or a deliveryperson?? Maybe you're trying to say something different, but I see nothing disrespectful about ordering food online and having it delivered.
Sure, it sucks to eat at your desk alone. It sucks to lose out on human interactions and shared meals and new experiences. But is it really "horrifically immoral." I don't think so.
Posted by: Josh | February 23, 2005 12:05 PM
I'm not so sure that ordering takeout from a menu and having it delivered to your door -- the quintessential New York convenience -- is significantly less problematic than ordering on Seamless Web. And I do both on a regular basis, so in a sense I'm speaking from within a glass house. But there is a moral dimension to the complex economies of post-industrial nations, one that entails very real trade-offs.
We're making these trade-offs all the time, even if we don't realize it. They reflect choices that necessarily favor some values and priorities over others. Seamless Web is just a symptom of a much more pervasive value judgment: the respect we owe those who provide our necessities has a dollar value, and we're willing to part with the money in exchange for the convenience of not having to acknowledge the work that is done on our behalf. This is not to say that the value judgment is categorically, or even generally, wrong, just that every time we make this trade-off we are saying something about ourselves and the things that are important to us.
This particular trade-off is the essence of the division of labor at the heart of capitalism. It has made our standard of living the envy of the world. But it has a very real price. You pay more for convenience because someone else is giving up more to provide it. And you may not realize it, but you're giving something up too. I write the things I do because if you're going to make this exchange, you have to understand what it is you are doing. Otherwise you'll never realize when you've traded away more than you were willing to part with.
In other words, "it sucks" is a reaction, not a reason. You recognize that something is wrong with this situation, but are unable -- or unwilling -- to say what it is. Still, I'd wager you give your delivery boy a bigger tip when it's raining. Think about why.
Posted by: jeremy | February 23, 2005 03:36 PM
Trapped at the old office a bit too much lately, eh?
Posted by: Laren | February 27, 2005 03:07 PM
I would like to put forward a concurring opinion. I've always felt a little uncomfortable about takeout because it feels masturbatory. You're eating great food all by yourself. The people responsible for the food are being paid a fair rate, and you're enjoying their work project immensely. The problem is the same as any luxury product enjoyed alone - the experience ceases to be biophilic and becomes materialistic. Takeout and delivery seem fine to me if they're enjoyed by more than one person.
Posted by: ty | March 6, 2005 09:33 PM
not sure i agree. seamlessweb is the same as ordering from a menu. and you can designate the tip amount. i regularly up the tip from its precalculated levels. and at my office, we get a call from downstairs and pick up the food from the delivery guy directly. so except for the delivery guy waiting downstairs instead of coming up to your desk, it really seems entirely the same as regular delivery. and without regular delivery, most restaurants in this city would probably go under, then everyone loses - customers, employees, business owners, taxes, etc.
Posted by: mimi | March 11, 2005 05:53 PM
There are two things you can do: Choose to use the system and enjoy the benefits it does give you - a man's gotta eat, after all - or choose to do something where you don't need the system.
Using the system and being miserable about it doesn't do anyone any good.
Posted by: Suebob | April 2, 2005 12:25 PM