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A story from an Indian entrepreneur who made a switch to no quick commerce
Planning over cravings: A story from an Indian entrepreneur who made a switch to five months of no quick commerce
Entrepreneur Saloni Srivastava went 5 months without Blinkit or Zepto. Her viral insight? Quick commerce "removed planning" from her life at the cost of invisible labor. Read her critique on India's gig economy.
In an age where the option for 10-minute grocery delivery services is the new staple of survival for urban Indians across the country, one entrepreneur and YouTube personality, by the name of Saloni Srivastava, has managed to do the unthinkable with the now viral hashtag #BlinktFree. After leaving the country to go to France with her job as the marketer for HustlePost Academy, Srivastava learned something interesting.
Srivastava's shift from apps such as Blinkit and Zepto cannot be seen as driven by moral principles but was forced upon her by her geographical relocation to France, where instant commerce does not exist, and all shops remain shut on Sunday.
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Blinkit didn't just deliver groceries to me; it removed planning from my life," Srivastava shared in a detailed Instagram post. "I didn't have to think ahead. I didn't have to anticipate hunger or boredom. Everything could be decided in the moment.
Now, reflecting on her former life with detachment, Srivastava underlined the "invisible labour" involved in making the conceit of ease appear effortless. She said that when next-day delivery was good enough for years, the default to 10-minute windows manufactured urgency.
She said, "The delivery person had to rush against time to satisfy my midnight craving for chips and Coke, simply because I would not plan in advance like a grown-up." She then mentioned the harsh reality of the "gig": riders taking potholes and toxic air for as low as ₹20 per delivery, who many times pay upfront for their uniforms, a practice that would be labeled a "scam" if one did it in any white-collar profession.
A post shared by Saloni Srivastava (@salonisrivastavaofficial)
Srivastava said the reason these apps scaled so aggressively in India. She flipped the blame and claimed that platforms like Zepto and Blinkit aren't "villains" but, in fact, fixes for two major government failures:
Infrastructure: The reasons are impassable roads and debilitating traffic flow, which make a 10-minute errand impossible for an average citizen.
Employment: Within a saturated, unemployable market, gig jobs have become the "only option" for tens of millions, as opposed to a supplementing side hustle in developed countries around the globe.
"In India, can we really imagine an Infosys fresher working as an engineer or a student working as a delivery partner in off-hours just as a side hustle?" she asked, thereby pointing out that for them, it is also a matter of survival.
Having planned meals forward, changing them whenever a certain ingredient is missing, five months on, the researcher concludes that the lack of instant delivery does not mean deprivation but rather a slower, more human way of living. Through this act of choice to plan, she argued that even as consumers, people may be able to lessen the life-threatening pressure exerted on their delivery partners.
By choosing to plan, she suggested consumers can reduce the life-threatening pressure placed on delivery partners. "The only things that we truly need to arrive in ten minutes are ambulances and police, no?" she asked, challenging the normalisation of extreme speed in the name of convenience.
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Source: ZeeNews
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