Weekly Shot #5

UberEats your heart out

Having kids affects every single daily routine you once had. Used to sleep 8 hours? Try four one-hour naps going forward. Used to go out with friends on the weekends? How about staying home with your kids, entertaining them like a Vaudeville act until they fall asleep, and then falling asleep yourself on your fourth attempt at watching Killers of The Flower Moon (hot take : bad movie, great book – yes I am that guy). Used to enjoy a glass of whiskey when you got home from work? Please, get your ass on the floor dad, it’s wrestling time. I have to admit that most of the routines are better after kids than they were before…except one.

The home cooked meal.

I love food in all its forms. I like going out to restaurants, I like ordering in, I even like frozen pizza (sue me), but the best meal by far is the home cooked meal. If you have any semblance of respect for yourself you should at least know how to cook one dish. That doesn’t mean you need to be Gordon Ramsay accosting your family members for not sous chef-ing correctly or Emeril Lagasse yelling out BAM every time you add a spice, you just need to know how follow a recipe.

For those inclined to make a good home cooked meal I have three suggestions.

A – ask your grandmother (she knows best)

B- ask your mother (she knows best because she learned from your grandmother)

Or…

C – go to halfbakedharvest.com

Tieghan Gerard, the founder of Half-Baked Harvest, has her own cookbooks if you’re interested but more importantly she has hundreds of free recipes on her website that are easy to make. And making a good meal isn’t difficult as long as you can read and measure. Okay, I know that’s asking a lot from this readership but c’mon. Is there anything better than gathering up some ingredients, putting them in the right place at the right time, and presenting a fantastic dish to your wife who now looks at you like maybe she made the right decision? I must thank Tieghan for making me 100x more appealing to my wife anytime I decide to try one of her recipes out.

But this routine has now, unfortunately, shattered into a million pieces (along with my wife looking at me like anything but a moron). With a two-year-old running around and an infant needing to be fed a bottle every two hours making dinner has become low on the priority list. For the next 6 months to a year, I will be looking for the quickest and easiest meals. It doesn’t matter what it is. As long as it’s edible and fast, I’m in. It is still possible to finely dine in the midst of all the chaos via the slow cooker (which Half-Baked Harvest has plenty of recipes for) but often times I’m too tired or too lazy or do not have the brain power to remember this. So, what ends up happening? I use UberEats.

About a month ago I had made one of those decrees in my household that often gets ignored. No more UberEats, no more DoorDash, no more GrubHub. If we are going to order out I will go pick it up. This decree was actually approved by my wife. I mean, have you seen the prices on these apps?  You get nickel and dimed for every little thing until your $10 sandwich is now hovering in the $50 range. There are app fees, delivery fees, tips, priority, tax – the ways these apps shake you down are worse than a mobster.

But again, with two kids, this decree can be overruled at times of great importance. So, the other night it was raining and cold and no one wanted to leave the house so we decided to UberEats McDonald’s. If you’re a snob you are thinking – ew, gross. If you are a normal person you are now looking through the McDonald’s menu and wondering whether to go with a BigMac meal (large of course) or a twenty-piece chicken nugget. My wife and I decided to go with both of the aforementioned meals, plus an extra two fries, a Coke, a sweet tea, and two apple pies. If you added up the totals of each item that would come out to $22.30. But in the words of Lee Corso …

When I went to check out, somehow, someway, the bill ended up at $73. No bullshit. I know inflation is bad, but what the fuck?

The problem is that UberEats can charge you whatever they want because the minute you click their app they know you’re desperate. Just by opening the app they know you are on your last resort. If you had other options you wouldn’t be there. Then they reel you in with pictures of food, your glands start salivating as you add items to the cart, and by the end you have to complete the order regardless of price.   

Now I’m a devout capitalist. Money makes the world go round and the quicker you find that out the easier it is to play the game. I know what supply and demand means and I know that with UberEats the insane upcharge is really just a convenience tax. My lazy ass didn’t want to go pick up my food and they charged me for it. Fair play. But what really made me write this was the guilt trip they fed me after the order was put through.

1 – Your order is being prepared

2- Your order is complete.

3– Robert is picking up your order

4 – Robert is dodging raindrops on the way to deliver your order.

Okay, Robert. You are DODGING raindrops to deliver my order? It’s called driving in the rain. You are not DODGING anything. If I’m going to pay $70+ for McDonalds I don’t need to be brow beaten because Robert has to get a little wet. I’m giving him a 20 percent tip for Christ’s sake. If the notification said Robert was DODGING bullets I might have been more understanding. Notifying me that Robert was under heavy artillery fire, sacrificing his life to get me my McDouble, would earn major points for Robert in my book…but rain? Give me a break. I don’t live in Southern California where a mere drop of precipitation can cause miles of traffic and panic through the streets. I live in New Jersey. Rain happens. Sorry Robert, no extra points for you.

In my anger I decided that I wouldn’t greet Robert at the door. I know it must have been tough to DODGE rain…in a car…but the notification pissed me off so bad I let him place the order at my doorstep with no meet and greet. I was still fuming at being made to feel guilty at the conditions Robert had to deliver the food in (at quadruple the price) while stuffing my face with my second box of fries. Later on, feeling disgusted with myself, I did have a real pang of guilt that I didn’t say thank you to Robert in person, which I usually do. UberEats drivers are just people trying to make a living. It’s not their fault their overlords feel the need to guilt trip their customers. So I am sorry to Robert for not thanking him personally on his immaculate delivery while DODGING rain, but fuck it, as the great Don Draper once said…