Five-minute deliveries. Ultra-fast groceries. Instant gratification on steroids.
It started with 10-minute deliveries, but that wasn’t enough. Now, dark stores and hyper-funded startups are chasing five.
And soon? They won’t even wait for you to place an order.
With predictive analytics, they’ll anticipate your impulses before you do. A rider will already be outside your house, holding a basket of what their algorithm foresaw you needing—a chocolate bar, an energy drink, a late-night snack you didn’t even plan for.
At that point, are you making choices? Or are they being made for you?
The Price of Speed
This isn’t just about convenience. It’s about the cost—on every level.
- The Planet: Extra bikes, more packaging, more fuel burned—because god forbid you wait 15 minutes for bread. The climate crisis isn’t just about oil giants and coal plants. It’s about our inability to wait.
- The Riders: Racing through traffic, breaking signals, risking their lives—so you can order ice cream impulsively. The gig economy disguised as progress.
- Your Own Mind: No friction, no second thoughts, just tap, buy, regret later. The more effortless the impulse, the less control you have over your own choices.
The VC-Fueled Madness
But let’s talk about the real reason this insanity exists. VC money, drunk on growth-at-any-cost thinking.
- Dark stores funded like tech unicorns, burning millions so your LTV (lifetime value) increases before their IPO.
- Oversubsidizing orders, throwing free delivery and cashback at you—not to help you, but to trap you into a habit that doesn’t make sense.
- Creating artificial demand, turning groceries into impulse buys instead of planned essentials.
This isn’t a business model. It’s a scam wrapped in speed.
An Indian Obsession
No other country does this.
- The US? Europe? China? Their rapid deliveries still follow rational limits. Even Amazon’s same-day delivery comes with a cutoff.
- But in India, no one is questioning how irrational, inefficient, and unsustainable this entire model is.
- No regulator, no consumer watchdogs, no mainstream outrage—just another billion-dollar company selling speed while wrecking everything else in the process.
Rewiring Mental Pathways, Inverting Value Systems
The worst part? It’s changing how we think.
- Rewiring our mental pathways to crave speed over substance, convenience over control.
- Inverting value systems where waiting is seen as inefficiency, patience as outdated, and impulse as a virtue.
When the norm becomes “I want it NOW,” we lose the ability to work for anything that takes time. Discipline shrinks. Perspective fades. Long-term thinking disappears.
And that has consequences far beyond groceries.
The Death of Impulse Control
Impulse control is what separates smart decisions from regretful ones. The ability to delay gratification is the foundation of long-term success.
- It’s the difference between investing vs. mindless spending.
- Eating with intention vs. ordering just because it’s easy.
- Thinking deeply vs. reacting without pause.
These ultra-fast deliveries are killing this muscle. They remove friction, they remove reflection, they remove thought.
And when everything is instant, nothing is intentional.
The Future We’re Racing Towards
Today, it’s five-minute groceries. Tomorrow, it’s pre-loaded shopping baskets delivered before you even feel the craving. A world where no one waits, no one thinks, and everything is impulse-driven.
The one thing that will never be delivered in five minutes? A meaningful life.
The best things take time.
Maybe it’s time to slow down.