Helpful Hint: Freshdirect

Grocery shopping in New York is a serious pain in the ass if you don't have a car and remember what life was like before you had to pay $7 for a 12 ounce box of Lucky Charms.

Rather than actually shopping, what you're really doing is foraging. People have come up to me and recommended stores 15 blocks away because "they have really good cheese" or produce or rare Asian lettuce or whatever. In the hunter/gatherer sense, that 15-block trek probably should leave me feeling more fulfilled than walking into a Super Target and picking up a brick of non-organic sharp cheddar on my way to the cereal/dairy/clothing section, but as an evolved male of the '90s, I find myself missing that homogenized experience. This is my one complaint about life up here. Hidden culinary gems are best left to the professionals; I just want bananas, milk and the essentials to all live in the same place.

So this has left me with a couple options:
1) Eat out a lot more than I normally would. Check.
2) Find someone with a car who's willing to take me to the Target in Brooklyn once a week. What is this, college?
3) Freshdirect. Wha?

Freshdirect is an online grocery store that delivers the shit you buy to you. It's better-stocked than anything else I've found around here, the prices are almost on par with flyover country and they come to my door with my sundry provisions. They charge $5.75 to deliver, only $1.75 more than the cost of a round trip on the subway, and they'll show up at your door at a time you choose. They even sell toiletries and stuff in bulk. I don't have to leave the apartment to buy toothpaste or ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream!

I hear tell it's best not to buy produce from them, and the bananas I bought were a lovely shade of green, but everything else about Freshdirect was great. It's a wonderful way to take the stress out of a milk run, and it makes those places with the great cheese seem a lot more accessible when they're not part of a four-hour journey just to get some calories in me.