Member-only story
Is Grocery Delivery Ethical During a Pandemic?
It’s keeping people from crowding the supermarket aisles, but it’s also putting unprotected gig workers at risk
“When the plague came to London in 1665, Londoners lost their wits,” historian Jill Lepore wrote in the New Yorker. “Everyone behaved badly, though the rich behaved the worst: Having failed to heed warnings to provision, they sent their poor servants out for supplies.”
Today, only the richest of the rich have servants to do their shopping. The rest of us rely on Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber Eats.
This raises a thorny question: Is it ethical during the pandemic for healthy people to hire others to bring them food and take risks they want to avoid? Silicon Valley gig-economy firms do not provide workers with health insurance or hazard pay, and they need not even pay minimum wage.
“Those of us who are lucky enough to have jobs that enable us to work from home need to be honest with ourselves about whether we are bearing our fair share of the collective risk or whether our comfort is coming at too high a price to others,” says Karen Stohr, a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. “If we’re healthy, this may mean going to the grocery store ourselves rather than relying on others to do it for us.”
Healthy people who hire app-based shoppers may also be taking scarce delivery slots away from those who really need them. “I want to save those for my 83-year-old father, not for me,” says Stohr, who has been doing her own shopping. Some people in quarantine, including health care workers, have no choice but to buy groceries online — provided they can arrange for delivery.
By contrast, Chris MacDonald, chair of the department of law and business at Ryerson University in Toronto, argues that keeping as many people as possible away from supermarket aisles should benefit the health of the entire community. “It’s better to have one person going to the grocery store and doing no-contact delivery to 100 people than to have those 100 people mingling in the produce aisle,” says MacDonald, who trained as a philosopher and writes about business ethics.
