Errands, Like Old Mrs. Rabbit

popping into shops brings me joy

I have come to love running local errands. Five years after the pandemic brought us touchless porch delivery and same-day shipping, drive-through service windows and curbside pickups, I find myself using those conveniences pretty sparingly: not never, but also not often.

And I think I’m better for it. There’s a mildly embarrassing do-gooder high I get from shopping local, sure, but that’s not the whole story. I’m also genuinely more connected to what’s happening in my local community because I frequent its businesses. I talk to shop owners and cashiers and librarians and parking lot attendants; I look at flyers posted in front windows and read notices stapled to telephone poles.

The more I’m out in the world, the more I notice about it. The flip side is also true: the more I’m on my laptop or inside a mobile app doing business on the Internet, the more my attention lingers there. Somehow one just feels better than the other.

Plus, every time I head out to the shops, I imagine myself like this:

“Then old Mrs. Rabbit took a basket and her umbrella, and went through the wood to the baker’s. She bought a loaf of brown bread and five currant buns.”

Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit

(Before I continue, I’ll state the obvious: old¹ Mrs. Rabbit did not have any baby or toddler rabbits. She had big-kid bunnies of varying abilities when it came to staying out of trouble, but they were independent enough to leave alone for a few hours. I, too, am in this blessed stage of rabbit-rearing, and can confidently assume that Mrs. Rabbit would have been UberEats-ing the shit out of her currant buns when the bunnies were babes.)

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Does it take more time and invite more hassle to do most of my errands in person? It might, but I wonder if it might not.

Yes, when I venture out to the shops, I sometimes forget that this one is closed on Mondays or that one doesn’t open until 11:00. I might encounter a ‘Be back soon!’ sign on the door, circle the parking lot thrice to find a spot, or make a special trip only to find my desired item is out of stock.

On the flip side, online shopping offers its own hassles: promo codes, flash sales, return policies and sizing confusion; ‘prove you’re a human’ CAPTCHA pages, signing up for texts and emails just to get that 10% off, and losing 45 minutes reading customer reviews.

I think it might be a wash, actually, and these days I find myself more drawn to the time-consuming hassles that involve real humans who live and work in my actual town: like the woman at the dry cleaner’s who switches effortlessly between proficient English and proficient Spanish, neither of which are her first language; like the man at the sandwich shop next door to the dry cleaner’s whose father used to sell my friends and I candy after school; like the pharmacist who seems always stretched thin and yet is endlessly patient with his elderly customers (whose dates of birth I can’t help but overhear).

Is it more expensive to run errands locally than it is to shop online? Yes, and…also no?

I buy less when I have limited options. I get tired of driving or walking around and am naturally up against the time limits of my schedule. The pace of running errands is slower, which helps keep the spend-rate in check even if the per-unit price of goods is higher.

I also thrift, buy secondhand, and borrow far more than I used to when I was in the habit of ordering everything online. The ease and familiarity with which I now bop around my town means that working a thrift store stop or a Facebook marketplace porch pickup into my routine is no big deal.

Is Santa Barbara, the city where I live, better-suited to popping into shops than your town is? Quite possibly.

If you live in a place where most of the retail is in large shopping centers and strip malls, I feel you, and I’ve lived there, too. Twice. One of the joys of doing errands in person is parking my car once and devising a few stops I can make on foot, OR driving from spot to spot for errands that are more spread out but where parking is quick and easy. Something about navigating those enormous parking lots and massive big box chains sucks some of the charm out of the type of errand-running I’m talking about.

(We’re also blessed with mild weather year-round, and there’s nothing less romantic than getting in and out of your vehicle for a series of short errands when the air temperature is 109 degrees. Ask me how I know.)

This is not an indictment of shopping online, something I still do regularly, if less than I used to. I buy toilet paper at Target or Costco, I frequent grocery chains as well as the farmer’s market, and I still order all of our pet-related supplies online because it’s easier and more affordable. But like so many other habits and rituals, the more I take my basket and my umbrella (or my Trader Joe’s bags and my AirPods, more likely) into the light of day, the more I want to do it again. And the less reliant on direct-to-my-door convenience I become, the stronger my local roots seem to grow.

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Want to access your inner Old Mrs. Rabbit and run more errands in person? Here are some tiny ways to get started:

• make a list of all the things you already do IRL in your town: dentist appointments, dry cleaner’s, dog grooming, post office, pharmacy - see, you’re doing great already!

• decide on a single category of purchases you’d like to switch from buying online to purchasing locally (for me it was books, and I’ve never gone back, though I do order them online through my local bookshop and then pick them up in person when they’re in stock)

• flip through local papers and magazines and look at the advertisements from local business owners; you might find out about a sale or a shop right in your neighborhood that you didn’t know existed

• I’m no longer on social media, but when I was I made a point to follow local chambers of commerce and business district accounts, as well as individual local business pages; just seeing them pop up in my feed kept my desire to shop local more top of mind

1. Also what do we think ‘old’ is for a rabbit? Four? Seven? One-and-a-half?