DREAM-SCROLLING FOR DINNER

With young people in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis, TikTok creators are turning grocery runs into rich-girl-coded productions - and followers are eating it up. Krista Diamond digs into what happens when a cart full of staple goods becomes a clout metric.

- Krista Diamond

I'm sitting in a Costco parking lot, staring at my Instacart app. It's my first week as a shopper, and all morning long, I've been at supermarkets in the sprawling, affluent community of Summerlin, Nevada, locations where the algorithm has detected a high likelihood that a customer will enlist my services. Except no one has, which means I'm currently making less than the $22 I spent on the insulated grocery bag Instacart recommended as part of its "best practices." I have 18 miles of gas left. Anxiety is starting to kick in. I open TikTok and type "Instacart how to get orders"-and instead get my first taste of a genre that will ultimately suck me in for weeks.

The initial video I stumble on shows a young woman named Shelly Kowatch (@Shelly Kowatch) in skintight workout gear surrounded by groceries in her kitchen. She and her husband "fucked up real bad," she explains, holding up a large cardboard box of items, and blew $737.14 on a single Costco trip. With naughty delight, she displays the items one by one: frozen açaí packs, chicken sausage, turkey bacon, a whole watermelon, yogurt tubes, a jumbo pack of cream cheese, guacamole packs, and on and on. "There's so much shit, I can't even keep it organized right now," she says.

I'm at once mesmerized and unsettled, because what should be the blandest of content a trip to Costco, the decidedly unglamorous warehouse club known for its discounted prices - is suddenly pinging my lifestyle envy. I skim the video's 668 comments and see I'm not alone. "How do you afford thisss," one viewer writes, adding two crying-face emojis. Another chimes in, "My broke ass couldn't." Says someone else, "I hope I can eventually be at the point where I accidentally spend $700 at Costco." And that's when I get it: It's not the store itself that feels so seductive; it's the idea of being able to stock up at all. In this economy?