From thousand-dollar Erewhon hauls to fridge restocking to simple «come grocery shop with me» videos, influencers give grocery shopping a glamorous treatment online. Celebrating and romanticizing the lifestyles of the rich and famous is nothing new, but now that longing-affluent fascination has trickled down to even mundane chores. 

This newer, even more confounding type of grocery flex that’s starting to pop up is the «aspirational grocery shop,» in which viewers can bask in the experience of buying groceries they’d never be able to afford themselves. This tweet reveals a lot about the state of Gen Z’s aspirations. It shows a modest cart full of groceries, overlaid with the text, «One day you’ll be buying groceries to cook dinner in the small apartment you rent.» » It’s a far cry from «One day you’ll employ a private chef in the mansion you own.» It’s presented as a fantasy vision of life that, in reality, sounds like a bottom-rung standard of living for most members of previous generations. A quote from the 2023 film The Holdovers seems pertinent: «You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you? Though it may sound bleak, buying one’s own groceries seems like a far-off dream for many young people.