Yahoo Lifestyle The Influencers Going Viral in Aisle 8
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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 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?
As a grad student in Las Vegas (and with Nevada having the country’s fourth-highest household grocery costs), I can attest it’s become very difficult to put food on the table with the $30,000 annual stipend I get for teaching and other academic duties. Hence my Instacart gig—and my insta-fascination with this budding corner of TikTok.
Soon, through hashtags like #SupermarketHaul and #LuxuryGroceries, I’m scrolling through thousands of videos geared toward evoking a strange yearning. Some are like that first one, almost normcore in their casual redefinition of excess. Others catapult viewers across the ever-expanding wealth divide into an otherworldly domain where you can (vicariously) spend $88 on edible sea moss gel. But all these young female influencers cruising the aisles with nary a care underline a unifying truth: For a lot of us, the act of buying the exact foods we like, of nourishing ourselves on our own terms, now feels like an increasingly rarefied one.
Back in that parking lot, my Instacart finally buzzes with an order. A customer has purchased a single rotisserie chicken…and nothing more. I’ll earn just $14 for delivering it, but I don’t feel I have much choice. I go inside, pick up the bird, and drive 40 minutes to a neighborhood almost 20 miles away. As instructed, I leave the bag outside a beautiful stucco house. I spend my $14 on gas, go home, lie on the floor, and watch more grocery content.
People have always been obsessed with how the “haves” spend their money, a spectator sport driven by fascination, envy, sometimes bitterness. As a millennial raised on the internet, I’ve been watching luxury unboxings since the dawn of YouTube influencer culture: Sephora outings with unlimited budgets, ribbon-tied packages from Hermès—videos that served viewers like myself a thrilling peek at devil-may-care consumption. What kind of person spends such ridiculous sums on their face? I’d wonder. But also: How incredible would that be?
Pummeled by an affordability crisis that has engulfed everything from housing to health care, young adults have only dialed up the digital window-shopping. A recent survey found that Gen Z now devotes over three hours a day, more than any other generation, to browsing fantasy purchases online. Think: historic homes that cost 200 times your annual rent, bucket-list vacations at 5-star resorts, Jil Sander boots. And now...ground beef? A pound of the stuff costs 43 percent more than it did four years ago. In fact, U.S. food prices have climbed so steeply—25 percent on average between 2019 and 2023—that in August, presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced an economic policy platform that would include the first-ever federal ban on grocery price gouging. Recent research suggests that young women struggle with food insecurity at higher rates than young men, meaning we’re less likely to get the basic nutrition we need for a healthy life. All of which makes what’s happening on TikTok feel even more dystopian.
Brooke Baevsky, a 29-year-old private chef in Los Angeles catering to celebrities like Paris Hilton and Adam Sandler, has built a 732,000-strong social following with a stream of stridently aspirational supermarket content. She often records herself shopping for goods at the high-end grocer Erewhon, which has 10 locations across Los Angeles. In a video from March, Baevsky fills two carts, then holds a long scroll of a receipt in front of the camera. The total is over $2,900. A viral upload from last spring with more than 638,000 Likes shows Baevsky sourcing ingredients for a pizza appetizer a client requested. Into her cart go organic figs, adaptogenic mushroom powders, gluten-free flour, $35 balsamic vinegar, a $42 flask of olive oil, and two $26 bottles of purified water, all on top of the extra-extra-special ingredients Baevsky purchased elsewhere: $200 caviar, New Zealand manuka honey, edible 24-karat gold flakes. “Did I feel poor after watching this? Yes,” one commenter writes. “Did I enjoy watching it? Also yes.”
Baevsky acknowledges her content acts like an irresistible lens into the country’s sharpening class disparities. “People will go to these stores as tourists just to see them, like a museum, and they’re like, Who buys this stuff? What is it used for? So I kind of answer that question,” she tells me. And she’s blunt about what makes a successful haul video: “showing the outlandish foods that most people in the country do not have.”
On other TikTok accounts, creators make sticker shock into a game. A May video with 10,600 comments stars user Vanessa Nagel and a companion at an Erewhon location trying to estimate the price of a large container of prepared mixed berries. One guesses $19; the other guesses $24. Real price: $41.18. It’s a little rage-bait-y (“This is the Hunger Games,” one commenter declares), yet viewers can’t look away. During an anthropological visit to an Erewhon this summer, I myself witnessed multiple groups of young women filming their bewilderment over prices...and gawking at the “real” customers. “Are you from Pretty Little Liars?” a teen girl yelled at a handsome man perusing Wagyu beef with his Australian shepherd.
In stark contrast to all this, Baevsky stresses to me that she teaches after-school cooking classes for families facing food insecurity, work that’s close to her heart. She grew up in a western Massachusetts county where nearly half of all households currently lack reliable access to nutritious food. On her social channels, she makes a point to integrate cooking tips for followers on any budget. But nothing does numbers quite like the fantasy excursions.
A couple of summers ago, I spent my school hiatus in Los Angeles pretending to be someone with money. That wasn’t my intention—I was supposed to be living frugally while researching a novel—but soon after I arrived, I began living as a woman who takes hot yoga classes and scours flea markets for vintage denim. The bougie neighborhood supermarket was a constant lure, with its imported cheeses, cold-pressed juices, and fresh-cut flowers. I wanted so badly to be the kind of person who could buy these things that I found myself taking out my credit card again and again.
TikTok has no shortage of grocery girlies engaged in similar games of economic make-believe, but today’s cohort comes with a twist of wry transparency and a (grim? refreshing?) recognition that sustaining this lifestyle would actually be impossible. One post filmed outside a Whole Foods shows creator Alina Ayoub pushing a cart of brown paper bags. White text across the screen reads, “Cosplaying a rich housewife who only eats organic and doesn’t care about the financial repercussions of an $8 cucumber.”
“Cosplaying L.A. influencer is my new favorite hobby,” a user named Kayla Ronquillo captioned a March clip. The video shows her posted up in an outdoor seating area at Erewhon with some of the store’s buzziest items: buffalo cauliflower, gluten-free mac and cheese, the spicy tuna sushi sandwich (“of course”), and a Winnie Harlow x Steens Honey x Erewhon Island Glow Smoothie made with organic blue spirulina powder, red dragon fruit, and vanilla collagen peptides. “Don’t ask me how much I spent,” she says to the camera. To do so would disturb this open-source identity experiment.
Some videos incorporate actual aspects of dress-up. At another Whole Foods, registered dietitian Taylor Grasso is seen costumed in a jean jacket and baseball cap, tousled waves spilling out as she saunters down an aisle. Her mission: “pretend you’re a hot, rich suburban mom who buys all her groceries from here.” A July TikTok from beauty influencer Anna Annora offers an aesthetic manual for this kind of consumer, what she calls “the Trader Joe’s girl phenomenon,” where women somehow appear glowy, gorgeous, and spiritually unbothered as they browse for yogurt and toilet paper. All it takes are 12 simple steps: a faint wash of stain dabbed on lips and cheekbones, a bit of spot concealer, strategic shimmery contour, filled-in brows, a smoky smudge of eyeliner, nose stippled with a ColourPop Freckle Pen in Soft Brown, setting powder, a second application of blush, a quick lash curl, mascara, buffed-out lip liner, and a swipe of gloss.
Go even deeper into the valley of GroceryTok and you’ll find more echoes of OG beauty and style content. A July haul from creator Kiki Somers features a package of free-range organic chicken breasts presented for the camera like an eyeshadow palette. Other users hold up meatballs, milk, and ice pops in similar fashion. A January clip from user Danielle Demi captures an ironic “unboxing” in which she fawns over a few items from Whole Foods, like a $9 glass vessel of sesame-ginger salad dressing. Drumming her manicured hand on a metallic package of butter, she adds, “Oooh, gold.”
Intentionally or not, these creators are performing a sort of reverse engineering, in which everyday fare attains divine status. Something must explain these ungodly prices, the videos seem to imply. Sometimes, like with that butter, it happens in passing. Other times, there’s an entire content universe devoted to a specific luxe item, like Oishii-brand Omakase strawberries, native to the Japanese Alps and known for their creamy sweetness. The Oishii company claims to have designed the optimal year-round growing climate at “the world’s largest indoor vertical strawberry farm”—in New Jersey—and delegates harvesting duties to state-of-the-art robots. For $11.99 to $19.99, you get a sleek container of 11 berries, each nestled in its own protective divot. “Worth it just for the packaging alone,” Meg Radice of @TheVIPList says in a TikTok review.
In an April TikTok with 1.1 million Likes, creator Lizzie Dushaj conducts a taste test of Penny Pound Ice–brand cocktail ice from Erewhon. The bag contains eight 2.4-inch spheres of frozen water and costs $30. “Oh my god—this looks like a crystal ball,” she says, holding up a melting orb.
“I can’t afford bread,” someone writes in the comments.
Lifestyle creator Kayla Brown is done with freewheeling supermarket splurges, even though she once was somewhat known for them. Several years ago, the 29-year-old began sharing grocery hauls on TikTok and admits she used to shop with a money-is-no-object mentality. “I was just like, Oh, this color matches the fridge; this would be great in the TikTok where I do the restock,” she tells me. Then her followers started to push back. “The comments would be like, ‘Well, this is not realistic’; ‘It’s so expensive’; ‘How much did you spend on this?’”
The discourse helped Brown rethink her habits—and content strategy. Lately, in an effort to be more relatable (and cut down on food waste), she’s been shopping with a list, and her posts offer a different kind of thrill: sensory delights minus existential stress. In a June video, you hear the pleasing clack of soft-drink cans being placed into a cart, the rattle of shelled pistachios, the soft thump of chicken cutlets hitting the heap, and the rustle of matching cream-colored shopping bags sliding perfectly into a car trunk, all with a soft overdub of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please.” Here, the supermarket is not a seat of modern financial anxiety. Instead, viewers feel like they’re in a gentle cocoon, a dreamy realm where their debit card will never be declined. “So satisfying,” someone says in the comments.
Brown, who is based in Salt Lake City, has a specific process for stirring such responses. After she puts together a video, she closes her eyes, takes in the audio element, and makes adjustments much like a music producer would. “It’s like a rhythm or a beat,” she says. “Is this clip too quiet? Was there a squeaky noise that wasn’t satisfying?” She also has certain visual trademarks, like showing a bright-red Target shopping cart at the outset, a cue that gets casual users to stop and watch, she theorizes. And she mostly keeps her face out of frame.
“You scroll upon this video and it’s kind of a relief, like you’re not trying to connect with another human,” Brown explains. “You’re resetting your mindset. It’s a dopamine release.”
Others are leveraging a similar approach, a tranquilizing take on grocery procurement that you don’t need a lot of money to experience IRL...or do you? I enjoy a similar flood of calm while watching an April grocery video from YouTuber Paige Turner, where I’m treated to a whispery voyage through a near-deserted Whole Foods. Turner taps her long silver fingernails against jars of organic fruit spread and packages of ancient grain crackers. She runs her fingers over inscribed bars of natural soap. The sense of tactile access, of actually holding items in hand, is very much part of the fantasy—at least for viewers like me.
At the chain supermarket where I shop in Las Vegas, entire aisles of items are locked up behind anti-theft panels, which seems to be a growing norm in lower-income communities. No longer can you freely pick things up, read the labels, and decide if you want them. You have to ask permission, over and over again, from the employee with the key.
After a supermarket haul comes the great kitchen restock. This is the genus of TikTok grocery content that delivers the intense payoff of watching an empty fridge suddenly fill with food. It represents a potent promise fulfilled: In this house, no one goes to bed hungry.
For me, the queen of kitchen restocks is Summer Reign Henning, an Atlanta-based content creator and entrepreneur with 2 million TikTok followers. While home organizing is her broader specialty, kitchen restocks are her highest-performing fodder. Her most viral to date, a 2023 video with more than 40 million views, opens with her husband, Ryan, steam cleaning the family’s empty fridge in preparation for a $1,000 influx. From there, Henning removes each item from its original packaging and transfers it to one of many clear containers. There are carafes for milk and juice, a multi-tier egg tray, crisper bins for greens, pull-out bins for snacks, and a special hourglass-style pickle jar that allows you to separate spears from their brine.
Some of Henning’s followers gravitate to the Pinterest-y appeal of her system—the creation of order in a chaotic world. And then there are viewers like me, who dream of opening their fridges to find tasty things in seemingly infinite supply. “It looks like a storefront,” Henning says. “Everything is easily accessible. The drink dispenser—when you take one can out, another comes behind it.” Pure magic.
“I want my future like this low-key,” one viewer writes.
“Literally the level of adulthood I’m trying to get to,” comments another.
A number of fans beg Henning to just adopt them.
After speaking with her, I reflect on the summer I’d had before I started the Instacart job. I was back in Los Angeles to revise that novel. I got a cat-sitting gig in a wealthy area near Griffith Park and arranged to stay in the stylish apartment of the owner—a retired set decorator—for free. She’d left a few items in her fridge for me: sliced turkey, Swiss cheese, sourdough. Should be enough for a sandwich, read a yellow Post-it note. It was a far cry from Henning’s epic restocks, but it was enough to make me feel cared for. That too was magic. So what if I was an interloper in that nice neighborhood? Maybe I wasn’t cosplaying anymore.
My university operates a food pantry for students, staff, and faculty. I applaud its existence and yet have always stopped short of going in. Too embarrassed to admit I might need this kind of support, I’ve driven past, not slowing down, not wanting the shame of seeing my own car in the parking lot. Now I wonder if the real aspirational move might be pulling up.
On a whim, I search “food pantry haul” on TikTok. I click on a July video from a creator named Alyshia Abbascia titled “Food Pantry Haul as a Single Mom.” The clip shows Abbascia arriving home with bags of groceries from a North Carolina food pantry. As she places them on the floor, she says, “This is something that I never thought I’d be sharing on the internet. It’s something I don’t even share with the people that I know.”
Viewers, myself included, are glad she did. There are more than 1,800 comments.
“I would love to be part of your village and place a grocery pickup order for you if you’d let me.”
“I am so proud of you. You are doing the best that you can and you should be celebrated.”
“No shame, Queen. You are not alone. It’s hard as hell out here, but we are all holding on!”
I watch a few other food pantry hauls. Creators marvel over boxes of potatoes, spaghetti, lentils, and nuts, emphasizing how happy they are to have overcome the self-consciousness of seeking help. The videos contain zero fantasy: no talk of product aesthetics, no ASMR, no influencer vibes. Here, at the end of the scroll, I may have finally found my place, where all strawberries—any strawberries—taste amazing.
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