Taken together, these challenges can make online grocery shopping feel like more trouble than it’s worth. Once you select your products, the online grocers allow buyers to opt in to substitutions, in case a selected item is out of stock or otherwise unavailable. The process varies by service, with some recommending an alternative and others emboldening the hired runner to make a swap, which might or might not correspond to the customer’s preferences. Instacart’s software sometimes suggests exotic or perverse substitutions: printer paper for toilet paper, say. Social media is riddled with gripes about failures, including size variations in packaged goods and concerns about food allergies.

Add in the premium cost of pickup or delivery, the difficulty of returns, and the need to schedule online shopping at a time when you can be home to put the perishables away, and supermarkets exist out of harmony with technological life.

Grocers have changed before, however, and they can change again. Just as a new appetite for one-stop, self-service shopping led to supermarkets after the First World War, the pandemic could inaugurate a seismic shift in grocery shoppers’ habits. Right now, consumers are not dining out, because of lockdowns, but they still have to eat. Restaurant delivery is growing, but online grocery shopping—both delivery and pickup—is cheaper, reduces the number of trips that food workers have to make, and keeps shoppers out of stores, where personnel are at serious risk of infection. Fussiness also appears to be in decline. Supply crunches are making it hard to get certain staples, which could be inspiring a new tolerance for not getting exactly what you want—something close enough might be just fine.

Read: Grocery stores are the coronavirus tipping point

Lockdown is temporary, not a way of life. But it’s going to persist for some time, changing everyday practice along the way. Bryan Leach, the CEO of the digital-shopping-promotions company Ibotta, predicts that online grocery shopping will rise from 3 percent “into the double-digits” as a result of the pandemic. That’s a big change, but it would still see the majority of food shopping happen where it always has, in the stores. “I don’t think this is going to cause the death of the American grocery store,” Leach told me. “I still think people view it as the public square.” Shoppers won’t lose the ability to manipulate the avocados, pick something up on short notice, or just browse aimlessly for meal inspiration. But they might do so differently. A new attitude about supermarkets could change the way people approach food shopping in general.

This future might play out in both promising and worrying ways. On the promising side, more online food shopping could encourage companies to better remunerate grocery workers for their skills and persuade Americans to embrace smaller local supermarkets. Internet-grocery fetchers might come to be seen more as the small shopkeepers of the turn of the century, or the community-supported agriculture services that deliver fresh, local goods at small scales today: not menial laborers, but devoted workers with specialized knowledge and experience who help meet families’ specific food needs.

The shift to smaller-scale, more attentive grocery service has already taken place, in part. As superstores got bigger and consolidated more, they cleared room for shops intended for more specific markets. Those include Trader Joe’s and even Whole Foods, before Amazon bought it. Small butcher shops already had been enjoying a renaissance, and quarantine seems to be accelerating that trend. Those shifts are spurred, in part, by increased urban densification, along with the rising popularity of buying nonperishable consumer packaged goods, such as paper towels and crackers, from online services such as Amazon Pantry. If online grocery can supply the basics, that could be a boon for Main Street–style local shopping.