I ordered UNO: No Mercy late at around 7PM (peak traffic) in Bangalore and it arrived in three minutes.

Three minutes is fast enough to feel magical. It is also fast enough to feel confusing. Not morally confusing. Physically confusing. As if something fundamental had been skipped. Energy, labour, distance, coordination. None of these have disappeared. And yet the transaction behaves as if they have.

For a brief moment, it feels like energy has become free.

That is usually where magic starts to smell like subsidy.

India understands subsidies instinctively. We have lived with them for decades. Electricity that costs less than it should. LPG cylinders cushioned by the state. Food grains whose true price is politely hidden. We know this pattern well.

Subsidies do not disappear when governments step away. They simply change hands.

What feels new is who is paying.

This does not feel like the state subsidising citizens. It feels like capital subsidising consumers. Venture funds underwriting speed. Investors playing welfare, except without elections or accountability. A strange form of social capitalism where convenience is funded not by taxes, but by term sheets. The story told is innovation. The mechanism underneath is subsidy.

Speed is not free. It never was. Every delivery contains irreducible physics. A human moves. A vehicle burns fuel. Inventory shifts location. Attention is coordinated across space and time. Software can compress decisions and routes, but it cannot erase energy.

Technology can compress time, but it cannot erase the cost of moving matter through space.

Optimisation does not remove cost. It relocates it. Someone always pays. We just stopped asking who.

We have seen this movie before.

Long before quick commerce apps and dark stores, delivery-first businesses learned this lesson the hard way. Domino’s is often held up as the canonical delivery success story. But listen closely to what its leadership has said over the years. Delivery itself was never the profit centre. The money was always in the product. The pizza paid for the delivery. Delivery was a necessary cost, not a standalone business.

If delivery was the business, Domino’s would have discovered it first.

Pizza is high-margin. Standardised. Predictable. Even then, delivery never justified itself economically. Groceries make the problem harder, not easier. Margins are thinner. SKUs are fragmented. Prices are transparent. Consumers are ruthlessly sensitive to a few rupees.

If delivery could not be made profitable when wrapped around hot, high-margin food, it is worth asking why we believe it suddenly works when wrapped around milk, onions, and shampoo.

The uncomfortable answer is not better technology.

What feels like magic is often just a bill we have not opened yet.

This is where dark stores enter the picture.

Dark stores are warehouses pretending to be neighbourhoods. They duplicate inventory every few kilometres. They pay rent. They refrigerate. They manage shrinkage. They staff operations. They hold idle capital waiting for orders that may or may not arrive. This is expensive infrastructure wearing a friendly consumer interface.

Kirana stores operate on an entirely different logic.

Most kiranas are run by their owners. The shopkeeper is the cashier, buyer, inventory manager, and accountant. Labour cost is not booked. It is lived. The store is often attached to the home. Rent is minimal or nonexistent. Inventory turns slowly but reliably.

These shops are not really businesses in the venture sense. They are cash-flow systems. Optimised for survival, not growth. That is why they endure. It is also why they remain stuck. Growing would require formalising costs they currently absorb informally.

The kirana is not inefficient. It is pre-optimised by history.

Dark stores are trying to out-engineer what kiranas solved socially decades ago.

Technology is not doing the heavy lifting here. Density is.

Quick commerce works in pockets of Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi because everything is close. Riders are dense. Orders cluster naturally. Customers value time highly and quietly tolerate prices that are still being subsidised. Remove that density and the math collapses.

This is not innovation scaling. This is constraint clustering.

Capital steps in to bridge the gap. Discounts. Free delivery. Cashback. Artificially low prices. Behaviour is trained on a reality that does not exist. When subsidies retreat, habits snap back.

Convenience is never free. It is only delayed.

Startups are supposed to scale. That is the promise. Heavy engineering and infrastructure only make sense if the spread is wide. If a business only works in Tier 1 micro-markets, it is not venture-scale. It is a logistics business with a software aesthetic.

A business that only works while money is burning is not scaling. It is evaporating slowly.

There is nothing wrong with that. Logistics is real work. But calling it a billion-dollar inevitability requires ignoring geography, energy, and labour.

Kiranas do not need to win. They just need to survive. They do not chase growth curves. They outlast cycles. Their costs are local, elastic, and human. Quick commerce has to win every quarter just to stay alive.

Reality can be deferred with money, but it cannot be outgrown.

So yes, quick commerce may survive. It may even thrive in hyper-dense metros. It may carve out premium convenience niches where time is expensive and distance is short.

But India-wide dominance was always a fantasy.

This is not a country where energy is free. Labour is invisible. Or margins forgive physics.

Speed feels like progress. But the deeper truth is this:

Money can suspend consequences for a while. Physics never forgets.