Foot Locker has put more than a thousand of its stores inside Uber Eats. The sneaker now sits in the app between dinner and a phone charger, ordered in a single tap. A shop customers once travelled to has become a place a stranger’s driver leaves from. Two recodings arrive in that one tap. The shoe turns into an impulse buy, and Foot Locker turns into a fulfilment node inside an app it will never own.

The demotion is not mine; it is Uber’s. Its head of grocery and retail welcomed the brands by noting that customers now open the app for “dinner tonight or a last-minute pair of sneakers.” A limited-edition Jordan and a cooling burrito, reached by the same tap.

Buying a sneaker used to be an occasion. People queued for the release and photographed the box before they had bought a thing. Foot Locker sold the wait as much as the shoe, because friction was doing quiet work: it made buyers want the thing enough to cross town for it. A fifteen-minute drop-off deletes the wait, and with it the wanting.

This is the second time this year the chain has moved onto a delivery app. In March it listed nearly 1,300 locations on DoorDash. Foot Locker is now a tile in someone else’s marketplace, ranked next to the shops it competes with. It will take that place on any app that owns a fleet of couriers. Each of them keeps a share of the sale for the introduction.

Inside the app the store stops being a shop and becomes an address. The staff who used to sell now pick orders and hand them to couriers they will not see again. The shop floor is now a picking aisle. And every order teaches Uber something about a customer Foot Locker once knew first.

The convenience angle was the whole of it. The trade tied the deal to back-to-school and moved on. What changed hands is quieter. On Uber’s marketplace, Uber owns the customer and decides where Foot Locker appears to her; Foot Locker supplies the shoes and the hands to fetch them. It is the same trade countless direct-to-consumer brands made when they left their own checkout for Amazon’s search bar. The reach is real. It is paid for in margin and the customer’s name.

Foot Locker no longer decides this alone. Since September it has belonged to Dick’s Sporting Goods, which bought the brand and its mall leases together and now has to make them pay.

It has answered by closing a portion of Foot Locker’s underperforming stores. Foot Locker goes on paying mall rent for a stockroom with a logo on the door.

Foot Locker still has the stores; it has given away the reason to walk into one.