From coffee to x rays: Almost anything can be sent to homes in Cairo

When it comes to home delivery and services, Cairo has most other places beat.

Costa Coffee will send around a single shot of espresso ($2.70), and the neighborhood pharmacy will dispatch one morning-after pill ($2).

Want a Brazilian bikini wax? It can be done in the privacy of your home for $6. Need a birth or death certificate? Just put in a call to the government, which will dispatch it within 72 hours.

For city dwellers in Egypt, almost anything can be delivered, and for nearly nothing.

Home deliveries started with fast food, but have come to include an array of other goods and services. Upscale restaurants will deliver a salad or a single slice of cake; stationers will send pens to the office; liquor stores will supply alcohol if a party runs dry; bakeries will send fresh bread and pastries straight from the oven — most of it carried on the backs of battered old motorcycles.

Driving the trend is a middle class willing to spend money to avoid hassles, plus large numbers of poorer people willing to zoom around on motorcycles for less than $10 a day. Given Cairo’s bad traffic and long, hot summers, the capital’s dwellers need little encouragement to pick up the phone. (Deliveries spike especially in July and August, when daytime temperatures rarely drop below 90 degrees.)