Are You Convenience Stacking?
Affordability, convenience, control. You get to pick two.
The abundance of today has made us forget that we can't have it all. There is an entitlement among people who demand things they want to be cheap and convenient, or that convenient things within their control should also be affordable.
Every task has costs and benefits. Cooking requires time and effort, but you get control of your food and the satisfaction of executing a skill. Mowing your own lawn takes time and effort, but you stay active and take pride in your landscaping. When you opt for convenience, you are paying a monetary premium to reduce that cost, while also passing on the benefits. There is obviously a time and place for convenience — it is why the percentage of farmers went from roughly 40% in 1900 to under 2% today. The logical trade is: if I can use the time and effort I save to generate benefits that exceed the premium I pay for the convenience, then this is a good trade. It can be a successful arbitrage when done intentionally.
Affordable and convenient things are the way of today. Fast food, cheap clothes, frictionless banking. But these lack control by the consumer. The convenience and affordability come from the efficiency of mass production. You don't get to choose what goes in your food or your clothes, and you don't get to dictate the terms of your rental agreement or your banking relationship. The reason is fundamentally the incentive structure and the power imbalance between consumer and producer. When you call for control over the product in this regime, the producer can afford to lose you as a customer. They are producing at a massive scale that makes the voice of an individual consumer irrelevant. It requires a large coalition to change consumer behavior and shift the incentive structure enough for the producer to cede any influence over their offering.
Getting convenience and control is not affordable. Private jets and concierge medicine are incredibly convenient and put the consumer in full control — but they demand a steep premium. At a smaller scale, this is using Uber versus taking the train.
If you want control over your products but also want affordability, you have to forgo convenience. People who move out of cities to raise their own chickens and grow their own food have complete control over what goes into their body and they control their food bills — but this is far from convenient. You can cheaply make your own clothes from nearly any fabric you choose, as people did for thousands of years, but you forfeit the convenience of buying off a rack. This combination requires the consumer to have both the skills and the desire to expend effort.
The problem I see today is people are convenience stacking. Instead of cooking, they get DoorDash, and the time saved is used to shop on Amazon, and the time saved from that is used to stream Netflix. They paid a premium for someone to prepare and deliver food without getting the benefits of cooking, then paid the prime premium for access and delivery without gaining any control, and backfilled that saved time with curated content they paid a monthly subscription for. Convenience for convenience's sake is a dangerous spiral. My razor is asking myself: "What will I do with the time I'm saving?"
It seems like fewer and fewer people choose the affordability and control combination today — and there is a real danger in that. If we never choose to take control and always choose convenience, our skills will atrophy. If nobody has the skill to pursue affordability and control, there is no market pressure for corporations to offer real affordability. Worse, if this effortful third option disappears entirely, people are left choosing between control and convenience or convenience and affordability. Control and convenience is effectively a false choice if you don’t have the money to pay for it. So for the average person, only one option remains: convenience and affordability. But having a single choice is having no choice at all — and when you have no choice, industry is free to raise prices and reduce quality without consequence. We are starting to see this already with shrinkflation and subscription pay models.
The solution is to occasionally reject convenience in favor of effort. Don't allow your skills to atrophy, or you'll never be able to take the affordability and control option again. You'll be stuck accepting whatever the convenient affordable option is, and we’ll give up any power to change the incentive structures for big industries.
I am biased toward starting with food. It is the easiest convenience to cut back on, with some of the biggest intrinsic benefits when control is reclaimed. The act of cooking gives you the satisfaction of a skill, the knowledge of what you're putting in your body, and the kind of slow, intentional time that convenience stacking steals from you. If you are someone who can genuinely generate more value with the time cooking demands, then you can probably afford to make the convenience and control choice. But most of us can't — and most of us aren't using that saved time as wisely as we tell ourselves.
