Remember how fun inconvenience could be? The problem with our uber-convenient, home-delivery world

In the past 12 months, several fast-delivery start-ups have cropped up in Sydney and Melbourne. With a few clicks on an app, people in certain inner-city suburbs can have groceries delivered to their door in under 15 minutes.

By now, we’re all familiar with the idea that our convenience comes at a human cost. In America, we’ve seen Amazon workers fighting to unionise, and in Australia, this masthead has spotlighted the dangerous working conditions of food-delivery drivers.

To your door ... but what of the joy of hunting and gathering your own fruit and veg? Credit: iStick

But new start-ups such as Milkrun, Voly or Send are hardly comparable to tech giants like Amazon or Uber. Their ambitions are more modest, and any exploitative potential much smaller. Nonetheless, they pose an interesting question. We’re so accustomed to paying for convenience, even when it means overlooking the harm it does to workers, that we never stop to ask the question: is convenience good for consumers either?

Needless to say, I’m referring to convenience as distinct from accessibility. For those who are isolating, or struggle to make it to the shops, fast-delivery apps offer an essential service. But for those who do have a choice: what do we gain when we buy into the narrative that our time is so precious, it’s better not spent doing our own groceries?

I’d argue that the principle we all implicitly endorse, almost every time we pay for our convenience, is the idea that our time is better spent not just anywhere else but specifically at work.

Jia Tolentino, the American essayist, writes eloquently about the all-pervasive capitalist compulsion to “optimise”: to use our time as efficiently as possible to maximise our output at work.

We outsource household tasks. We combine exercise with socialising so we are fit and happy enough to be maximally productive at a desk for several hours, where we will earn enough money to afford the domestic labour and the gym, so we can do it all again.

All of this seems like a reasonable – even efficient – trade if you buy the mantra that work is pleasure. Naturally, some people are fortunate enough to love their jobs. But it can’t be the case that the “work = pleasure” equation applies as liberally as companies would have us believe. (Chillingly, James Bloodworth reported in his book Hired, about low-wage working conditions in Britain, that Amazon warehouse employees laboured beneath a sign that read “we love coming to work and we miss it when we’re not here”.)

With the pandemic-induced increase in remote work, we saw a nationwide increase in work hours as the lines between home and office blurred. Significantly, this did not make us happier. Indeed, a survey by the University of South Australia last year reported that workers in the university sector who emailed about work outside of work hours had higher levels of psychological distress and exhaustion.

But, in the same way that the pandemic gave us fast-delivery apps, and the increasing encroachment of work into the home, I think it also gave us a more nuanced understanding of how to spend our time.

Every app that sells “convenience” assumes a good (such as groceries) is good, no matter how you acquire it. For anyone who streamed movies during the pandemic but missed the cinema, or who bought clothes online but looked forward to shopping in-person, we know this assumption to be false. It seems obvious now that there is pleasure, not just in what we spend our money on, but in how we spend our time. And that time spent working isn’t necessarily the most valuable.

I can see the merit in the efficient. It’s nice to skip a queue, and to avoid going outside in the rain. But we shouldn’t overlook the value of the inconvenient either. We know that it’s fun to browse even when you don’t find anything, that the best ideas come on a slow stroll, and that there is pleasure in the cooking as well as the eating. Anyone who tries to tell us otherwise is selling something.