The Age of Convenience

July 30, 2010 in writing

In any given week, many people choose to have someone else:

-wash their car
-clean their house
-feed, walk, bathe, and groom their pets
-fix the car
-landscape the yard
-drive us around. to the airport, home from the pub…
-take care of financial matters including taxes
-launder and fold our clothes
-make coffee and for that matter:
-breakfast, lunch, and dinner

(Any other big ones I’m missing?)

Obviously, these things we can do ourselves.

Someone in my office roasts his own coffee. I think there’s something great about that.

As I’m writing this, I sip from my savvily-packaged (yet weak in defense, fully-recyclable) venti Starbucks I picked up on the way in because truthfully who knows where my mug went. And, I like their Tazo tea.

This package is more than $2.39. It’s comfort, it’s identity (oh, the options to choose from! I’d like a “tall extra-hot americano, please” an actual reply from a baristo “I’ll let you know when he walks in the door!”) , and most importantly it’s ease.

In looking over the aformentioned list, I subscribe to many of these. Why? The answer to that is simple. Why not? It’s not a matter being unable to handle the day-to-day minutiae anymore. I’m buying convenience.

It makes me wonder what kind of shift is happening here on a socioeconomic level. As we place a higher value on the reliance of services, will we place a higher premium on the service-based industries? Will we start to see higher end and/or gourmet services with higher premiums?

What does this say about the way we work, and live?