391. The Demise of Convenience

What’s sold as convenience collapses into something that no longer qualifies as convenience.

This is essay #14 in the series The Revolution No One Sees Coming.

Convenience is the beating heart of Modernism and Progress: Progress is defined by everyday life becoming easier via new conveniences, which are the acme of Modernism: new is better because it’s novel and adds convenience, which is a mix of reduced time and effort to get what we want / need.

So the supermarket is more convenient than having to walk around the neighborhood to a half-dozen specialty shops. The frozen pizza is convenient because we no longer have to laboriously mix the dough, stretch it into the pizza pan, prepare a sauce, slice the vegetable and meat toppings, grate the cheese, etc.

The private vehicle is more convenient than having to wait for a bus and walking to our destination.

Online shopping is convenient because we don’t even have to leave our desk to get stuff delivered to our door.

The Demise of Convenience is a subtle, complicated dynamic which is not as easy to grasp as the easy-to-see conveniences described above.

Let’s start with a truth that’s invisible to most of us: convenience is extremely expensive to provide and maintain. Everything that provides convenience demands extraordinary quantities of energy, physical plant, machinery, expertise, management and complex global supply chains.

Convenience is the result of adding complexity and cost on a vast scale. Scaling up the global system that generates convenience lowers the cost per unit, but taken as a whole, the system is extraordinarily resource-capital-labor intensive.

Consider the supermarket versus the neighborhood small specialty shops. The supermarket is a gigantic space that must be heated / cooled, and is the “last mile” of a massive global supply chain network bringing goods from around the world via container ships, aircraft and diesel trucks. It requires a large staff and exacting management to offer convenience.

If the staffing is cut to reduce costs, convenience suffers: we can’t find anyone to help us. (See links on understaffing below.)

There’s a small shop we frequent that doesn’t even turn on interior lighting; why bother if there’s enough light to see what’s on the shelves from the windows? Some neighborhood shops rely on global supply chains, of course, but many subsist on local suppliers.

One of our neighbors has a part-time job delivering locally made food products (kimchee, etc.) to local retailers in the early morning hours with his car. The network required to operate this food preparation and delivery is far less intensive that the complex mega-factory that makes the frozen pizzas, the refrigerated trucks moving the pizzas thousands of miles, the freezer-warehouses for storing the pizzas between transits, and the freezer cases in the supermarket where the pizzas sit for days or weeks until a customer buys them.

Moving to the digital realm, consider the convenience of autopay, a standard form of technological convenience. Rather than having to remember to pay bills, we set up autopay and our bills are paid on time without our having to pay attention and manually transact the payment.

I switched the credit card in my healthcare insurance autopay, deleting the old card from their system, leaving the one new credit card on file. This eliminated any confusion over which card to bill. I anticipated a seamless transition to the new credit card.

Instead, I received an email from the insurer notifying me that my payment had failed because they’d continued trying to bill the card that had been removed from their system weeks ago.

I called customer service, was offered three AI-bot options that did not address my problem, and asked for a “representative.”

The human representative could not explain the system failure other than a vague reference to work being done on corporate software systems, nor could she guarantee the same problem won’t occur next month.

This is not an added convenience. It is an added uncertainty that requires monitoring. That isn’t convenience.

Now that AI-powered hacking is being unleashed globally, digital networks are being compromised on a vast and ever-expanding scale. In response, we’re being nagged to adopt a “passkey” security system. Oops, it turns out that passkeys can be lifted unencrypted from browsers. So much for that security solution.

Many sites now require entering new passwords on a regular basis. Others nag us to adopt multi-factor security, so every login requires entering a security number from our phone.

Compared to the good old days of the early Internet, these are not improvements in convenience, they’re significant increases in unpaid shadow-work, a marked decline in convenience, i.e. Anti-Progress.

The range of stuff that can be bought online is so broad that it fosters the illusion that we can buy everything online, so if local suppliers close down it has no impact on our convenience.

But some things that require labor or specialty equipment / parts are not available online, and when the local supplier closes down due to exorbitant rent increases or the owners aging out / retiring, that hole isn’t going to be filled by online orders.

While we’re considering online purchases, let’s ask if dynamic pricing is a convenience or an extortion. Dynamic pricing is when the price changes as the retailer’s profit-maximizing algorithms collect data about us from myriad sources (social media, search, previous purchases, income and credit scores, etc.) and then jack up the price to whatever the probabilistic algorithms reckon are the maximum we might pay, increasing the profit margins without offering any improvement in quality.

This is not an increase in convenience, it’s an extortion process powered by data collected about us.

Returning to local shops closing down as the owners retire: it’s difficult to find younger people willing to work long hours in marginal, demanding small businesses.

CHS NOTE: the Revolution No One Sees Coming will not just be a series of external events, it will be personal, as each of us will face situations we didn’t choose whose novelty and scale may exceed our previous experience. History is full of changes no one thought possible a few years earlier. No one else is writing about it like I am, so a subscription–which costs the same as a few sushi–is a unique value. Thank you for supporting my work, I would say to heck with it if it wasn’t for you. …