Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Here's a thought experiment. Would you rather have more time or more money? Generally speaking, I value time law. It's like you can accumulate money, but you cannot accumulate more time.
I do think that time continues to be more valuable for me because I do have so little of it. I think more money would help me with the immediate basic needs. I think in the scheme of life, though, you can't overseave the importance of time.
With people, time has always been money, but recently, consumer goods makers and retailers are trying to sell people more things that can give back their precious minutes and hours.
We've been seeing this emergence of products and services that have come up in recent years that aim to help people save time.
Bloomberg's Jawon King says these time saving products and services often come at a premium price, and consumers they're paying.
Walmart, for example, they have, you know, a loyalty program or a paid membership program called Walmart Plus, and they offer an add on service called in Home where if you pay extra, you know, forty dollars a year on top of the one hundred dollars for the membership. You can get someone to come inside your home and unpack the groceries for you.
Wow, they go into your refrigerator and put things on your shelves.
Yeah, like you can you know, leave detailed instructions on how you want your order to be delivered and they'll have employees do that for you.
Frigidnaire is selling a seventeen hundred dollars pizza oven that promises to cook restaurant quality pies in two minutes. LG has come out with a high tech closet that costs upwards of fourteen hundred dollars and will steam your clothes for you. And at home depots annual showcase the Spring where store managers get to preview the coming year's biggest products. Devices that make chores easier were all the rage.
Like a plant terranium that you just have to water like once a month or maybe once every two months. Like quick cleaners where the heads rotate four hundred times a minute so it helps you clean faster.
These companies are all tapping into something real. Inflation remains a concern. The labor market is showing signs of weakness, but people are tired. People like Lauren Ledux, a therapist who lives in Massachusetts.
I will buy the service that allows me to be comfortably settled into my life. I'm going to buy the dice in hair dryer, even though it's stupid expensive, because it's going to give me that extra twenty minutes in the morning that I otherwise wouldn't have.
Even as many shoppers are cutting back on non essentials, others are willing to spend a little more to make their lives easy.
We've been writing for a few of years now about how resilient consumers are despite all of these macroeconomic forces, and we're starting to see them kind of behave differently and think differently when it comes to saving their time as well.
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today on the show Buying Back Your Time, paying the adulting tax, the Nope, not doing it fee, the growing number of American consumers who are willing to spend more to save time even in today's uncertain economy, and the companies that are taking notice. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, there are only a few things that are certain in this life. Death taxes and having to do your laundry.
It's a chore that many of us would rather spend less time doing, and that's why as companies try to market new time saving tools. Bloomberg's Jawon King says one GE appliance has been particularly popular.
The washer dryer combo units, where people can just throw in their load of laundry and they don't have to transfer anything after the washing is done. You just put it in and you leave it, and after two hours or so, it's done. That costs about two thousand dollars.
That's a significant premium over a basic washer and dryer, but it's a premium that Ge was betting people would be willing to pay. The origin story of this machine is pretty interesting. Jay One says. At first, Ge wanted to design a more energy efficient dryer that could help people spend less on their energy bills. But executives realized that people would pay to save time, so the company changed course. Instead, it focused on redeveloping the combo unit.
A common complain of combo machines has long been that they just don't dry very well.
To make it more targeted for the US consumer, I mean, they've done work like making the machine's a little bit bigger. You don't need the extra venting for it, and you just kind of put it on and forget about it. And yeah, I mean the consumers I talked to, they haven't complained about the drying difficulties and.
The machine has been a hit. Ge has sold ten times more than forecast, even after it increased production in twenty twenty three. Products that promise to streamline annoying tasks aren't new. That's why we have self cleaning ovens, two in one shampoo and conditioner. Even the combo washer dryer has been around for a while, and gig economy apps like Instacart and door Dash and task Grabit have been
selling convenience for more than a decade now. But Jaywan says there's a growing body of market research suggesting that the convenience economy is poised to out.
There was a twenty twenty four survey from Morgan Stanley and it showed that people on average are willing to pay about five percent more if it means that things are going to be more convenient for them.
Five percent might not sound like a lot, but Jaywan says even that small premium can be meaningful to companies.
In this market where companies are juggling and navigating through a lot of different forces, whether it's tariffs or higher costs, or the cautious consumer, you know, the challenges within the job market. So I think people are trying to figure out different areas of growth and different avenues of growth, and this is presenting to be one of them.
That's so interesting. It feels almost counterintuitive. Right people are stressed about money, they're seeing cracks in the labor market, they're scarred by inflation, and yet they're willing to spend more money on products that promise a certain amount of time savings exactly.
And that's you know, one of the initial things that sort of sparked our interest, which is that people are trying to save money in every way they can. Like we hear all the time from consumers about their buying chicken instead of buying beef because it's cheaper and they want to save money. But at the same time, here we are seeing people pay up you know, extra however many dollars to get something that they want in that moment. Yeah, I think it's kind of intuitive and pretty interesting.
After the break, we talked to a behavioral economist about why certain consumers are so willing to pay the time saving tax, and what it says about the US is increasingly bifurcated economy.
So people have always cared about saving time.
That's Dallas Matitsky. He studies judgment and decision making with a particular focus on the ways people think about and value time and money, and he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania's Warton School. He says, as more products and services offer ways to buy back time, it's becoming more normal for people to use them.
What the gig economy is doing is it makes it much easier to turn money into time on demand. Now with a few taps, you can get a ride if grocery is delivered, or you can even hire someone to assembly of furniture. So that means that consumers are constantly seeing opportunities to buy back time. So instead of time saving products being a luxury that are built into everyday's apps and platforms, it's probably more accurate to say that
the gig economy amplifies or normalizes these choices. It doesn't create a desire to save time. It just makes time saving options much more accessible and feasible.
And there was another turning point, a moment when this trend started to accelerate.
I feel like the pandemic made people think about how much valuable the time is. I think something happened during a pandemic that people, a lot of people decided to change a course of action of the pandemic, spend more time with the loved ones, with family, with friends.
I'd rather have something done quickly and write the first time if that means that I'm going to be doing something more meaningful later with people that I love.
That's Lauren Ledux, the therapist who loves her dice and hair dryer.
And I think that's also a product of COVID, because so many of us experienced loss. If not like the loss of a loved one, we experienced like loss of time because we weren't spending time together. We were quarantined, we were away from each other.
Now, several years out from the worst of the COVID pandemic, the economy looks a little different. Inflation is still above the fed's two percent target. The job market looks like it's cooling. Consumer set has been at one of the lowest points on record, though higher income consumers are still spending so I asked Bloomberg's Jaywon king how paying for time or convenience fits in with all that.
Yeah, so we've seen the bifurcated economy this year for sure, where the lower income consumers they are pulling back and the higher income consumers they continue to spend. The spending power that's been really resilient from the higher income consumer, I think also speaks to this idea that we're talking about where higher income consumers generally do have more comfort and do have more cushion to pay up a little bit more for convenience in time.
Jaywan says, young people and people making over six figures are especially likely to spend money to save time. But you also spoke with people who make a wide range of incomes and there are those who need to budget really carefully who are still willing to pay a premium for time saving products.
Yeah, so we're really seeing it all across the board. And there might be you know, variation in the demographic based on the products or services. So if it's additional five dollars or additional thousand dollars, we might see some differences there. But in terms of this willingness to spend and sometimes pay more for convenience is happening all across
the board. The fact that people consider time to be more important today than they did even in twenty one twenty two, I think speaks to this growing sort of fatigue that everyone is feeling about having to be so cautious about watching for price increases, having to be so cautious about saving money, constantly reading news about corporate layoffs
across different sectors. The list kind of goes on and on, and so, as you know, exhaustion sort of builds up, and some people who still have score tissue from experiencing inflation in twenty one twenty two, they feel like they can and deserve to splurge here and there if it means that they're going to feel a little bit better about their stress and their daily lives.
I feel like that the fact that people are willing to pay more for a convenience, it can either reflect that higher incomes or more disposable money, which becomes more acceptable to save an hour. But at the same time, it can also reflect that people feel more time pressured or overloaded.
Wharton's gals Matitski again.
If you'l day inspact spending money to avoid one extra shore can feel less like a luxury and more like a necessity. So the way I see it is it is less as an indicator of clear economic indicator and always a window into how people balancing these very real trade offs between time and money.
As for Lauren, spending on convenience feels worth it so she can use the time she gets more meaningfully.
I do think that there is something to that piece of it that feels poignant in this sort of like ready made consumer culture that at times feels a little bit ethically blurry because it can feel really mindless. But then I when I, like as a psychotherapist, was really intrigued by the sociology of things, I'm also like, well, why do we do that? It's not because we're all just blind spenders who don't care what we have at
the end of the day. It's that there's less available to us within this economy, and so how do we maximize the most out of our time given what we have.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot Com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash Podcast offer, thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow