What Caused Convenience Culture?
DoorDash, Amazon Prime, and Takeaway Coffee Didn't Get Here on their Own
Last week, Lloyd Alter of
wrote a fantastic piece about what he termed the Convenience Industrial Complex. His argument, in short, was that we don’t just have a disposable cup crisis, we have a cultural crisis: An entire “linear food system” that relies on disposables. Dependence on ever more drive-thrus and deliveries. The need to get everything we order instantaneously.In fact, I once heard a European describe American culture as “excessively convenient.” In other words, we are convenient to the point that it is detrimental to ourselves and to society as a whole. And, crucially, the rise in convenience culture in other parts of the world is largely due to the export of U.S. based corporations— ranging from Amazon to fast food chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks. Since then, my wheels have been turning about how we ended up in this cultural position.
Convenience is often the substitute for supportive culture and connection.
I don’t think that we would find ourselves in this spot of relying on drive-thrus, DoorDash, and Amazon Prime if we lived in societies with deeper connections: If meal trains stepped in every time there was an illness or a new baby, if the next-door neighbor was more than happy to grab you more milk from the store, if we had time to linger with friends instead of having to rush to get Jimmy from after-school care to soccer practice.
Convenience is what happens when we operate in societies where we have to ‘fend for ourselves,’ but don’t have the time or mental bandwidth to do so. It’s what happens when you need to grab shampoo from the store but you work 60 hours a week. It’s what happens when your kid is sick, but without a neighbor’s homemade casserole, pizza delivery will have to do.
And please know: I’m not anti-convenience. Some days, grocery delivery is the only thing standing between my family having an idyllic day frolicking around, and me needing an Aspirin because two toddlers can’t handle a grocery trip. It’s not productive to shame convenience culture because we all rely on it, to varying degrees.
But convenience culture does come with its costs. Of course, there’s a cost in packaging and carbon emissions. But there is also a cost to ourselves.
Convenience culture often distances us from the behaviors that can help us to feel grounded in our own lives.
Look, I’m not telling you to grow your own wheat or wade into the river to wash your clothes. But tasks like gardening, baking bread, or hanging laundry on a clothesline do serve important functions for your brain, by connecting you to a physical labor with a tangible reward. For many of us who work primarily in our heads and with technology, such labor— just like getting outside for a good hike or enjoying coffee with a sunrise— serves as a much-needed reminder that we operate in a physical body and with a nervous system that needs a chance to “reset.”
You don’t have to do all of these things, and you don’t have to do them often enough to replace store bought vegetables or ditch your dryer. But even the knowledge to perform these actions— the how-to mend a seam and how to make grandma’s famous lasagna— is being lost as a result of convenience culture. If I can buy a $3.99 shirt, why stitch the one I have? If DoorDash can bring me any food in a 30 mile radius, do I really need to know how to cook?
There is also a cost to the community. In Brené Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness, she talks about a village where women all got washing machines— ostensibly a wonderful, time-saving convenience— and soon after experienced a spike in depression. It turns out, women gathering together to wash clothes together in the river was a powerful act of community. When the labor moved indoors, women lost their daily socialization and robust support systems.
The problem here isn’t the washing machine, online ordering, or the existence of pizza delivery. The problem is the combination of all of the above, pushing us into working more hours to afford the ‘conveniences’ that we require because are operating in a throwaway culture with a lack of social support.
I think the ultimate question to ask is: How do we change the culture? And, because culture shifts generally take quite a while, what do we do in the meantime?
I don’t have all the answers— but if we take a birds-eye view of the last 70+ years, we might have a better understanding of how we became a convenience-dependent culture in the first place. This quick little history lesson will be largely American in nature, since, quite frankly, we’re disproportionately the problem. But even using the United States as an example, it helps to remember that every culture and government handles these issues in slightly different ways—for example, trucks and SUVS account for 80% of new car sales in the United States, while Paris just voted to triple parking costs for large SUVS to $20 an hour.
How We Got Here: The Changing Face of Public Spaces
Of course, access to public space has never been completely straightforward. Social inclusion has always been mediated by degrees of acceptability (with at times severe consequences for failing to adhere to these norms historically, like, oh, I don’t know, being accused of witchcraft. Fun fact: While it would be way more dramatic to say “burned at the stake,” the accused witches of the infamous Salem Witch Trials were generally hung, occasionally stoned, not burnt).
But the existence of a rich, vibrant community has been challenged in recent decades. In my favorite Boomers’ tellings, the number of adult spaces has shrunk, considerably. Where churches once had robust singles groups and 20-somethings frequented the apartment pool with their neighbors, today’s 20-somethings have… TikTok.
Arguably, though, there are actually more spaces that cater to children than 50 years ago. Think Chuck E. Cheese, trampoline parks like Urban Air, and gymnastics chains like Romp n Roll— but every one of these spaces is contingent on forking over a not-insubstantial sum of money. In other words, we are further corporatizing childhood, but making these activities less accessible to people without some serious disposable income.
And, crucially, these aren’t inter-age spaces. A 20-something year old can’t hang out at Chuck E. Cheese without arousing suspicion (nor would they likely want to). At the same time, children have become less welcome in other public spaces. Malls increasingly restrict teenagers from congregating without an adult present, once-noisy coffee shops are now the places of stoic productivity where someone else’s child gleefully shrieking, “Can I take your order?” (ok, who are we kidding, it was my kid) draws some seriously disapproving glances.
Even fast-food chains— once the ultimately kid-friendly destination— have gradually removed their play spaces. The cited explanations are usually a combination of health concerns (dirty diapers in the ball pit, anyone?) and a transition towards more mobile and drive-thru services. And while, sure, you can fit more tables— and don’t require any staff to ‘clean’ a tunnel system— without a play area, you’re also taking away one of the only places for children to congregate boisterously indoors in the winter months.
Nothing is truly ‘nearby’ in suburbia
In the United States, the rise of ‘suburbs’— smaller towns that popped up on the outskirts of larger cities— really took off in the 1950s. There were a handful of reasons for this shift, including an explosion new constructions when soldiers returned home from World War II armed with GI bills (that afforded low interest rates and no down payments for a home purchase).
American urban planners, concerned about the vulnerability of American cities in the event of a nuclear attack (it was the Cold War, after all) also encouraged sprawling suburban developments to move populations out of city centers. The result? Millions of nearly-identical houses in neat little rows.
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.Little Boxes, a 1962 song by Malvina Reynolds
But unlike in cities, the suburbs rely on cars to get just about anywhere. So when suburbs exploded, so did car culture.
And here’s where I have a sneaking personal suspicion about the particular scale of drive-thru culture we see today: If you are a parent or caregiver, it takes a whole lot of effort to get the kids out the door— and then in and out of the car, repeatedly, at every destination. And while cars technically came with seat belts in the ‘50s and ‘60s, almost nobody wore them. Tennessee passed the first child restraint law in 1978, with other states following through the mid-1980s (The UK, for comparison, didn’t actually require car seats until 2006).
Please know, I’m not knocking car seats. They are incredible inventions that have undoubtedly saved millions of lives. But they do make it next to impossible to ‘pile in’ and ‘pile out’ of the car quickly and easily— turning a 5 minute errand into a 30 minute tug-of-war with a toddler seatbelt. And, in the same time frame, it became less feasible to leave your children with a neighbor for a quick errand and completely socially unacceptable (in fact, in many cases illegal) to leave your child alone in a car for any amount of time. So if your child falls asleep in the car? You are officially screwed. Hence, the drive-thru.
We’ve also become less adept at conversing with strangers, thanks to our ever-present glowing screens, which might explain why you can find a handful of parked cars in any drive-thru parking lot, the solo occupant enjoying their burger in silence without the added aggravation of walking into a building to place their order face-to-face with another human.
But even if you aren’t a parent and are plenty social, residents of suburbia know this: Everything is far enough away that you have to drive, and even the ‘one-stop’ superstore doesn’t actually have everything you need. Errands can quickly subsume an entire afternoon— but unlike in the city, you’re hopping in the car between every destination. This also explains the case of the super-sized suburban refrigerator: While the average European refrigerator is 24 inches, a typical refrigerator in the suburban U.S. is nearly twice that size— because it’s simply too much of a pain to drive 30 minutes to the store every day.
Of course, the United States is far from the only place with small towns. But our towns, in general, are more car-dependent and more rife with chain stores (supermarkets, specifically, were also a product of the 1950s) and chain restaurants than those in Europe and elsewhere.
And, of course, subsidized oil fuels suburbia (and everyone else).
Globally, governments offered $7 trillion in subsidies to fossil fuel companies in 2022— reflecting 7.1 percent of global GDP (and a $2 trillion increase since 2020). $1 trillion of this was in the form of literal handouts, where governments forked over cash to fund drilling, increase plastic production, and smooth out supply chains— while “Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income.” The remainder was in the form of costs from Big Oil where the government or individual citizens had to pick up the tab— ranging from government assistance cleaning up oil spills to soaring cancer rates near drilling sites.
In the United States, taxpayers handed over $20 billion to oil companies— the equivalent of $60 per person (and because babies count as people too, a statistically average 4 person family is paying oil companies nearly $250 annually— in addition to what you pay at the pump!). These subsidies, though, aren’t just a North America issue— explicit subsidies account for 23% of GDP across the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS— which includes members such as Russia and Belarus), and 19% of GDP across the Middle East and North Africa.
Of course, these subsidies mean that oil companies get to defy the basic rules of a ‘free’ economy— but it also obscures the true cost of our car culture. Thanks to these subsidies (which, reminder— we are paying for in our taxes), the out of pocket financial cost to filling our tanks and lingering in drive-thru lanes feels (relatively) cheap, even though the true cost is not.
But even cities have a convenience problem.
Even though we think of car culture as a feature of suburbia, that’s not to say that cities cities don’t have a convenience problem. They do.
In New York City, for example, 2.3 million packages are delivered daily— 3.7 million if you include groceries and food delivery. As the MIT Technology Review notes, “That’s nearly enough to deliver one item each to half the people in New York every day.”
I’ll be honest; I just don’t understand the appeal of $10 in fees for a dinner delivery. But given that I once saw a DoorDash driver pull up to a neighbor’s house with nothing but a McDonald’s soda and a bag of fries, I have to assume that DoorDash appeals to someone. And, in cities, apparently a lot of someone’s.
Urban areas like New York City and Boston are struggling with the multitude of delivery drivers— 65,000 in New York City alone— clogging city streets and needing access to rest spaces and restrooms that restaurants don’t always want to provide independent contractors.
The rise of one and two-day delivery has also contributed to air pollution, both for urban areas contending with Amazon Prime deliveries and for broader metropolitan areas. In an unfortunate twist of privilege, shipping warehouses are most likely to be built on the outskirts of urban centers— polluting nearby communities with less economic privilege. For example, Amazon has built over 3,000 warehouses in Southern California, mostly along a stretch known as the Inland Empire East of Los Angeles. But the communities “dominated by Amazon warehouses have the lowest rates of Amazon sales per household” while having to contend with increased traffic and pollution.
So what’s the path forward?
Convenience culture didn’t show up overnight— and it won’t go away overnight, either. As individuals, we have to decide what parts of ‘convenience’ make sense for our lives and our families, and where we should push back: Think twice about two-day shipping. Passing on DoorDash. Supporting your local coffee shop by lingering on a Saturday morning. Turning off the car while waiting at curbside pick-up. As with every other change we talk about in this space, it’s not about making all the changes or doing something perfectly, it’s about one degree better.
And on a broader level, there’s plenty of policy changes we can encourage: Urban planning won’t eliminate car culture overnight, but it can encourage easily walkable downtowns, even in smaller towns. Installing bike lanes and green spaces can encourage outdoor play. Utilizing community centers, libraries, and churches for low-cost classes and group gatherings (from hobby clubs to mom’s morning out) can reinvigorate a lost sense of community. Cities who implement composting programs make it more feasible for individuals and local companies to follow their lead. Employers who maintain flexible hours— and take the time for an extended coffee break— help to reduce the strain of hustle culture that makes convenience feel like a necessity. There’s plenty we can do without moving mountains all at once.
Meet Me in The Comments: What else can you think of that has contributed to convenience culture? Where do we go from here?