How Much Would You Pay to Buy Back Your Time?

0:08Here's a thought experiment. Would you rather have more time or more money? Generally speaking, I value time more. 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 overstate 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.

0:48We'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 Jaewon Kang says these time-saving products and services often come at a premium price. And consumers, they're paying. Walmart, for example, they have 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$40 a year on top of the$100 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?

1:33Yeah, like you can leave detailed instructions on how you want your order to be delivered and they'll have employees do that for you. Frigidaire is selling a$1 ,700 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$1 ,400 and will steam your clothes for you. And at Home Depot's annual showcase this 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.

2:15Like quick cleaners where the heads rotate 400 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 Ledoux, 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 Dyson hairdryer, even though it's stupid expensive, because it's going to give me that extra 20 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 easier.

3:00We've been writing for a few 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.

3:19I'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.

3:45To 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 Jaewon Kang 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, you know, after two hours or so it's done. That costs about$2 ,000.

4:27That'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. Jaywon 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 complaint of combo machines has long been that they just don't dry very well. To make it more targeted for the U.S. consumer, I mean, they've done work like making the machines a little bit bigger.

5:10You 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've talked to, they haven't complained about the drying difficulties. And the machine has been a hit. GE has sold 10 times more than forecast, even after it increased production in 2023. 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 DoorDash and TaskRabbit have been selling convenience for more than a decade now.

5:52But Jaywon says there's a growing body of market research suggesting that the convenience economy is poised to grow. There was a 2024 survey from Morgan Stanley, and it showed that people on average are willing to pay about 5 % more if it means that things are going to be more convenient for them. 5 % might not sound like a lot, but Jaywon 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.

6:39So 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 they're buying chicken instead of buying beef because it's cheaper and they want to save money.

7:21But 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 counterintuitive 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 U.S.'s increasingly bifurcated economy.

7:59So people have always cared about saving time. That's Gal Smetitsky. 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 Wharton 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, have groceries delivered, or you can even hire someone to assemble your furniture. So that means that consumers are constantly seeing opportunities to buy back time.

8:42So instead of time-saving products being a luxury, that are built into everyday 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 their time is. I think something happened during the pandemic that people, a lot of people decided to change the course of action after the pandemic, spend more time with their loved ones, with family, with friends.

9:21I'd rather have something done quickly and right 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 Ledoux, the therapist who loves her Dyson hairdryer. 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 2 % target.

9:56The job market looks like it's cooling. Consumer sentiment has been at one of the lowest points on record, though higher income consumers are still spending. So I asked Bloomberg's Jaewon Kang 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 and time.

10:48Jaywon says young people and people making over six figures are especially likely to spend money to save time. But she 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 variation in the demographic based on the products or services. So if it's additional$5 or additional$1 ,000, 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.

11:29The fact that people consider time to be more important today than they did even in 21, 22, 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, this exhaustion sort of builds up and some people still have scar tissue from experiencing inflation in 21, 22, 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.

12:19I feel like that the fact that people are willing to pay more for 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 gal Smetitski again. If your day is packed, spending money to avoid one extra chore can feel less like a luxury and more like a necessity. So the way I see it is it is less as an indicator, a clear economic indicator, and more as a window into how people balance in these very real trade-offs between time and money.

12:54As for Lauren, spending on convenience feels worth it, so she can use the time she gets back more meaningfully. I do think that there is something to that piece of it that feels poignant in this sort of ready-made consumer culture that at times feels a little bit ethically blurry. because it can feel really mindless. But then when I, like as a psychotherapist who's 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 about what we have at the end of the day. It's that there's less available to us within this economy.

13:29And so how do we maximize the most out of our time given what we have?

13:38This 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.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.