Convenient, Convenience, Unconvinced
I refuse to call my Starbucks order a failure of humanity
I became a Starbucks fan after Pippin was born.
She didn’t like bottles and I didn’t like pumping with an oversupply. We never found a balance which means I fed her every two hours directly from my body until we started supplementing with formula when she was nine months old. The longest stretch was four or five hours, her reluctantly taking a bottle from the overproduction I’d spill out one breast while I fed her from the other. We were tied together, bound by time and physical demands. I would hurt if I didn’t feed her. She would be hungry and not sleep if I didn’t feed her. And so we were intertwined, one unit, one mind itchy to escape. We didn’t travel well together. The way my mind works resists easy packing, a running inventory of needs that magically appear in one bag that is easy to carry alongside a baby.
In short, I didn’t get out much.
What I did do was go to Starbucks. Robbie and I both worked from home and split days of who was “on” with her wake times which were always stupidly long for anyone but especially for a baby. When I had to stop eating dairy, egg, peanuts, and treenuts due to possible milk contamination as her allergies emerged, I started going even more. It was close by. It was fast. It was one of the only places that had a chocolate sauce that was dairy free, listed in great detail on their website where every ingredient could be found for any product.
Grande iced mocha. Oatmilk. No whipped cream. No foam.
Aside: now you know my order. I say yes to gifted caffeine.
No matter what store I went to, the same exact experience every time. The taste interchangeable. The only variation being the rate at which the ice melted from the temperature outside and how long I’d avoid going home.
Suburbia at its finest: predictable, stable. And I needed one thing in the universe with those qualities.
Sometimes I’d have Pippin with me. She’d be in her carseat, maybe asleep and I’d pull into the parking lot spot labelled “curbside pickup” and some eager youth would bring it to my car window. I’d sip it while she slept, texting friends and finding a way out of the loneliness.
Other times I’d go on my own. I’d walk in and it would be already waiting for me and I’d sip it in my car, ac or heat blasting, fingers tip tap tapping away on my phone to repair lost connection.
This past week, Seth Godin visited the podcast The Long and the Short of It hosted by Pete Shepherd and Jen Waldman and talked about how he went to a big coffee chain recently and asked for a ceramic mug but was told they didn’t have those anymore. It made sense. The line for the drive-through was long. There was a lament to how Godin described it, a loss of a place to be and a cup to hold, that somehow the drive-through was a loss for humanity. It echoed something Pete and Jen had talked about a few weeks prior, how it used to be in the NY theater world that the agent would go in person to submit headshots and have a chat with the directors and it was all more human than a form submitted online.
Convenience removing humanity. A price paid for the sake of progress. Progress an overrated result.
And it’s also in Oliver Burkemann’s 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that we should choose most things over convenience, that a good life may in fact eschew modern ease in all ways (see: the boyfriend in You’ve Got Mail). The way a boss of mine once lamented that no one went to deposit their checks at the bank anymore.
And I’m angry.
Because what is unexplored in these sweeping statements about convenience being a loss of humanity is… me. MY humanity.
That convenience is as often access. To be accessible is to be more convenient. That my wellbeing might be tied to the curbside delivery of an iced mocha made exactly the same way in thousands of locations around America is not considered. Because it did. It does.
had a great piece on this recently and again last year that got to the problem underneath a problem that is being presented in a problematic way.“Often mistaken for ‘automation’, these technologies are in fact labour-displacement machines used to shift work from a waged worker to an unwaged user.”
Innovation for convenience does not often eliminate labor—it displaces it.
I think of it like a rock placed in a stream. The water does not disappear or contain fewer molecules of H2O because it now passed around a rock that sits dry above the waterline. The same amount exists but it is routed another way, displaced.
The displacement from convenience is not always fair. It is not often thought through. Often, the innovation of convenience came make things less accessible, particularly around economic status. It takes money to have apple products and use apple pay—it’s by far the most convenient thing. So are credit cards—and they are exploitative as fuck.
The labor around coffee drink making and delivering to my car displaces my labor in favor of someone else laboring more. The unionization of starbucks locations is a signal that the strain on staff is too great. The demand for fast turn around on each item created with wild customization is too much for the pay given and the staffing provided.
But the convenience itself is not the evil. It is the unconscious displacement that is a problem.
Or more accurately: where was labor displaced onto me so that an iced mocha, so small a good, becomes a commodity I would fight for, assert as an unvarnished good, a life-line, a piece of culture worth saving in future dystopias?
I said it was Suburbia at its finest. The conditions for my mochas were fed by having a baby in a town without nearby family, living in a single family home with a yard where the neighbors knew my name but not well enough to make me food and we weren’t likely to see each other unless walks synced up on accident once a week, and a friend/professional network strewn across a large metro+sprawl area. Suburbia at its finest.
The issue in my life is that is was a life-line I shouldn’t have needed. The weight of labor displacement heavy on me so that one convenience is the thread holding my life together. My need for the known and the controlled is hardly an evil. The ease of access, the peace of predictability, hardly worthy of lament.
This comes up as well when people talk about not ordering from Amazon. That company is often the only tie to resources that disabled folks have. It comes fast and direct to the door when leaving home is impossible or too high a cost for energy and well being. The accessibility of Amazon is not what makes Amazon evil (and they are)—it is the unethical displacement of labor onto the underpaid worker and the explosive financial compensation of the higher ups. No one needs as much money as Bezos has.
“Convenience” is not something we will choose against as long as our lives and bodies live on the edge of isolation and hunger. Pippin and I were in many ways homebound while I exclusively breastfed, bound to each other, the inconvenience and cost of leaving for any reason too high. Why was the cost of leaving so high? Feeding her in public didn’t work for her very well and certainly didn’t work for me. Feeding her formula wasn’t something we considered until later one. Feeding her from pre-pumped milk came at the cost of pain as I had an oversupply and pumping threw off the balance of a pain-free chest. And there are the hormones that tell your body that if you stop feeding from your body that your baby will die; hormones don’t know about alternatives, it’s just telling you what evolution has taught it.
The cost to all of this was…is… high.
Not making this up. See Yale. And Vox. See how I pull out sources beyond my self-reporting to convince you.
Convenient coffee was the pleasure that kept me remembering that pleasure was possible. Convenient coffee was a shelter that gave me something to look forward to, something to escape towards. I didn’t need it forever but I needed access to it when I needed it. If it wasn’t coffee, it would have been something else, or could have been (see: alcohol consumption by mothers). Continuing without relent was not viable.
Convenience is a symptom, not a failure in itself. The choosing of convenience mean more than laziness, more than a lack of Humanity. It is instead important to ask what access some convenient thing is given. And if that convenience comes as a larger cost, then where does the humanity come back in? It’s not in asking the exhausted soul to try harder.
It’s not my humanity that is absent.
One of your best.
We will always gravitate toward convenience and gravity always wins. I agree that this feels like a high-level, systems problem of chronically undervaluing the people who create the amazing value of convenience.
Thanks for being the one to finally articulate this effectively.