Why We Pay for Convenience
What surveys and a field experiment say about spending money to save time, why most people still choose money, and where the saved hours go.
Answer to the question
Why do we pay for convenience?
Because convenience buys time. In surveys across four countries, people who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction, and a field experiment found working adults happier after a time-saving purchase than a material one. Most people still prefer money to time, and the benefit depends on how the freed hours are spent.
Key takeaways
- Ashley Whillans and colleagues reported in 2017 that, across 6,271 adults in four countries, those who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction.
- A field experiment in the same paper found working adults happier after spending money on a time-saving purchase than on a material purchase.
- Hal Hershfield, Cassie Mogilner and Uri Barnea found that most participants preferred money to time, while those who chose time reported higher happiness.
- A 2022 survey of 15,545 Americans by Iris Lok and Elizabeth Dunn linked buying time to happiness across age, gender and income groups.
- Vaclav Smil's Speed shows how saved time is often absorbed: ploughing speed nearly doubled over centuries while the hours spent on the task barely changed.
Of 6,271 adults surveyed in the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands, those who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction than those who did not. Ashley Whillans, Elizabeth Dunn, Paul Smeets, René Bekkers and Michael Norton reported this in 2017, and it gives a plain reason why people pay for convenience: a delivered meal, a cleaner or a shorter route hands back hours, and hours are what a busy life runs short of.
Why do we pay for convenience at all?
Whillans and her co-authors start from a pattern in richer societies: as wealth rises, so does the sense of not having enough time. Their proposal is that spending money to buy time can act as a buffer against that pressure, and so protect happiness. The survey result covers people who already buy services that take over a task. A field experiment then tested the idea directly. Working adults reported greater happiness after spending money on a time-saving purchase than after spending it on a material purchase, which is the nearest the paper comes to showing cause and effect.
Convenience is the everyday form of that trade. A grocery order brought to the door, a repair done by someone else and a payment that takes one tap each move a small task from the buyer to a provider. Even the act of paying has been made easier, and Why Paying by Card Feels Cheaper looks at what that ease does to the felt price. A convenience premium is the price tag on the hand-off, and the research asks whether the hand-off is worth it to the buyer.
The question is narrower than it sounds. The studies do not say that every convenient product raises happiness. They compare money spent to save time with money spent on things, and they find the time-saving purchase ahead in the field experiment and linked to higher life satisfaction in the surveys. Nothing in that work ranks one kind of convenience above another.
Does buying time make people happier?
In a later survey of 15,545 Americans from varied economic backgrounds, Iris Lok and Elizabeth Dunn asked whether the benefit of buying time depends on age, gender or income. Buying time was linked to happiness across all three groups. People who valued time over money were happier when they used money to buy time, and gender and income did not change the time-buying link. The authors note that this relationship was somewhat less reliable than the link between happiness and spending on others, which the same survey also covered.
Our view is that convenience is worth paying for when it takes over a task the buyer would rather not do and the freed time goes to something the buyer chooses. That is a reading of the findings, not a result in them. The experiment shows a time-saving purchase beating a material one for working adults, and the surveys show an association across large samples. Neither tests what people do with the minutes. The Lok and Dunn finding that the link held across income groups suggests the idea is not only for the wealthy, though it describes a survey and not a prescription.
Time bought can also go to the experiences covered in Are experiences worth more than things?, where the evidence leans towards trips and shared occasions over objects. Hours handed off are one way to make room for them. Waiting is part of the picture too: What Anticipation Actually Adds reports that the wait before an enjoyable event can itself be pleasant, so removing every wait is not the same as adding every pleasure.
Hal Hershfield, Cassie Mogilner and Uri Barnea asked people to choose between having more money and having more time. Most participants preferred money. Those who chose time reported higher happiness, and the gap remained after the researchers accounted for how much money people already had. Further studies in the same paper looked at why people choose as they do and whether choosing time causes greater happiness.
That puts the convenience premium in a different light. A buyer who treats it only as a price to be avoided is making the choice most participants made, and the people who chose time were the ones reporting higher happiness. The data are associations, and the paper's further studies are where cause is examined.
Three questions fit the evidence for anyone weighing a convenience purchase:
- Which task does it remove, and would I have minded doing it?
- What will the freed time go to?
- Is the task one I would have enjoyed?
Where does the saved time go?
Vaclav Smil's Speed traces how far machines have pushed pace, and one of its quieter points is how often a gain in speed fails to show up as a gain in free time. Smil reports that ploughing speed nearly doubled between Roman times and the Great Plains of 1900, and that harvesting speed more than tripled, yet the total time given to the task barely changed, because holdings grew. He also argues that the pace of many modern machines reached a ceiling long ago: jet airliners cruise at about the same speed they did in the late 1950s.
Both points matter for convenience. Where a machine cannot go faster, a buyer can still gain time by handing the task to someone else, which is what a convenience service sells. The farming example shows the other side of the ledger: time saved is easily taken up by more work of the same kind. So the benefit in the studies depends on the saved hours being spent differently, and the survey and the experiment above are best read as measuring that choice as much as the purchase. In the ploughing case, the work went several times faster and the hours spent on it stayed about the same.
Common questions
Why do we pay for convenience?
Because convenience buys time. In 2017, surveys across four countries linked spending on time-saving services to greater life satisfaction, and a field experiment found working adults happier after a time-saving purchase than a material one.
Does paying for convenience make people happier?
In the studies reviewed, yes for time-saving purchases. A 2022 survey of 15,545 Americans linked buying time to happiness across age, gender and income groups.
Do most people choose time over money?
No. In Hershfield, Mogilner and Barnea's studies most participants preferred money, yet those who chose time reported higher happiness.
Is every convenient product worth the price?
The research covers time-saving purchases, not every convenient product. It does not rank one kind above another.
Sources
Smil, V. Speed. Seed book; vault hub Books/Speed.
Whillans, A. V., Dunn, E. W., Smeets, P., Bekkers, R., & Norton, M. I. (2017). “Buying time promotes happiness.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 8523-8527. doi:10.1073/pnas.1706541114 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1706541114
Hershfield, H. E., Mogilner, C., & Barnea, U. (2016). “People who choose time over money are happier.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(7), 697-706. doi:10.1177/1948550616649239 https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616649239
Lok, I., & Dunn, E. W. (2022). “Are the benefits of prosocial spending and buying time moderated by age, gender, or income?” PLOS ONE, 17(6), e0269636. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0269636 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269636