I just came across this WSJ article: You Can Now Hire Someone to Return All Those Unwanted Gifts, which is exactly as it sounds.
That reminded me of two other articles I read this year, also from the WSJ:
Tired of Waiting in Line? You Can Hire Someone for That (March 2025)
and
It’s Sample-Sale Season. Cue the Professional Line-Standers (October 2025)
On the face of it, this practice is certainly economically efficient: My time is more economically valuable than your time; My time is worth more than waiting in line, whereas your time is worth less than waiting in line; Therefore, we should trade, my money for your time.
But something about this doesn't sit well with me, and it harkens back to the days of the aristocracy who had servants do everything include put on their clothes for them.
We no longer have personal servants, but have we just re-created personal servitude but in a distributed sense? In a way, I always thought of DoorDash, InstaCart, and the like just a form of distributed servanthood.
Acknowledgement: I don’t like paying anyone to do anything for me that I can do for myself.
Question: Why do you think there’s an incompatibility between personal servants and economic efficiency?
I don't. But i also don't have to like everything that would be considered economically efficient.
Ok, I misunderstood the juxtaposition you were making.
I’ll bail you out then. You have a bizarre egalitarianism in your utility function that violates transitivity in these cases.
Edit: on second thought I don’t think it’s a transitivity problem.
I mean, I did pitch it as a dichotomy even when it's not, so that part is fair.
Perhaps the word is simply moral repugnance. I always assign this article to my Public Econ students, to remind them that economic efficiency and your personal moral sensibilities are different things, and that they can sometimes conflict, and that policy is as much about economic efficiency as it is about people's moral feelings. (Not in the sense that we should always listen to our moral feelings, but to understand the interplay between the two when it comes to politics)
Maybe we need a market for making side payments to people to get them to stop doing things we find repugnant.
Then we can align the two things.
I ain't paying someone to not stand in line for someone else
Obviously not. You should pay someone to not pay someone else to stand in line for them.
It’s the wannabe aristocratic who’s grossing you out, so that’s who needs to be paid to stop.
My indignation is off the charts
It hints at an equality. I think jobs like this exist only because extreme inequality does, but then who am I to tell someone trying to claw their way up that they shouldn't be a line stander? I'm okay with it because there is an agreed upon price and the person isn't "forced" into it. Also some places like local eateries / ticket sales are just ridiculous when it comes to interest in them, they are actually providing a useful service.
That could hint at some of the underlying issues too. Lines tend to form when things are underpriced, and thus another form of rationing (willingess to spend time) becomes the mechanism to equilibrate supply and demand.
Oftentimes, especially in the case of ticket sales, some restaurants, and collectibles like Pokemon cards, the goods are underpriced precisely because the producer wants there to be more equitable access to them. So when rich people pay others to wait in line (or when scalpers scoop up all the underpriced product), we get upset by that (or at least, I do.)
I guess we're both talking about price discovery. If they raised the prices for a concert, what you would get is still scalpers and line standers, but the scalpers would be making even more of a killing. And there would be perhaps fewer professional line standers, but still some. It would all still depend on the price, I suppose. There's probably some range of prices that would still have line standers and scalpers, but I think if the price was set too high all you would have is scalpers and the odd wealthy person who really wants to see the Rolling Stones standing in line.
E: Thinking a bit further on this, even if you raised the prices to a higher level, you would now only entice scalpers and those who can pay for a line stander to get in line. I don't think there's a way to get rid of the behaviour even by raising prices. Not sure.
I've never been able to bring myself to use DoorDash. But I have no problem getting a burger at a fast food joint.
What is the difference between paying someone to assemble a burger and paying someone else to deliver it?
The grocery stores here in Texas are full of employees doing the shopping for other customers. They push these tall carts through the aisles, selecting items that I assume the customers requested online. Feels icky to me.
Yet, I don't mind having Amazon's employees do the same thing in some warehouse as they select the items I ordered. What's the difference?
Clearly, this isn't an economics issue. It's something to do with our culture.
Maybe we don't like it not because we have any inherent objection to it, but because it's a visible sign of growing inequality (which we think likely originates from unjust reasons, like the Cantillon effect).
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All those services are voluntary applications. You can elaborate that servitude happens because of monetary fiat system, but is a very complicated ela elaboration.
Even if it's voluntary, I don't have to like it.