Furniture to assemble? There’s an app for that – because no one wants to do anything for themselves any more

A few months ago I saw an excellent fight at my local jeweller. The owners, as well as much of the clientele, are big characters. Spats often break out. This time a customer demanded a written statement that the necklace she had brought in would be stored in a safe. The jeweller told her they don’t provide this, and so the customer grew irate. “You don’t trust me, is that it?” said the jeweller. The woman protested: she did! The jeweller had been highly recommended. “So you know who you’re dealing with then,” said the jeweller, proudly. The woman handed over her necklace.
It was a brilliant spectacle. I wanted to cheer. Instead I asked to see the gold chains (I like the ceremony of seeing them displayed on a velvet cushion). I actually don’t buy jewellery very often, but I stop in fairly regularly for minor repairs, to have links taken out or clasps fixed – and for scenes such as this.
It occurred to me recently, when I saw an advert for Taskrabbit (a platform that connects customers with workers who will do all manner of DIY jobs) offering a service to assemble flat-pack furniture for you, that I have chosen to live what is, in many ways, a fairly inconvenient, old-fashioned life.
I have ordered a takeaway once this year. I’ve used the (now defunct) grocery delivery app Gorillas only once in my life, when I had Covid during lockdown. In fact, rather than opt for the time-saving these platforms promise, I spend (you could say waste) a good deal of my time running errands such as the one to my jeweller. I constantly take secondhand shoes I buy to the cobbler and get clothes tailored. I could pretend this is a statement of resistance, or frame it as a pious act of self-denial. But honestly, I think I just prefer this way of living.
A platform such as Taskrabbit (and the similar services catering to various aspects of our lives) promise the ultimate in convenience. You enter your postcode and the scope of the task you want done (painting a wall, say) and you are presented with a list of potential workers, with profiles including a photograph and customer reviews. You select one, they come around and do the job, you pay for their time through the app. Having never used Taskrabbit, I cannot vouch for how well this works in reality.
There are situations when this would be useful, of course. The concept of a handyman is not a new one. But it struck me, when seeing this recent advert, that flat-pack furniture was always supposed to be something most people could assemble by themselves. I wonder if the person tapping around on an app for someone to come and click their shelves together has tried this themselves and found it impossible, or simply assumed it is a waste of time to attempt it.
And what metric are we using, in our hyper-convenience era, to decide what is a waste of time and what is time well spent? I think we forget we can actually get a lot of enjoyment out of doing tasks such as this for ourselves, or wandering around our neighbourhood running errands. Not in the hedonistic sense of entertainment, but completing tasks does engender a feeling of accomplishment. Meanwhile, a service such as Hello Fresh, which delivers exact ingredients from a set of recipes you can choose from on their website, and so removes much of the planning and preparation from cooking, makes a potentially creative task feel a little robotic. In our convenience- and productivity-obsessed landscape I think we can forget that spending more time doing something can actually be more fun.
All this corner-cutting prompts the question: what is it that we are saving all this time for? The leftwing argument for these services tends to be that they are useful for, say, working-class single mums or disabled people. But they all cost money, and the most time-pressed or marginalised people are often also the most pressed for cash. Another argument is that everyone works so much they can’t possibly assemble their own furniture on a Saturday. Still, most of us seem to find time every day for bouts of TikTok and Instagram.
My personal experience, too, is that these “convenience platforms” never really deliver on the seamless, frictionless experience they promise. I don’t even like ordering clothes from retailers online, for example, because I find the process tends to become a Kafkaesque nightmare, with items trapped in labyrinthine systems or mysterious stages of the post. I broke my rule and ordered a bikini online recently. It is now somehow trapped between warehouses. After multiple emails and calls I was told the retailer is opening an “investigation” into its whereabouts. Meanwhile, the people in my building who order time-saving meal prep boxes are constantly arguing in the building WhatsApp group because their box has been delivered to the wrong place and they must set about tracking it down.
I hate the facelessness of all this, the replacement of humans with clanking and opaque systems. And I am not sure I really believe that any of this offers much of a time-saving. I think modern convenience, instead, asks us to buy into the idea that the best way to spend our time is tapping around on apps and filling in online forms, chasing down missing packages and scrolling through TikTok as someone puts up our shelves. This is a concept I can’t get on board with at all. Perhaps, after all, it is me who hates having my time wasted.