Near the top of the list of tiresome tasks that the Internet has yet to solve is this one: trekking to the post office.
Enter a San Francisco start-up called Shyp, which is expanding to New York on Monday. For a small fee, it fetches, boxes and mails parcels for you. The other week, I had a get-well package to mail to my cousin. I opened the app, snapped a photo of the items I wanted to send and entered her address. Fifteen minutes later, someone was at my door — and that was it. No boxes, no tape, no weighing, no buying stamps, no standing in line.
Are Shyp and similar tech start-ups for outsourcing chores the realization of the laziness economy? Or are they the opposite — a giant step toward unleashing the human productivity and creativity that technologists have prophesied?
Technology has conditioned us to expect ease, efficiency and speed in almost everything we do. Once it came from sewing machines and dishwashers, later from Google and Kayak, and most recently from start-ups that provide on-demand services like Uber for cars, Instacart for groceries and Munchery for dinner.
The post office, with its slow-moving lines and cumbersome packing supplies, offers exactly the opposite. The Postal Service’s daily operations are a logistical feat, and it has succeeded at tackling the last-mile delivery problem — the expensive process of getting items to their final, far-flung destinations. But getting packages into the system — call it the first mile — is another story. Richard R. John, a Columbia University historian who has studied the postal system, called it “a particularly intractable, knotty problem” as he contemplated a package in his office that he had been procrastinating about sending back to Amazon.
The inconvenience highlights the mismatch between an 18th-century idea (the Postal Service was created in 1775 because “the conveyance of letters and intelligence was essential to the cause of liberty”) and the modern world. Now, even waiting in line at Starbucks is considered inefficient and necessitates an app to pre-order a latte.
How do we judge whether technology is making us more productive, or just lazy and impatient?
Economists think about outsourcing chores in terms of opportunity costs. If you can work during the hour you would have spent mailing a package, it would probably be a better use of your time — as, perhaps, would taking a nap, going for a run or spending time with your child.
“People underestimate the value of time,” said Susan Athey, an economics of technology professor at Stanford University’s business school. Paying someone a few dollars to run an errand, she said, is worth it to someone who would otherwise have to take half a day off work to do errands, lose money by missing a deadline for an e-commerce return or pick up a child late from day care after getting stuck in line. It is not just an indulgence for the well-off, she said. The trade-off between time and money is particularly crucial for those with less of each.
There is evidence that technology has already made household chores much less time-consuming. Parents together now spend 27.6 hours a week on chores, down from 36.3 in 1965, according to data from the American Time Use Survey and Pew Research Center. Some of their new free time is being spent on their children. They spend 20.8 hours a week on child care, up from 12.7 in 1965.
Outsourcing individual chores to other people, as opposed to machines or software, has been made possible by location-aware mobile phones. Few people can afford a full-time personal assistant, but many more can pay a few dollars to outsource chores here and there. Shyp costs $5 to mail an unlimited number of boxes; you pay the postage.
So perhaps the bigger problem for people using apps like Shyp is becoming too dependent on something that might not be around for long. The mortality rate for start-ups is sky high — and particularly for delivery start-ups. The implosions of Webvan and Kozmo during the dot-com bust taught web entrepreneurs some clear lessons: It’s expensive to build warehouses, hold inventory and hire drivers to go to people’s houses.
Shyp, however, just a year old, is already earning money. That is because most of its revenue comes not from the $5 pickup fee, but from taking advantage of the deeply discounted bulk shipping fees for high-volume mailers. It charges its customers the retail price for the least expensive shipping method — the Postal Service, FedEx, U.P.S. or DHL — and keeps the difference.
Whereas some of the on-demand businesses lose more money the more people that use them, Shyp makes more money when more people use it — the kind of business school basic that much of Silicon Valley seems to have forgotten. Some customers have actually moved from one home to another using Shyp, paying just $5 for messengers to retrieve their belongings and package them. Kevin Gibbon, Shyp’s co-founder and chief executive, said he welcomes that because Shyp makes a lot of money on the difference between the bulk shipping fees it pays and the retail fees customers pay to mail such heavy boxes.
“With logistics companies, you need to prove out your business model very, very early,” said Mr. Gibbon, who was an eBay “power seller” before starting Shyp and who said that sellers on sites like eBay and Etsy are among its biggest users. “You can’t wait for scale.”
Shyp keeps so-called satellite vans around the city, and when messengers retrieve a package, they tag it and drop it in the van. When the van fills, the driver takes the packages to Shyp’s warehouse, where a gigantic box-cutting machine creates a perfectly sized box in eight seconds. Another printer produces address labels and stamps, and FedEx and the others come several times a day to pick up the packages.
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Other start-ups have also tried to revolutionize mailing. One, called Outbox, scanned and digitized customers’ mail so they could read it in an app, but it was forced to close early this year.
Shyp, however, is going after a crucial market for the financially troubledPostal Service: packages, which, unlike envelopes, people are sending more of. (That is one reason the Postal Service has also started picking up certain types of packages from homes and last year agreed to deliver Amazon packages on Sundays.)
People are mailing fewer letters because of digital communication, but technology has not been all bad for the 18th-century institution. Mail sorting is now largely automated, for instance, and e-commerce is a big reason people are mailing more packages. If Shyp succeeds, it could be another.
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