As a society, we are failing the marshmallow test, and Amazon is the one holding the bag and shoving the marshmallows down our willing throats.
I have been seeing these ridiculous commercials on Hulu about Walmart Express Delivery for a few weeks, and each time, I just dismissed them.
But then, I recently read a newsletter story from Stacked Marketer on the top reasons that online customers abandon their shopping carts, and the top reason kinda floored me: “36% of shoppers bail because delivery is too slow.”
The next day, I see news headlines on LinkedIn that Amazon is now rolling out 1-hour and 3-hour delivery times to more areas across the United States. LIke, wait, what??!
Really, Karen, you can’t wait a day or two to receive your moisturizer? You now have to demand it arrive in 1-3 hours??
Veruca Salt would be very happy with all of this….and that should be reason enough for us to turn our backs on this rotten egg of a business direction.
How did we get here? I know not all of us failed the marshmallow test as children, so why are we as a society now saying that it is totally fine to eat not just both of those marshmallows right this instant, but also to eat the entire bag the researcher has stashed away for the next participant?
There are certainly instances in which an urgent delivery of an item is needed - for example, someone who is immobile or cannot drive and needs an item for their health…something they legitimately could not wait until the next day for. This would be an amazing service to those folks.
But the rest? Is it really that much of a hardship to wait a few days for it to be delivered? And if it is, is it really that hard for you to go get it yourself?
In the ER, I saw people who legitimately needed things in 60 seconds or life got real, real fast. If you aren't bleeding out, you can probably wait for your artisanal beard oil to arrive on Thursday.
We have lasted a very long time without these instant deliveries and been totally fine. I feel like an old curmudgeon here…”Back in my day……” (shake cane angrily at the sky), but shit people, you all are out there seriously not purchasing an item from a small business because the shipping time is too long??
There is so much marketing psychology that has been applied to us over the decades that we now don’t even question the nonsensical. Our brains have been hijacked for the dopamine kicks of the instant gratification and now the instant deliveries.
From a business perspective, this obsession with "now" creates a race to the bottom where only the giants survive. But as a small business owner or a consumer, there is a different path: choosing the way of the slow-cooker.
You are choosing a hand-packed box. A box that could mean the difference between them paying their electrical bill that month or not. A box they are possibly hand-carrying to the post office and waiting in line to purchase postage to ship to you. A box that means so much more to them than any single order you place with Amazon will mean to the warehouse robots packaging your order.
When you support a small business that takes three days to ship, you are buying a product, while at the same time opting out of a hijacked reward system.
You are choosing a better product over a faster dopamine hit. Taking back your brain power means realizing that convenience is often a distraction from improvement.
I’ll parachute down from my soapbox now and leave you with these parting thoughts from James Clear:
"The modern world is optimized for convenience, not improvement.
The default path is usually the more convenient path. And I get it. Who wants their days to be a pain in the neck? I like sitting in air-conditioned rooms and watching my favorite shows too.
But the body and mind only grow when placed under a stimulus. If you want improvement, you have to choose something different than convenience.
It can be lovely to have a day where you do not push yourself, but it rarely works out well if you have a life where you do not push yourself." - James Clear