chunks of change, it raises the question of why more people don’t do what Sid Savara, Sarah Wagner, Kathryn Bowsher, and others do. When I’ve suggested black-belt-level household outsourcing to people, I’ve gotten a few reactions.
The first, reflexive one is that it’s too expensive, which isn’t the case nearly as often as people think it is. You can spend $200,000 a year like the hedge fund family, but most people can get by with an outsourcing budget that is orders of magnitude less—and more in keeping with normal American budgets, which somehow manage to accommodate monthly $400 car payments (because we have to have new cars, not used ones), big air-conditioning bills because people feel entitled to freeze during the summer, or, for that matter, $25.95 books on time management. The only reason we consider household outsourcing expensive is that we, as a society, largely expect women to do these things for free. We may expect men to do some household tasks for free, like mow the lawn, but interestingly, lawn care turns out to be among the most highly outsourced of household chores. The National Gardening Association found that 30 percent of all U.S. households hired some sort of lawn or landscape service in 2006. By contrast, Merry Maids, the dominant player in the household cleaning industry, handles just 300,000 North American homes per month. It seems that men are wise to something. As it is, categories of women’s work are disappearing, too. No one expects women to sew their children’s clothes anymore. We outsource this to various factories around the world. No one expects women to milk their own cows or churn their own butter. We outsource these tasks to farms and manufacturers who can do it faster, better, and cheaper.
Including the opportunity cost of time is the only step forward in logic necessary to justify outsourcing laundry, cleaning, and food preparation alongside sewing. Indeed, if you run the numbers, you’ll see that the rise of small businesses devoted to these tasks, and the moonlighting culture of the Craig’s List economy, makes outsourcing far more accessible to the modern middle (or at least upper-middle) class than the maids, butlers, and laundresses of yore. Given the efficiency differences between Sid Savara and his personal chef, he manages to buy back his time at $6 per hour, which is less than Hawaii’s minimum wage. He can definitely earn more than that by spending those additional hours working. Savara’s chef, on the other hand, earns $15-20/hour. This is the same phenomenon that leads countries to trade goods with one another. The economy as a whole grows, and utility rises, when everyone focuses on what he or she does best relative to other market participants.
The second reaction is that some people really, truly enjoy housework, or at least parts of it. While I try to order the workhorse staples of my grocery list online, if my family has rented a car and ventured into suburbia, my husband and I can spend hours wandering the aisles of fancy or specialty grocery stores, tossing bags of frozen octopus or packages of raw milk cheeses into our cart. We consider this fun. Plenty of people enjoy gardening. And maybe some people out there really, really love laundry. If this is you, embrace it. Consider it leisure time, and indulge in pricey scented detergent, roll around in clean sheets, and dog-ear your copy of Cheryl Mendelson’s Laundry: The Home Comforts Book of Caring for Clothes and Linens. Better yet, if this is a core competency for you, then start a business doing other people’s laundry. There’s plenty of space in the Craig’s List economy for more laundry experts, personal chefs, professional organizers, and other people who excel at household chores.
But the last objection is the one I find the strangest. Some people—women more often than men—get a little offended when I suggest outsourcing and say something along these lines: It’s my job to take care of my family.
It certainly is a parental core competency to care for a family, but culturally, many people still believe that “caring for a family” means cooking, scrubbing, vacuuming, lunch packing, weeding, and laundry, in addition to the emotional work of nurturing children’s brains and souls. For years, all these labors have been roped into the job description of “mom” or occasionally “dad.” But does it make you a better parent to stand there in the kitchen every morning packing elaborate lunches that will get soggy when $2-3 for the hot school lunch would suffice? Is that really what kids need? Or do we have a situation like in the
Gospels, when Martha was obsessed with cooking for Jesus, and got upset that Mary sat and listened?
We all have 168 hours a week. Time spent doing one thing is time not spent doing another. I would argue that unless you are making a conscious point of involving your kids with an activity such as laundry
—a reasonable idea if they’re ten, not so easy if they’re two—doing loads of it is taking time away from them. Freed from unnecessary domestic burdens, we become better parents and people.
“I find it so interesting that it is commonplace in our society to outsource child care, but the burdensome routines of keeping house are, for the most part, not outsourced,” Sarah Wagner says. Finding a laundry service has let her spend more relaxed time with her little ones without dreading that Sisyphean chore, just as outsourcing food prep has let Savara spend more time on his core competencies of working and playing the guitar. Says Wagner, “We have all been happier ever since.”