Convenience

The term convenience denotes an idea that increasingly suffuses contemporary consciousness. In January 1998, there were 280,337 different webpages that mentioned convenience, by November 2010; this figure has reached 62.7 million. The rising significance of convenience reflects three key processes in the development of contemporary consumer cultures: the further embedding of individualized orientations toward everyday life; the growing importance of time pressure; and the acceleration of rationalization, calculation, and commodification in personal life.

[Page 356]The term convenience is not a new one, it has been used in English since the fifteenth century, though the early usages are now obsolete and current applications of the term have their origins no earlier than the seventeenth century. Three meanings derive from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first refers to something that is suitable or well adapted to the performance of an action or attainment of some satisfaction. This continues to be an important sense referring to utensils. A second meaning concerns the avoidance of personal trouble in particular practices, and also to material advantage and personal comfort deriving there from. From this emanate phrases such as “marriage of convenience” and “at one's convenience.” A third sense refers to an opportune occasion or an opportunity, as in the phrase “at your earliest convenience.” All three meanings continue to operate in contemporary discourse.

The Oxford English Dictionary records no significant new applications of the term convenience between the early nineteenth century and the 1960s, when another usage emerged in the United States. The terms “convenience food” and “convenience store” indicated that arrangements or commodities might be “designed for convenience or used when convenient.” In 1968, the British newspaper the Guardian (December 6, 1968) reported, “No one would deny the drudgery, the time-wasting, the monotony, that has been removed by convenience foods.” As Warde (1999) notes, this more recent twentieth-century addition to the meaning of the term relates to notions of saving, or more properly reordering, time.

Increasingly, convenience acts as a reason for purchasing a plethora of goods and services and for decisions about the organization of everyday life. There has been a perceptible change in emphasis during the twentieth century on different attributes of convenience. Houses and hotels used to be advertised as having “all mod cons,” meaning all modern conveniences (electricity, running hot and cold water, and an indoor lavatory). Such conveniences were oriented toward comfort—keeping warm, not having to go outside in the cold to find coal—but also toward saving labor. A whole set of convenience devices has emerged in this form. Washing machines involve less physical labor, prevent chapped hands, require less than constant attention (the operator can do something else while clothes get clean), and take less time overall than handwashing or using a tub and washboard. Other labor-saving devices are convenient because they require less cleaning: especially the electric fire, the self-cleaning oven, ceramic cooktops, and so forth. As Shove (2003) notes, such convenience devices, sensu stricto, reduce labor input and reduce labor time attached to a given activity, but they do not necessarily save time.

...