Self-Service Economy

Historical Perspective

There is little doubt that goods that had been made in the home or by local craftsmen for barter and only occasionally for market exchange, have been gradually replaced by goods production en masse in factories. This led to a separation of home and production. Those who previously made goods for their own use increasingly purchased factory-made items.

In contrast, however, the transfer of service provision (rather than goods production) to external providers has not been of the same magnitude. The self-servicing thesis has argued that although goods production has moved out of the household, the emergence of cheap and mass-produced durable goods has enabled households to produce services for themselves. Indeed, there is a long history of consumers having moved toward various types of self-servicing activity rather than outsourcing these service activities to external providers. For example, consumers have long dialed a telephone number themselves instead of using a telephone operator, pressed a button in an elevator rather than using an elevator operator, and pushed a shopping cart around a food store rather than request a salesperson to collect each individual good for them from behind the counter. While laundry, meanwhile, was for many decades in the early and mid-nineteenth century “sent out” to external providers, especially among the middle classes, the advent of the washing machine has brought such a service activity back into the home where it has been conducted on a self-servicing basis. Consequently, the assumption that service provision has been, over the long run of history, replaced by external service providers has been increasingly challenged by drawing attention to the growth of self-servicing.

Contemporary Issues

The subsistence “economy” (i.e., people and households relying on self-provisioning as their principal source of livelihood) hardly exists in advanced economies. However, it is not universally the case that households are providing fewer and fewer services for themselves. Households still engage in a tremendous range of self-servicing activity from routine housework, cleaning windows, cooking, gardening, child and elder care through to car maintenance as well as home maintenance and improvement activity. The move of goods production into the marketplace, therefore, seems to have been only partially followed by the shift of service provision into this sphere, notes Colin C. Williams and Jan Windebank.

New technological innovations, moreover, are creating ever more opportunities for self-servicing. The advent of IT, for instance, now provides consumers with self-checkout at supermarkets with no cashier present. If one wants to install a broadband connection in one's home, one does it oneself. If one wants to pay a bill by telephone or check one's bank balance, one does it oneself via an automated phone system; if one wants to track packages, one does it oneself; if one wants to manage one's finances, one does it oneself online; if one wants to organize a holiday, one does it oneself rather than go to a travel agent; if one wants to go to the theater, one does it oneself; and if one wants an airline ticket or to check in, one does it oneself, including the selection of one's own seat. Indeed, the use of such technologies to facilitate self-servicing has rapidly transformed entire industries. ATMs in the banking industry have moved cash transactions in banks near enough entirely into the self-servicing realm, as has e-commerce in the travel industry resulted in consumers largely booking themselves by using online resources.

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