I had an argument about these type of services when Instacart showed up, not a well-thought out one, but here goes.<p>My first thought with these services is always "that's cool!". I'll save time, won't have to bother with some boring task etc, no more inconvenience! Same reaction with Instacart. Then I questioned that reaction. The store where I buy all my food is roughly a 100m away from my apartment, and it takes me roughly 10 minutes to get there, buy food and get back. Yet I still find it inconvenient. And after I get rid of that inconvenience, there will be something else that will start to bother me, a smaller inconvenience than the last one, but still bothersome. So where does it stop? I always think of those kids you see around, whose life has been completely removed of all unpleasantness by their overprotective parents, and who are spoiled/irritating beyond belief. Will we all turn into that?<p>Expanding on that, we probably won't all turn into that in the near future, because the inconvenience that we'll have removed will be taken care of by another human being, who in turn will take on all the unpleasantness. So there will be a class of people who do all of the "boring" work so the top class can "do what they want". It's already long established in things like house-cleaning, gardening etc. And the argument I get into is, why do "we" get to do what we want, and "they" get to do the work we (and in most cases they) find a waste of time. The counter-argument I get is it's a job, people get paid, and people can make any work enjoyable for themselves, even if it's picking up groceries/laundry for others. And I argue that if they can make any work enjoyable for themselves, why the hell don't we make picking up groceries/laundry enjoyable for ourselves? Or is making a boring task enjoyable again reserved for that other class of people, who don't have the means to avoid it?<p>This is quite a tangent, and I still think it's a cool idea, we're all working on projects which serve to remove pain-points for people, and abstracted away, you could argue my points for any business in the world.<p>Still, I'd like a start-up that instead of shifting my inconvenience to other people, removes my feeling of inconvenience itself. Once someone teaches me that, I'll be set for life. Maybe we can revive Marcus Aurelius and give him a few million dollars.