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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

> it would have cost me a lot more ($10 time + $5 gas!) to pick it up myself.

Can we stop doing this? Our free time has zero monetary value. Every minute of our lives is not billable, and it's disingenuous to frame it that way.

Sure, avoiding 40 minutes of driving time might be worth $10 to you (it is to me, too), but... just say that, maybe?

And I agree with you in general that the grandparent's example was maybe not the common case. Sure, sometimes people get late-night munchies and make a small delivery order to Taco Bell, but I would hope that most orders are at least for a single, full, lunch- or dinner-sized meal, and will often be for multiple people. Delivery is still certainly more expensive than going into the store, but not having to deal with driving somewhere to pick it up also has value to many.

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If you're a contractor and set your own hours, the relationship is pretty clear.

You could spend 30 minutes to pick something up, or that same 30 minutes has a value of half your hourly rate (minus taxes). Why would you be opposed to anyone doing the calculus on how to best utilize their time?

I think it’s because people use it to justify being lazy - if you were going to sit there waiting for your food and then use that time not driving to justify the delivery costs - you’re kind of kidding yourself that you’re “saving money”.

Agreed, I see this often where people confuse their marginal income (e.g. $0) with their total income. Most are paid a salary and don’t just choose to work an extra hour on a moment’s notice. Let alone the possibility of working 24x7 and having billable hours like a switch they can flip at any time.

The framing of something “costing me my time” has never made sense to me especially when someone tries to actually quantify it.

Even if you can't make money during that time, time is inherently limited and most people value their limited time on the planet. Some may value that time more than some arbitrary dollar amount.

You can't reallocate time and money "on a moment's notice", but why does that matter?

Most events can be moved around, so even if there's a big delay on changing your work hours you can still exchange extra free time with extra money.

And people generally can choose how many hours they want to be paid for.

It's easy to quantify, it's just something that happens in bigger shifts. One hour by itself probably doesn't make you change your work hours. But as more and more hours pile up, eventually you might chose to reduce your work week by half a day. Or if you find yourself doing unimportant and uninteresting things very often, and with a shortage of cash, you might increase your work week by half a day.

"Our free time has zero monetary value"

You're right... it's priceless. Some of us really do place a high value on our finite quantity of time that we have on this planet.

I remember being absolutely flummoxed by how much time people were willing to just throw away to camp overnight for some hot commodity Black Friday sale at Best Buy back in the day.

I do freelance work so I really can convert 40 min into money when I want to.

> avoiding 40 minutes of driving time might be worth $10 to you

My point was that avoiding 40 minutes is worth the price increase for almost everyone, not just me! You’d have to go out of your way to find exceptions such as the GP’s McDonald’s deal.

And yeah doordash pretty much forces you to order at least $12 off food which often works out to 2 meals. I’m sure a lot of orders are larger too.

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