Shopping only works if you have time for it
“Time is money.”
It is a well-worn cliché, one I think you’ve probably heard.
You may not have heard the reverse, money is time, but it is just as true.
Wealthy people can use money to create time for themselves. They do it by hiring people to do things that working people have to do for themselves.
People elsewhere recognize it as a simple truth. My daughter ran into it when she volunteered for a medical charity in India. When she was invited to the home of some of the doctors in the charity and saw that they had servants, she asked how she should address the servants. When the doctors discovered she did not have servants, they exclaimed, “How do you get anything done!”
They know that money buys time for wealthy people to do what they want by paying for servants to do cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, and gardening.
In the USA, however, we hide it behind a facade of democratization. Equality, we say, means people working two jobs and doing the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and grocery shopping, have the time to do the same things as someone with the money to hire a shopper, a cook, and a cleaner.
Wealthy politicians, who pay someone else to research answers for them, diligently avoid mentioning that money is time when imposing more shopping on the American people. They call it giving people choices. Whether it is requiring people to comparison shop between insurance plans for medical coverage every year, shop for schools for their children, or shop for the best investments every year for their retirement fund, they ignore that the burden is heavier on people who have to do their own research than it is on people like themselves who employ other people to do it for them.
Consider, for example, policies advertised as “school choice.” The Walton Family Foundation claims that making parents shop for a school for their children will result in the best possible education, “especially in low-income communities.”
Let’s think about how that works. You are supposed to research your school options, probably online. Then you are supposed to visit each school to see if they actually look like their online profile/advertising. You are advised to meet the teachers and observe a class. When is a single parent working a day job, or two parents who both work, supposed to get the time for that? It is much easier for someone who can buy time, whether by relying on staff to research, affording a stay-at-home spouse, or having the ability to set their schedule and someone to help manage it.
When challenged, advocates of school shopping turn to misdirection. They say anyone who opposes the idea is elitist. They say their critics don’t believe working or low-income parents know what their children need or can’t make good decisions. All their critics are doing, however, is pointing out that money is time. Many people are already stretched for time between work, parenting, and daily chores. Each new imposition of another shopping chore demands more time that they don’t have and brings them closer and closer to the breaking point.
The USA regularly ranks near the bottom in happiness among highly developed countries. We ranked 24th in 2025. My hypothesis is that one of the reasons we are less happy than people in comparison countries is because of all of the high stakes shopping we are forced to do. Our access to health care, our retirement, our children’s schooling all comes down to our decisions and we get little help from the government. In countries where governments take more responsibility to help their citizens, the time and effort required of such decisions are less, so people have more time for things they enjoy.