Why we sit back and let apps do our chores

There is evidence that technology has already made household chores much less time-consuming. Parents together now spend 27.6 hours a week on chores, down from 36.3 in 1965, according to data from the American Time Use Survey and Pew Research Center. Some of their new free time is being spent on their children. They spend 20.8 hours a week on child care, up from 12.7 in 1965.

Outsourcing individual chores to other people, as opposed to machines or software, has been made possible by location-aware mobile phones. Few people can afford a full-time personal assistant, but many more can pay a few dollars to outsource chores here and there. Shyp costs $5 to mail an unlimited number of boxes; you pay the postage.

So perhaps the bigger problem for people using apps like Shyp is becoming too dependent on something that might not be around for long. The mortality rate for start-ups is sky high — and particularly for delivery start-ups. The implosions of Webvan and Kozmo during the dot-com bust taught web entrepreneurs some clear lessons: It’s expensive to build warehouses, hold inventory and hire drivers to go to people’s houses.