With just a few keystrokes, Allison Okon zips through her grocery shopping.
By shooting off a brief e-mail, Valarie Reed gets her laundry washed, dried and folded.
Neither woman has to set foot in a supermarket or a laundromat to complete those basic chores. Instead, from the comfort of their computer chairs, they pay others to do the jobs for them.
No longer just the realm of the rich, a growing industry catering to busy lifestyles is taking everyday duties off people’s hands.
Don’t want to cook dinner? Get a personal chef to cook it for you. Your pup looking restless? A dog walker will happily take over the leash for a few bucks.
“Everybody’s busier than ever and looking to free up their time,” said Elana Margolis, spokeswoman of Skokie-based Peapod, which delivers groceries to more than 250,000 customers in 18 markets nationwide.
But by outsourcing chores, are people being resourceful–or lazy?
Okon, a medical sales representative who lives in Lincoln Park, said she’s being a bit of both.
Okon, 36, hops online every other week to order her groceries from Peapod. She has a car, so a trip to the grocery store isn’t out of the question. But she relishes the time not spent walking up and down the supermarket aisles, and she’d rather avoid walking outside onto the windy street where she lives.
She also calls on dog-walker Ryan Anderson, who dubs himself “The Lincoln Park Dog Whisperer,” from time to time to entertain her dog Sutton when an emergency keeps her from getting home to take him out, or if she’s too busy or too ill to do it herself.
‘There is a laziness factor’
“It’s a no-brainer because it’s so convenient,” said Okon, noting that she got used to having things delivered when she lived in New York. “There is a laziness factor in there, too, though.”
That laziness factor prompts some people to turn up their noses at the notion of outsourcing household chores, unless old age or a disability necessitate it.
“It’s not showing a lot of responsibility,” Terrance Kennedy, 26, of Wicker Park said as he folded his clothes at his neighborhood laundromat.
“If you don’t have time to clean up your house, maybe you should stop doing some of the other things that are taking up all your time.”
As he waited for his clothes to dry, Dwayne Washington said that while he could afford to get his laundry washed for him, he’d feel he was wasting money on something he could do himself.
“I don’t live on a house on a hill, I don’t have servants,” said Washington, 35, of Wicker Park. “I’m an adult. I figure, if I soil my clothes, I should have to clean them.”
But to Reed, a 24-year-old restaurant manager, using a laundry service has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with saving time.
Reed has a laundry room in her Lincoln Park apartment building, but she’d rather pay Bucktown-based WashKing $1.40 per pound of laundry–amounting to about $35 every two weeks–to pick up her laundry, wash it and deliver it neatly folded back to her doorstep.
“I can spend one of my days off washing clothes, or I can spend it doing what I want to do,” said Reed, who moved to Chicago from Texas this year. “I still have a lot to see and do in this city.”
Time is money
Several entrepreneurs are banking on that attitude to fuel their chore-relieving ventures.
WashKing founder Jim Schultz, 23, left the mortgage business to open his laundry delivery service a year ago after hearing peers complain about how much they hated doing laundry. He said he has more than 250 customers now, most of them single, city-dwelling professionals in their late 20s and early 30s.
“They’re usually busy working people who want to have a busy social life,” Schultz said.
At Mudroom Laundry, a Lakeview laundromat that opened in January, the motto is “More time, More life.”
“We believe that if we can take this chore off your hands, we give you two hours, three hours, to do what you want to do,” said Mudroom owner Keith Price, 43, who started a delivery option four months ago at the suggestion of clients.
When Jon Cano saw a similar need in the housecleaning industry, he ditched his job as a management consultant and opened the Chicago franchise of MaidPro, a company founded in Boston.
Cano, 30, said Chicago MaidPro has more than 200 recurring customers, most of them too busy to clean their homes because of work or school.
“The industry almost has shifted from a luxury to a need,” Cano said. “I’ve had people talk about the fact that if they needed to cut back on things, the cleaning service would be the last thing to go.”
For people who have as much anxiety about cooking as vacuuming, a growing industry of personal chefs is there to take home cooking off their hands too.
Unlike private chefs, who normally are employed by a single wealthy client, personal chefs are hired to prepare home-cooked meals that can be stored in a client’s refrigerator for several weeks.
“There’s a misconception that it’s all wealthy families,” said Diedra Johnson-Miller, 35, who runs a personal chef business out of her Hyde Park home and has about 20 clients.
“Often it’s busy two-parent families or busy singles who want to [cook] themselves but they don’t have the time or the know-how or the patience, and they’re tired of doing McDonald’s and fast food.”
Including grocery shopping, meal preparation, storage and re-heating instructions, the service ends up costing the client about $19 per person per meal if they buy the most common five-day, four-person family package, Johnson-Miller said. One- or two-person packages tend to end up costing more per person.
A personal chef sounds good to Chanel Whiteside, who was folding her family’s clothes at a Wicker Park laundromat. With two children, ages 1 and 7, to care for, Whiteside, 26, said she’d outsource her chores if she could afford it and wouldn’t think twice about being called lazy.
“If I could come home and have dinner already cooked,” she said, “that would take off a lot of the stress.”
COLLEGE STUDENTS SHELL OUT CASH FOR THE PAMPERED LIFE
It’s not just young professionals who are shelling out cash for convenience. College students (read: their parents) also are paying to live the cushy life.
The cramped, dingy dorms of yore are increasingly being replaced by upscale student housing boasting amenities you might find at a luxury high-rise.
At DePaul University, students can pay more than $1,000 a month to live in Loft-Right, a mod-looking building that opened this fall at 1237 W. Fullerton Ave.
The student-only building, owned by the non-profit MJH Foundation, offers tenants private bedrooms in two- , three- or four-bedroom suites with skyline views, full kitchens, maple cabinets and ceramic countertops.
The building’s perks include a 24-hour doorman, indoor parking, Wi-Fi throughout the building, a DVD rental machine and a string of businesses on the first floor, including Starbucks, Citibank, a sandwich shop and, coming soon, a tanning salon.
Loft-Right is just a recent manifestation of a trend toward upscale student living.
In 2003, the Illinois Institute of Technology opened State Street Village, a residence hall made of glass and stainless steel and offering a glass elevator, picture windows, rooftop deck and a 50-inch plasma TV in the penthouse lounge.
Campuses also offer a bevy of services to cushion college life.
Through Valet Today Campus, students can get weekly water delivery, laundry and dry-cleaning delivery, move-in services, housekeeping, digital photo processing and a concierge service. Depaul, Columbia College Chicago, IIT, Northwestern University and Loyola University are among the schools served by Valet Today, though not all of those services are offered at all of the schools.
DormAid, which serves mostly schools on the East Coast, offers room cleaning, grocery delivery and laundry delivery.
New York-based Madpackers helps students pack up and move to their residence halls, charging up to $289 for an in-state move of up to 400 pounds (plus $99 if the Box Squad does your packing for you). The service is available at all Chicago schools.
Taking the royal treatment to a whole new level, Madpackers this year sent 30 clients to college in limos.
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Worth the money?
Chores. Bleh. For many of us, the thought of coming home to piles of dirty laundry, a sink full of crusty dishes and an empty refrigerator inspires dreams of living in a hotel.
What would it cost the truly chore-averse to outsource all of their dreaded duties? Assuming a two-week window, and taking prices from some of the more common businesses offering these services, here’s what you might pay:
Grocery delivery: $7 (if you order more than $100 of groceries)
Laundry delivery: $28 (assuming a rate of $1.40 per pound and a typical load of laundry being a 10-pound bag of whites and a 10-pound bag of colors)
Housekeeping: $60 (assuming $30 per hour for two hours of work)
Dog walking: $120 (assuming $12 for a 30-minute walk, five days a week)
Personal chef: $240 (assuming dinners five days a week for one person)
Total: $455 every two weeks
The time you save (wait for it): Priceless
— Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, RedEye
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aelejalderuiz@tribune.com
TELL US
Do you pay to have someone do everyday chores for you or do you think it’s just plain lazy? E-mail ritaredeye@tribune.com and include your full name, age and neighborhood.
