Time crunch sees demand for personal shopping services up
The closer it gets to Christmas the busier Sonya Tonhauser becomes.
Tonhauser, owner of Custom Concierge, is seeing an increasing number of Calgary consumers use her personal shopping services because they simply don’t have the time to buy gifts themselves.
“A lot of companies have year-ends and budgets that are due at the end of the year. It’s more of a time crunch,” said Tonhauser.
Busy professionals are her primary clients these days. Tonhauser started the business in 2008 and throughout the year she will perform many tasks. Her normal rate is $44 an hour, plus mileage. But for Christmas she will purchase up to a maximum of 10 items on a person’s shopping list in a two-hour stint, have them each gift-wrapped, addressed or labelled and delivered for $150.
“I’ve had probably five to 10 people so far but definitely as the weeks go on all of a sudden people are panicked and they realize ‘Oh, I don’t have time’, ‘I don’t want to go to the mall’, ‘I need someone to come help me’,” said Tonhauser.
The concierge industry is growing as time-strapped clients find the convenience of having someone else shop for them an enticing proposition.
“Value is a very simple question. Value equals benefits minus cost. As consumers we make this calculation hundreds of times a day. But as we know time is the scarcest of resources,” said David Finch, associate professor of marketing at the Bissett School of Business at Mount Royal University.
“The growth of personal concierge services is simply a response to the value we assign to time.”
“This means that consumers of these types of services have concluded that the benefits of freeing up time outweighs the financial costs.”
Terri Martin, a professional with a busy family, has used Tonhauser’s services for Christmas shopping.
“I utilize her for things that I know what I want and she’ll go out and pick them up for me if I can’t get to them, but also some of the smaller items that are just time consuming,” said Martin.
Cynthia Pickering, owner of Time is Money Executive Concierge Inc., said more people are seeking her services these days.
“As Christmas comes, people get caught off guard,” said Pickering.
“We can try to tell people in September to start but honestly the past two days, as soon as it’s the first couple of days of December, people start to panic.”