Hedonic Adaptation
Two-day delivery was, in 2005, a startling promise. By about 2012 it was ordinary. Next-day arrived and became the expectation for anything that mattered. Same-day appeared, first in a few dense cities, then more widely. Two-hour grocery slots became normal in urban Britain. And at each step, the previous standard did not remain acceptable-but-slower. It became slow. A five-day delivery estimate in 2026 reads as a warning sign about the seller, in a way that would have been incomprehensible in 2003, when five days was simply how long things took.
This is hedonic adaptation working on a service instead of a possession, and it is the same mechanism that makes a pay rise stop feeling like a pay rise. What is unusual about delivery is the speed of the resetting and the fact that the industry has been actively driving it. Every competitor that improves its speed forces the others to match, and the customer’s baseline moves, and nobody can go back, because the first firm to return to three-day delivery would simply lose.
Compare broadband. In 1999 a connection that loaded a page in eight seconds was thrilling. Now a page that takes two seconds feels broken, and studies of user behaviour keep finding abandonment thresholds measured in hundreds of milliseconds. Or compare video: buffering was an accepted fact of life in 2008 and is now an outrage. Or smartphone touch response, where the industry works in single-digit milliseconds because users can perceive lag they cannot consciously identify. In every case the improvement was real, the adaptation was total, and the gratitude lasted about eighteen months.
The economists have a term I find useful here, though it is usually applied to prices: the reference point. What matters to human satisfaction is not the absolute level of a thing but its position relative to what you have come to expect. Improve the thing, and the expectation follows it up, and you are back where you started with a more expensive operation to run.
Which produces the peculiar situation of the modern delivery industry: it has achieved, in twenty years, an improvement in service that would have seemed fantastical to anyone in 1995, at enormous capital cost, and its customers are on the whole more irritated than they were, because their standard has risen faster than its performance. Satisfaction surveys in the parcel sector are dismal almost everywhere, and they are dismal in markets where the objective service is excellent.
There is a lesson here for anyone in the business of making things better, and it is not a cheerful one. You do not get to bank the gratitude. You get to keep the cost.
from The Last Mile (2026)
