A good invention, popular wisdom tells us, ought to either fulfill a need or create one. But popular wisdom greatly underestimates our laziness.
These days, a good invention simply indulges our sloth: what are Seamless and Drizly if not attempts to make perfectly accomplishable tasks a little easier? I understand the impulse — indeed, it’s difficult to resist the sites’ appeal. Imagine a 10-minute errand forcing you off the couch in the middle of a Netflix binge-watch. It won’t do.
It seems the visionaries behind Favor agree.
Photo: Reuters
Their new app is a salve for the ordinary loafer: with a few listless taps, you can commission the company’s team of bike-mounted couriers to run your errands for you. Do you need your dry cleaning dropped off or some cat litter picked up? Capitalism insists you shouldn’t bother. Pay a startup to do it for you.
Favor, which began life in Austin, Texas, gained a vowel this week as it made its debut in Toronto (I wonder if this shouldn’t be a cautionary tale for American businesses hoping to cross the border in the future: pick a name that translates).
Having read that for a small fee — US$2 as a flat rate, plus 5 percent of the total price of the items you request — Favor would deliver virtually anything in the city to my apartment, no matter how trivial or silly, I felt compelled to put the service to the test. So over the weekend I installed the app and let torpidity reign.
PLIABLE APP
Because Favor, unlike other couriering services, does not work directly with the businesses it delivers to and from, the app’s interface is unusually pliable: it begins as a blank page onto which you type the name of the business you’d like to order from and a description of the items you’d like to order from them. But as inspiration Favor has provided a list of “featured” suggestions: dog food from the pet store, an umbrella from Walmart, ear buds from the Apple Store, and various specials from local restaurants and cafes.
It was dinnertime, and I was in the mood for something suitably indulgent. There are, of course, a lot of ways to order takeout in the city already, but Favor distinguishes itself on the cuisine front by promising access to places that don’t customarily deliver: the company’s “runners” bike over to your restaurant of choice, place an order to go, and bring it to you themselves.
Favor’s list curators have done their research, and thus Grand Electric, Toronto’s trendiest eatery, was featured front and center on the app’s main page. I placed a modest order of tuna ceviche and seared albacore poke and within moments had confirmation that my runner, Sabrina, was on her way. But then I received an alarming text. It was Sabrina, writing from the restaurant: “According to them you can’t get tuna ceviche or albacore poke to go,” she informed me. And with that, my first order was foiled before it really began.
Sabrina was nice about canceling and within moments I’d made a replacement order, this time pork belly banh mi from local sensation Banh Mi Boys. This time, it was a grand success. Ro, my new runner, whisked the hot food from storefront to apartment with tremendous gusto, and since payment is entirely electronic I hardly had a chance to exchange pleasantries before the food was in my hands and Ro was off on another pressing task.
The next afternoon, my wife and I tested our runner’s resolve: we ordered two large Neapolitan pizzas from the inimitable Pizzeria Libretto right as a baseball game at the stadium beside our apartment was letting out. At such times I make a point of remaining safely indoors, away from the tens of thousands streaming impossibly by. And yet here came Lucas, on time and unperturbed.
Favor could do food. But how far does Favour’s purview extend?
LOW ON TOILET PAPER
My wife observed, later that afternoon, that we were disconcertingly low on toilet paper. So I booted up the app and made a request: a twelve-pack of two-ply from the local pharmacy, please, and maybe throw in a can of Pringles while you’re at it. It was Ro again assigned to the task. Ten minutes later I received a call from the store: they were out of Pringles, but how about the off-brand equivalent? That was our Ro. Resourceful to the last.
Late on Saturday night, playing poker and drinking a glass of scotch, I felt a minor craving I knew only Favor could satisfy. I plugged in my desire and, naturally, Ro once again complied — still working so many hours later.
In a half-hour there was a knock on the door. It was Ro, my prize in her hands: a single vanilla milkshake from McDonald’s, miraculously unmelted. No item, it seems, is too small or too frivolous to meet the Favor threshold. Let the languor run deep. For two bucks, you can get any ridiculous thing you want.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s