Convenience used to be the cheap option. Fast food over home cooking. Instant coffee over ground. The trade was legible: you paid less, got something faster, accepted lower quality. That logic has inverted. Meal kits, same-day delivery, AI-driven replenishment, Deliveroo at the door in twenty minutes — the most convenient options are now among the most expensive. Convenience has moved up the value chain and become a premium product. The people buying back their time can afford to. The people who can't are still doing the friction themselves. What was once a budget category has become a class marker running in the opposite direction.

Mintel is right that convenience has stopped being a differentiator and become a baseline expectation — cognitive offloading, the quiet business of removing decisions and effort from the consumer's plate, is now the whole product in category after category. But the mechanism that delivers frictionlessness is worth examining more carefully. Once you are inside an Amazon Subscribe & Save loop, a Nespresso capsule subscription, a Deliveroo default order — you often stop choosing. Convenience as entry strategy, lock-in as the business model. The consumer who wanted less friction ends up with less agency.

Which brings the uncomfortable conclusion: the friction that convenience removed was also doing something. The effort of choosing, comparing, waiting — browsing a bookshop, wandering a market, discovering something you hadn't searched for — was the mechanism through which preferences were built, taste was developed, and unexpected things were found. Frictionless commerce doesn't just save time. It narrows the world to what the algorithm already knows you'll accept. Convenience optimises for satisfaction. It does not optimise for surprise. The places most associated with genuine discovery — the independent bookshop, the concept store, the farmers market — are high-friction by design and growing precisely among the consumers who can already afford to outsource everything else. Inconvenience, it turns out, is also becoming a luxury product.