Do Subscription Boxes Hurt Socialization?

Nickolas Roberson | United States

We all enjoy and love the subscription box services and products that we pay for and receive every month. Shaving products, popular culture merchandise, or even food and water; these services deliver easy-to-access, quality goods straight to our homes. However, how do these amenity providers affect our socialization?

Subscription Boxes: An Introduction

Companies provide boxes that are filled with niche products for the consumers they are targeting. These boxes are known as subscription boxes. Routinely fulfilled payments pay for the shipped goods. 

In the United States, there are an estimated 400 to 600 companies offering these subscription boxes. BlueApron (a meal kit service), Stitch fix (a personal styling service), Dollar Shave Club (a personal grooming product service), and Loot Crate (a pop culture product service) are some of the more popular services offered. This constantly innovating industry has grown from 4.7 visitors to their websites in 2014 to 41.7 million in 2018. This demonstrates increasing demand for these easy to access quality products. Additionally, a majority of the consumers of subscription boxes are 18 to 24 years old, and “prefer the convenience of online shopping.”  However, while online shopping and subscription boxes are extremely easy to purchase and are high in quality, this massive increase in popularity of them may have some negatives.

Marketplace Socialization

The physical marketplace has been the locality for much of humanity’s socialization. It’s where we learned the social skills that were vital for trading and general communication. However, the adoption of mass consumerism and the development of subscription services and boxes could harm socialization.

The vast majority of the aforementioned subscription box services are provided through online shopping. Now, this makes goods incredibly easy to access and purchase. This is tremendous, but there is no social interaction taking place. This, practiced en masse, would have a negative impact on the socialization of individuals.

New Technologies

This occurs through the immense increase in technological advancement taking place today. Cell phones read your face, voice commands control TVs, and personal computers contain alternate realities. With these new, innovative technologies and subscription boxes is a matter of time before individuals have total access to goods and services without leaving their homes. As a result, the death of socialization. 

Subscription services are an amazing product of capitalism. They provide cheaper and more convenient high-quality products. But everything in life has a tradeoff, and the loss of socialization is the tradeoff for subscription boxes.


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