The NYC Errand Tax: What Your Return Trips Are Actually Costing You

There's a version of life in New York City where you're everywhere you actually want to be, with time left over. Then there's the actual version, where a chunk of your week is quietly swallowed by things like the post office, the UPS Store, and the dry cleaner — errands that don't feel significant individually but add up to something you'd notice if you ever got it back.

New York City already has the longest average commute of any major American city: 40.6 minutes one-way in 2024, according to US Census data. Full-time workers in the city log a combined work-and-commute week that averages over 49 hours, per a Comptroller's office analysis. That leaves real scarcity in the day for anything that isn't necessary.

Against that backdrop, the return errand is one of the more expensive things you're paying for without quite realizing it — and David Returns is built specifically to take it off your plate.

How Much the Return Errand Actually Costs You

Nobody calculates the total time they spend on returns in a year. But it's worth doing once.

The average American household makes about 21 online returns per year, according to industry data on e-commerce return rates. In New York City, each of those trips involves getting somewhere without a car — usually a walk, sometimes a subway ride — waiting in whatever line exists at the carrier location, and coming back. A realistic average for the round trip, including packaging and the mental overhead of remembering to do it before the window closes, is somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes per return.

At 21 returns per year, that's between 10 and 21 hours. Annually. On package returns.

That's a real number. And it's a number that David Returns reduces to effectively zero — because when you hand a package to a courier in your lobby, the time you spend on the return is however long it takes to schedule a pickup in the app plus thirty seconds at the door.

The Convenience Economy in NYC — And Where Returns Fit

New York City is the proving ground for services built on one premise: your time is worth more than the cost of having someone else handle the task.

Grocery delivery made this case for groceries. Wash-and-fold laundry pickup made it for laundry. Instacart, TaskRabbit, and a dozen others extended the logic across various categories of domestic life. The math is always the same: the fee for the service is less than the value of the hour you reclaim, especially in a city where the average rent is nearly $4,000 a month and the workweek is already brutal.

Returns are one of the last household logistics tasks to get this treatment, and they're overdue for it. The return isn't just inconvenient because of the time it takes — it's inconvenient because of when it needs to happen. The return window closes on a Tuesday. You're in back-to-back meetings Tuesday through Thursday. Friday you're exhausted. Saturday you had plans. Now it's past the 30-day window and you're absorbing the cost of something that didn't fit.

David Returns solves that specific problem. You schedule the pickup when it's convenient for you — not when the carrier location is open, not when you have time to leave the building. The courier comes to you. The window problem disappears.

What David Returns Actually Looks Like in Practice

The process is designed to take as little of your time as possible:

• You initiate your return on the retailer's website and get either a QR code or a label PDF
• You open the David Returns app and schedule a pickup window
• You bring the package to the lobby during the window and hand it to the courier
• We handle carrier routing — whether it goes UPS, USPS, FedEx, or Happy Returns — and you receive tracking confirmation

Total time spent on your end: maybe five minutes, mostly in the app. The errand itself — the carrying, the waiting in line, the trip to the carrier location — doesn't happen. You stay in your building.

For residents in buildings partnered with David Returns, the service is completely free. For everyone else in the coverage area, it's $7.99 per pickup or $22.99/month for unlimited pickups across any number of packages. At 21 returns per year, the unlimited membership costs roughly the same as one mid-range dinner in Manhattan and reclaims somewhere between 10 and 20 hours of your year.

The Math, Run Honestly

Say you value your free time at $30 an hour — a conservative number for most NYC professionals. Over the course of a year, 21 return trips at an average of 45 minutes each works out to about 16 hours, which at that rate is $480 in time value.

The David Returns unlimited membership is $22.99/month, or roughly $276 per year.

The service pays for itself — in time saved alone — at that math. Before you factor in the convenience of never worrying about a return window, never having to figure out which carrier location accepts your specific label type, and never dragging a box onto the A train at rush hour.

This is why the "convenience economy" framing isn't really about luxury. It's about whether a service saves you more in time and friction than it costs in money. David Returns does, clearly and repeatedly, for anyone who returns online purchases at anything close to the national average rate.

A Note on the Bigger Picture

The errand tax in NYC is real and growing. E-commerce return volumes increased by nearly 40% year-over-year between 2023 and 2024, according to National Retail Federation data. The average household is making more returns now than they were five years ago, and the infrastructure to handle those returns hasn't kept pace with the volume.

David Returns is the infrastructure. It's the service that was missing from the last-mile logistics picture in New York City: not just getting things to you, but getting the things you don't want back — without making you the one who handles it.

If you've ever stood in a UPS Store line during your lunch break holding a box that was too big for the subway, you already understand the problem viscerally. David Returns is the answer to that.