The FedEx driver stood on my porch and said, “There are 27 boxes for you.”

I said, “27 boxes?”

I knew I was buying a sofa. I had customized it and added the sound system, which turned an expensive purchase into a very expensive one. What I didn’t know was that it would arrive as a full-scale game of FedEx Jenga. Before delivery, I called the store and asked for the worst-case assembly time. The answer was “two hours, tops.”

It took sixteen. I did not sit down once, which is a strange way to spend a day building a sofa. At 5 pm I admitted I couldn’t see the end and hired a TaskRabbit. By Sunday I had a beautiful sofa, a body that ached in new places, and a question I couldn’t shake.

Who priced in the other fourteen hours?

Nobody. That is the answer, and it is the whole business model. The company sold me a premium product and handed me the unpaid labor to finish it. The quote was two hours, the reality was eight times that, and the difference shows up nowhere. It’s not on the invoice. It’s not in a report. It’s not in any metric the company uses to judge how customers are doing.

The sofa is well built. The model behind it treats the customer’s time as free, so that time never gets measured, and what never gets measured never gets fixed.

What did the sofa actually cost?

Assembly ended Saturday night. The project didn’t. The sound system needed a mount for the sound bar, so I made a run to Best Buy. It also needed power in places I didn’t have it, so I rearranged parts of the house and bought more plug-in gear. Then there were 27 boxes that don’t break down and don’t fit any recycling bin I own. My garage became a cardboard warehouse, and I’m paying someone to haul it away.

Here is the ledger. The sofa: $10,000. Best Buy: $150. TaskRabbit: $200. One truckload of cardboard hauled away by a junk removal service: $1,000. (Yes, I may have been overcharged. I was not in a negotiating mood, and neither would you be.) That’s $1,350 in costs that weren’t on the invoice, a 13.5% surcharge nobody mentioned. Add sixteen hours of my Saturday, priced at zero because no one quoted them.

Who has a spare room and a spare couch?

The instructions say to leave the cushions uncovered for 72 hours so they can fluff up. That assumes I have a second couch to sit on, or a room I can abandon for three days. Most people don’t. The product quietly assumes slack in your life, and nobody asked whether you have any.

Now picture a 78-year-old in that showroom. The pitch sounds easy. The reality is 27 boxes, a back that can’t take it, and no one to call at 5 pm. Nobody designed it to shut her out. It only works if someone absorbs the cost, and the system never asks who.

Where have you seen this before?

In your own workforce. You just can’t see it in your data.

Every system that quietly shifts work onto the individual assumes the individual has slack. Your caregiving employees spent theirs before they walked in this morning. I’ve spent 25 years in aging services, and the pattern is identical. The employee managing a parent’s medications, appointments, and insurance calls is working a second shift. Nobody quoted her those hours. She also pays the out-of-pocket tab, and she keeps paying after the appointment ends.

The scale is not small. AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving’s 2025 report found that 63 million Americans, roughly one in four adults, are family caregivers, a 45% increase in a decade. About seven in ten caregivers under 65 are working, and half say it affects their work.

My own early pilot points the same direction. In a group of about 40 people (friends, family, and small business owners, self-selected, so treat it as a signal and not a study), 75% turned out to be doing some form of caregiving. Several didn’t realize it counted until the questions asked.

Why does the cost stay invisible?

For the same reason mine did. When someone absorbs a cost quietly, the organization never records it. It sees symptoms instead: the employee who is late, who stops volunteering for travel, who calls off more often, and then resigns. Her file says “personal reasons.” The sofa company’s version of that file says “customer satisfaction: fine.”

This is hidden turnover. The loss is real, the cause never appears in your data, and the person carrying it never told you, because she had no reason to think it was yours to know.

What should you do about it this week?

Ask the sofa question about your own people: who is absorbing hours that nobody quoted? A new benefit can wait. Start by dropping the assumption that a quiet workforce is an unburdened one. Then get a number, so the cost stops being a feeling and becomes a line you can bring to a budget conversation.

Want to see what your invisible fourteen hours are costing you? The Hidden Turnover Calculator takes about four minutes and gives you a defensible annual figure for caregiver-driven attrition.

Onward,
Jaime

Jaime Roberts, founder of The Help Project and author of The Third Rail, has spent 25 years in aging services and now works with employers on the eldercare pressures quietly reshaping their workforce.

P.S. The sofa is gorgeous. I’m sitting on it. I’m just not going to pretend it was a two-hour job.