The Economic Consequences of Teleporting Home for the Holidays

“Wow, the airport is THE WORST,” Nicole thought. “I wish I could just teleport home for the holidays.”

First, we need to clarify that this is safe, easy, and instantaneous teleportation, not in the weird way that destroys your body and makes a copy of you with all of your memories, but just the ordinary way of, like, disappearing and reappearing.

Your bags teleport too. $25 for the first teleported bag, but anything you can carry on your body is free. No aerosols, no explosives, and no guns—because I say so. (Shampoo is fine. Take as much shampoo as you want!)

The cost of teleportation could in theory be as much as the cost of a trans-Atlantic flight—I mean, let’s be honest, the cost of teleportation could be anything the person who owns the teleporter wants it to be—but eventually all the ports get built and connected via a network, and pretty much any town that has a bus stop has one. (Cities have one per bus stop, which will turn out to be a very bad idea.)

The cost is also equivalent to riding a bus, because that was the easiest analogy to make. Teleporting across town? $1.50 each way. Crossing a state line? $15. Teleporting across the country? $150. (The checked bag fees are where they get you. Also, those snack kiosks next to the line to board the teleporter are way overpriced.)

The first holiday season with the teleporters is great. Everyone who isn’t convinced the teleporters are going to kill them buys a ticket, waits in line, steps into the device, and steps out into the extremely nervous arms of their extended family. (“Ma’am, you can’t put your arms into the teleporter,” the operators tell anxious mothers, over and over.)

Two months later, someone posts a story titled “I’ve Been Teleporting to Work for Almost a Year—and My Boss Never Noticed!” It goes viral, because of course it does.

The first people to move out of town, to pay rent in the rural Midwest and teleport to their jobs every day, are the young single people, the ones with enough cash to buy their way to a less-expensive life, slowly pushing their Ikea sofas into the teleporters before hauling them up to their new $300-a-month apartments. (“I wish there was a teleporter for stairs!” one person says. The person at the other end of the couch says “Dude, that’s an elevator.”)

The families wait a smidge longer, mostly because school districts do not recognize teleportation. Some people cheat, maintaining fake addresses while paying lower rent or buying an affordable home thousands of miles away. Eventually the schools just add a teleportation fee for “non-local students.”

A lot of people’s lives improve, at least at first. Rents go down. Commutes become shorter. People walk more, to get to the teleporters and to walk from the teleporters to their jobs. Pollution drops, since there are fewer cars on the roads.

People also stay more closely connected to their family and friends. The concept of a “long-distance relationship” disappears, for the most part. With grandparents just a short teleporter ride away, families get to see each other more often, and kids can be sent through the teleporter—with adult supervision, and yes, the adult has to pay for a round-trip ticket too—to spend the night at Grandma’s while the parents teleport in the other direction to claim their reservation at the hottest restaurant in the country. (This also means nearly every family has to have the conversation that goes “Mom, Dad, just because there’s a teleporter doesn’t mean you can show up at our house unannounced.”)

Of course, “people” doesn’t really mean people. It means the employed, the able-bodied, those among us who have enough cash to pay $150—plus the adult supervision fare—to send our kid cross-country to visit the grandparents, as well as the ability to stand in line and walk through the teleporter. (The first teleporters were not built wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair.)

A lot more people have that extra $150, now that they’re only paying $300 per month in rent, but a lot of people don’t. They’re the ones still living in the decaying cities, scrolling through Facebook posts of families hosting barn dances in their new hometowns. (The “let’s live in a barn!” craze only lasts as long as it takes for people to realize that driving a truck 45 minutes down a gravel road every morning to get to their teleporter gets old really fast.)

The unemployed also quickly find that they are competing for every job with everybody else in the country. The question, of course, is when it will become everybody else in the world. Both sides have their arguments, but history has proven that we slowly, if imperfectly, work towards inclusivity—and in this case inclusivity means pulling the best talent from an international population, embracing a diversity of ideas, creating a true global meritocracy.

There is no such thing as a true meritocracy.

We also aren’t as good at inclusivity as we think we are.

Rents and real estate prices start to rise, by the way. They couldn’t stay down forever, not with all of those small-town populations booming like that, not when people realize the actual value of those Midwestern Victorian homes. Wages drop, once companies no longer account for their city’s specific cost of living. Sure, some people make a lot of money off a post-teleportation world, but we always knew that was going to happen. What’s interesting is that most people don’t, after the initial economic boom that primarily affected the already privileged.

Going home for the holidays is still awful. It still involves waking up early, dragging your bags out into the dry winter weather (warmer than last year but still), letting the snot slowly drip towards your upper lip as you stand in line, inching forward as one person after another gets searched, gets their ID checked, and passes through the teleporter. You wonder if the lines are shorter somewhere else, but all lines are the same now, everyone is standing next to you with their bag bumping into the back of your legs as they push forward even though the line isn’t moving, why can’t they see that the line isn’t moving, and by “everyone” I don’t really mean everyone, I mean the people who would have always been in the line, no matter what the line was.

“Wow, the teleporters are THE WORST this year,” you hear someone say behind you. It’s someone who isn’t really old enough to remember airplanes, and the cost of losing an entire industry in a few years, and the magic of breaking through the pummel of clouds to see blue sky and sunlight. You feel old, because you will never see a sky that blue again.

Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.