1. Good help is hard to find. If you're smart and capable, you're above that $20/hr line, and if you're not... well you're just not.
2. Service business is hard. Customer support can eat up your time, money, and energy day in, day out. Maybe if one had worked in retail in their youth they would understand it.
3. One of the more homegrown trends the past few years has been maid service. There's a vibrant community on Reddit and blogospheres revolving around setting up maid services in various localities. They all build off the same model. Good to see that it's validated by Exec switching to focusing on that.
In the end, these businesses revolving around re-organizing labor structures and managing people result in the inevitable grand truth: people are complex creatures, sometimes a person is good, sometimes a person is bad, then sometimes a person is cheap, and sometimes a person is expensive.
But we keep insisting on using an iPhone app to sort human beings into quantifiable skillsets then driving down the costs to utilize them. Everyone serves as little cogs in our lives commanded by our remote control. So future.
Right. The problem was his misconception with society on the side of the errand runner. All he seemed to have experience with was the exec who has tasks needed to be done.
On that note, something like this in a society with very high unemployment and a large casual labor market could possibly do well (granted, people were wealthy enough to own smartphones). My partner's family in India would constantly go through servants/maids/gardners/etc because there're so many people willing to work.
One of my parents is Egyptian and when she was growing up they had multiple "servants" but each with a different speciality. One was the transportation (pick up/drop off) guy, one did cleaning, one was the handy man, one was the doorman/concierge type person, one did shopping, someone watched the kids, etc.
In effect, there were no errands for the family to ever run because they had one servant that specialized in one thing but that servant did it for all the families on the block resulting in a full time job. All the affluent city blocks had their own network of specialized servants.
2. Service business is hard. Customer support can eat up your time, money, and energy day in, day out. Maybe if one had worked in retail in their youth they would understand it.
3. One of the more homegrown trends the past few years has been maid service. There's a vibrant community on Reddit and blogospheres revolving around setting up maid services in various localities. They all build off the same model. Good to see that it's validated by Exec switching to focusing on that.
In the end, these businesses revolving around re-organizing labor structures and managing people result in the inevitable grand truth: people are complex creatures, sometimes a person is good, sometimes a person is bad, then sometimes a person is cheap, and sometimes a person is expensive.
But we keep insisting on using an iPhone app to sort human beings into quantifiable skillsets then driving down the costs to utilize them. Everyone serves as little cogs in our lives commanded by our remote control. So future.