451–460 of 493 posts
Oh, or just have a complete melt down.
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To be fair, we don't know if this is the truth. Has Wag responded with their side of the story?
Unless the entire story is false it really doesn't matter. Dog died. Wag wanted them to sign an NDA or Wag wouldn't pay for anything. The only correct response from Wag was to pay everything (again, we're talking about a couple of thousand maximum) no questions asked and apologize profusely. Even from a purely soulless financial standpoint, that's the only correct response.
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"It takes years or even decades to build community trust. It takes about 15 minutes to destroy it." - my old boss
Just fyi, the usual quote goes “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair”
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The problem is I can’t tell which ones care, and those are the only ones I’d want to do business with.
I can respect that. You want to maximize the likelihood the dog survives. I call this "The Hard Problem of Delineation". You can't delineate between who will and won't kill your dog no matter what system you use. That's the problem. Though I take your point about the cold, uncaring, capitalist dog walker. Hmmm. Edit: now that I think about your point I can see what you mean. The "sharing economy (Uber for X)" has bec…
I think essentially every dog owner will have done something to "kill" their dog but were saved by chance. Dogs sneak out the door when you're bringing groceries in, yank the leash out of your hand, escape fenced yards, among a number of other possibilities of them getting loose. The saving grace is that 999 times out of a thousand there's no traffic or the driver is paying attention or fluffy comes back before anything happens. In a situation like that it's hard to say if the walker is worse than any random owner or walker, or if they were just unlucky.
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Through other trust paths. Start by caring for neighbours' pets, or family/friends, anyone that already knows you. Ask them for tips, guidance (aka "education"). Show them you care and want to expand your services (aka "networking"). Then ask them for references (aka "certification").
This seems like a lot to ask for something that pays substantially less than McDonalds. Kind of feels like someone should be able to give non dog walking references to walk your dog. Like if people regularly trust their children with person foo person foo can probably be trusted with pets?
Isn't that chain of trust completely backwards?
You'd start by looking after pets, then once you have loads of good references, you might just be able to upgrade to looking after kids?
Full disclosure: zero pets + three kids
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Not really. The whole idea of the 'gig economy' relied on independent contractors being independent entities liable for their own issues, and whom reap the rewards for their own work. Part of the reward is a reputable account as a saleable asset. It's just like selling a company or passing it on to your children. If Joe's Handmans or Joes' Dogwalkers no longer includes "Joe" that's not supposed to be a scary situatio…
"Part of the reward is a reputable account as a saleable asset." Your assessment is wrong. Joe's plumbing is a legally distinct entity that people understand is represented by a variety of different individuals. An account on a gig site that represents that you are Joe Smith is different on the face of the matter because you are contractually liable for providing accurate info to potential clients and the company. Th…
If you want to hold someone to a 'name must match' standard, then I think you hire them personally so they are your employee. For someone using Uber, they theoretically do not care who the driver is so long as it is a 'valid driver' as per marketplace standards. To them, they are doing business only with Uber, not specifically with any individual driver, so any disputes are between Uber and driver or Uber and customer.
If something goes wrong, as you said it's between Uber and whomever they signed a contract with regardless of whom is driving the car at the time but that isn't a higher standard than any other B2B contract.
Personally, I would not mind laws put in place saying that if you want to higher 1 person for 1 job, and the name must match, then you have to classify them as at least a part-time employee.
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It's not in the interest of the marketplace actor, like Wag, to see negative reviews, so I would not be surprised if Leslie's rating was doctored somehow. For example with Uber I had a couple of bad experiences with the driver not picking me up but starting to charge me, and I had to settle for getting my money back but could not leave a review because technically I did not ride with the driver.
I would think it would be beneficial for the marketplace to see negative reviews, because they will direct customers to the reliable dogwalkers, leading to greater customer satisfaction and retention. Badly reviewed dogwalkers could be bumped off the platform.
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The vetting is 'crowd-sourced' with customer reviews, no? If 'Bill' thinks 'Leslie' is a great walker... what more should wag or rover need to do? Vet Bill now too!? That's just crazy talk...
Currently the problem arises if the reviews are owned and hosted by the company in question. You can find tons of complains about the quality of Amazon products. And now there is a need for external tools like fakespot.com to find fake reviews. It wouldn't have taken Amazon much to build a similar service. The amazing thing about smaller markets like Wag and Rover is that even if there are negative reviews you are no…
Would people really trust it as much as something completely external?
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I don't agree: I'm not from the US and generally think everyone is over reacting with constantly (threatening) to sue everyone else. But here the problem here isn't that the dog died, it's how Wag has handled the problem afterwards, and how their (poor) communication suggests that they didn't really do their due diligence in vetting the walkers. EDIT: a similar thing happened in my country (the Netherlands) where an…
I think the incentives in play force companies to act callous. It seems to me that companies are wary to act with empathy lest they get sued and the court takes it as an admission of guilt (or at least evidence of culpability, or something the jury will pay attention to). It's like that old advice where you should never say "sorry" after a car accident (as a Brit, apologising is a natural impulse even when not at fau…
Pets are treated as simple property by US law and the liability is strictly limited to the cost of replacement. There has never been a civil judgement in the US beyond that. There are CRIMINAL issues involving treatment of animals, but none of those are applicable here.
This is pure incompetence by WAG's legal and customer-service departments.