21–30 of 49 posts
My view on this is this is another example of a free market system of supply and demand. If you have an individual willing to spend money on having their lunch delivered or their car washed without moving a muscle, and on the other side you have someone that is willing to do the work, then it is win win.
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What's wrong with most of their users being in the major cities? Look at Craigslist.
courier services (aka postmates) is definitely difficult to scale in the 'burbs. And that's because of the distances, traffic etc. involved. Certain tasks on Taskrabbit could work in the suburbs, but not all. How many times do you see these kind of jobs on Craigslist ? Ikea delivery, assembling etc are fine -- but when instant gratification (Postmates, Zaarly etc.) is concerned, scaling to the suburbs will be extreme…
This is no different than the scaling limits of many online media companies, in fact. 83% of the US population is in an urban center. 81% of the US population has access to broadband internet (and not all of them take advantage of that access). Netflix's addressable US market for streaming is smaller than TaskRabbit's for tasks.
The one thing I have always wondered -- how would these companies scale ? These models work well in areas with a high population density (eg: SF, NYC, major city downtowns etc.). How well will they work when they spread out to the suburbs ?
But I imagine they either don't scale to the suburbs at all, or if they do, it will be more expensive to hire people in the suburbs, reflecting the higher cost of providing the services.
It's for the same reason I doubt they will ever came to rural areas. It's okay though, not all services have to be everywhere.
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60,000 per year is not "underemployment".
You know all those jobs claiming you can earn up to $big_number a week? That's their all-time record. The odds of real numbers resembling it are low.
The one thing I have always wondered -- how would these companies scale ? These models work well in areas with a high population density (eg: SF, NYC, major city downtowns etc.). How well will they work when they spread out to the suburbs ?
Do they even need to spread to the suburbs?
> I call Chris Mok, a top-ranked local TaskRabbit who earns up to $1,500 a week. Mok was laid off from his job as an art buyer at Macy’s (M) in 2009 and now spends most days, including weekends, on handyman assignments such as assembling Ikea furniture. TaskRabbit: Distributed underemployment.
Sorry to say but there is no such thing as underemployment. Clearly there are less need for art buyers (or he wasn't good enough to do the job) than there were in 2009, so he has to do something else.
First, an unemployment rate of 0% is bad. This is because not all unemployment is bad.
Frictional unemployment is actually a good thing (to a certain extent), because the alternative is having people stuck doing jobs they don't want when better jobs are available.
Structural unemployment is what happens when $old_industry dies because $disruptive_tech_company changes the market. It's definitely bad for the unemployed (who will never be re-employed in the same field), but it's usually the result of positive improvements to society at large. The 'solution' is that those people losing their jobs need to be retrained to work in another field, which is admittedly difficult, or retire.
Cyclical unemployment is undeniably bad. That's the result of boom-and-bust economies - people over-hiring during bubbles, and then having to lay off en masse when the market contracts. (The problem is largely that the people are being dumped into the jobs marketplace all at once, creating a glut, instead of being more evenly distributed).
The rest - someone who's employed but at a salary lower than what they'd like, or someone who retires because they're laid off... that's not unemployment. Someone may dislike it and they may think it's a 'problem' that needs to be 'fixed', but they need to realize that they're talking about something completely different from unemployment.
As for real unemployment, the ideal value is a point of debate amongst economists because it is tricky to measure, but somewhere in the ballpark of 5% is a commonly accepted value for the target 'natural rate' of unemployment.
That is, a sustained, unwavering value of 5% unemployment is actually the target for a healthy economy.
I became a task rabbit almost three weeks ago. I have bid on at least thirty jobs. I have spent a total of 5 hours checking the site for jobs. I have not been assigned one task. I have applied for several graphic design gigs. Most people want a logo designed for thirty to fifty dollars. Some people want ebooks created from word documents for under a hundred dollars. The hard labor tasks is where the money is. Those j…
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You can write it off in the end user agreement for the runners, right?
I'm not sure about the US legal situation but here in Sweden there is so much legislation to protect workers that a TaskRabbit kind of service becomes hard to achieve.
In the US, hiring contractors exempts you from many of the taxes and liabilities of hiring employees, and they are also exempt from most benefits (their right to litigation against the company is also limited).
US readers will certainly be familiar with Vector (ie, Cutco knives) - they get away without providing any benefits/insurance, without reimbursing for expenses such as gas/phone bills, and with paying what often amounts to minimum wage because all of their salesmen are college students who are hired as 'contractors'[1].
Don't think I'm saying that contracting is bad - the same laws allow others to make very large sums of money working as contractors. It really just depends on what the setup with the company is.
[1] I may be confusing some of the details with other similar companies, but I know Vector engages in at least some of these practices, all of which are commonly practiced.
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Sorry to say but there is no such thing as underemployment. Clearly there are less need for art buyers (or he wasn't good enough to do the job) than there were in 2009, so he has to do something else.
People grossly overuse (and abuse) the term unemployment like this. First, an unemployment rate of 0% is bad . This is because not all unemployment is bad. Frictional unemployment is actually a good thing (to a certain extent), because the alternative is having people stuck doing jobs they don't want when better jobs are available. Structural unemployment is what happens when $old_industry dies because $disruptive_te…
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You know all those jobs claiming you can earn up to $big_number a week? That's their all-time record. The odds of real numbers resembling it are low.
The national median household income is around 45k. The third quintile starts just under 35k. Are you really going to say that half of the US population is "underemployed"?
Let's look at Chris Mok, mentioned in this article as a top-ranked TaskRabbit who makes "up to" $1500 a week, but a Reuter's article from February describes him as making about $3500/month, which works out to 42k per year[1], far far below that weekly "up to" number. And so when TaskRabbit's Leah Busque says people make "up to" 60k a year, my assumption is that most are making much less, especially when a "top ranked" guy appears to be about 18k below that.
I'd love to know mean and median figures, at the least, but haven't been able to turn them up—which doesn't do anything to alleviate skepticism about the "up to" numbers.
Obviously if someone can make even 20-30k from this in a market where they can't find anything else, then it's a good thing they've got TaskRabbit, but I wouldn't really call that enabling entrepreneurship in line with the TaskRabbit PR message.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/09/us-peer-idUSTRE818...