My Life as a TaskRabbit

I had a bad experience as a TaskRabbit buyer. There was a dispute between me and the task worker as to whether the task was complete. The worker went ahead and marked the task as complete and TaskRabbit deducted my credit card. The dispute resolution process was a convoluted and manual process which I didn't have time for (which is why I was using TaskRabbit in the first place). It wasn't a huge amount of money so I let it slide.

I can see why TaskRabbit might be biased towards paying for the task automatically after the agreement has been entered, the alternative would be to make it easy for the buyer to screw the workers over, but it seems like they probably need an easier dispute process or they'll lose the buyers, I know I'm not using them again. I guess the worker ratings is supposed to help with this but I couldn't quickly figure out how to rate the worker and TaskRabbbit didn't make it easy by sending me an email about it or something like that, so I just gave up.

I think your parent referred to Houston's population only.

I don't think you're reading these comments in context. I'm arguing that even if they only reach the major urban areas, they'll still be a large, profitable company. You're responding that reaching beyond them is logistically difficult -- again, "so what?". If you want to answer my comment, you have to say something as to why TaskRabbit has to be available in the 'burbs to scale.

The purpose of the comparison to Netflix was to emphasize that the addressable market for your product or service need not be "every household in the nation" to be considered "at scale". It's OK for TaskRabbit to never offer all its services in every suburb -- because it's logistically difficult or impossible -- they still have the potential to be a large, profitable company without doing so. I never made a comparison between how easy or difficult it would be to grow.

I hired a TaskRabbit to pick up a large amount of IKEA and deliver it to my house. The TaskRabbit proceeded to show up an hour late with the furniture...because she dropped the furniture on her foot, breaking multiple bones.

Once I heard this, I realized "Shoot, I contracted her. Am I legally liable for her injuries?" (Fortunately for me, she shrugged it off, and seemed to be covered under some insurance of her own.) And if she had not delivered the furniture due to her broken foot, would TaskRabbit make me look like the bad guy for asking for my money back? (Fortunately again for me, she made the delivery, amazingly.)

While things turned out OK in the end, suddenly the whole service felt much riskier, for both the employee and the consumer - and I felt irritated at TaskRabbit for subjecting me to that risk without some sort of a safety net in place. (Heck, I would have paid extra for one, some sort of "TaskRabbit Insurance.")

I have to say, as much as I dislike the idea of tight regulations on workers, and can see directly how much cheaper my services are removing those regulations...I think next time I'll pay the premium for a more legitimate furniture move, at least, until the law catches up to services like TaskRabbit.

There is such a thing as underemployment, but I don't think it means what the gp and you are claiming. Actually I think that like unemployment, there are 2 forms of it...

1. voluntary - a person is capable of doing a job, that job is available and fits into that person's life, but (s)he chooses to work at a less demanding job not utilizing his/her skills. I don't see this as a problem, personal choice is OK.

2. involuntary - this is a case where a person or workforce has capacity to produce more, get higher wages, or otherwise be "better" employed, but market inefficencies[1] prevent the best employment. Again, this may not be a problem for the individuals - they may not be bothered by this, but it is a valuable measure for opportunity. If a company can employ these people for $fewer than the going rate, but $more than they are making and gain profit, they should, because it helps overall market efficiency - it helps lower the cost of employees overall, and helps raise the wages of the people who provide value. Everyone wins. Just like finding new sources of any raw material in demand, or using previously "too expensive" sources because the market price has shifted.

For a real example: company A had a systems office in my town employing some pretty good graybeards. A decided that they didn't want/need to be in that business anymore, and closed the office. For the large part, the graybeards were happy in town, and chose to stay and not work at as well paying jobs, for reasons outside of salary. The thing is - systems graybeards are in demand and expensive (usually). For a while they were underemployed, not making the money they should. But company B heard of this, and realized that they could pay cost-of-living adjusted salaries that saved them a lot of money on a pool of systems people with a proven track record. They opened an office hiring most of the underemployed graybeards and everything was in balance again.

Of course that example is almost the text-book ideal case of how efficiencies, indicators, and such should play out. There are harder cases of this. Finding ways to take advantage of the underemployed metric is more difficult.

Anyway -- that is the long way around of saying: underemployment may not be a good or even valid measure at a personal level, but at an aggregate level it is a good measure of where efficiency can be sought. Disbelieving it speaks more of personal/political biases than of a market understanding - probably because it is term associated often with jobs programs and other things many dislike.

[1] Like algorithms, just because a perfect theoretical algorithm has an efficiency of $X, a given implementation my only be able to achieve $Y efficiency (where $X > $Y).