Comment by parpfish
1 year ago
i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
for the driver, consistent pay and the ability to weed out bad clients. for the client, you'd get a trustworthy assistant that should be able to take on a wider range of things that a single app wouldn't do. it may not be as fast as an on-demand delivery apps, but for most things that doesn't really matter.
My (wealthy) father in law does this, he has a handful of people he can call upon day or night to do whatever he needs, anything from pick something up two hours away to put some additional overnight security on one of his sites/properties... most of them are ex-military Eastern European. I've no idea how he compensates them but they seem happy with him and stick around, and the couple I've spoken to over the years seem nice enough.
To be honest I wouldn't want to know more details, he's a dodgy fuck
I think those kind of assistants are called henchmen ;-)
My father in law (not so wealthy), has a few people near his beach rental that will do various different things. Including one handyman who will help with whatever.
There are whole management companies who do this type of stuff for vacation rentals. I’d bet there are similar ones for rich people’s primary and secondary homes.
Estate/house managers are a very real thing, especially at the high end.
It can vary from basically part time concierge work (get the beds made, and make sure that the fridge is full when I arrive), all the way to full-time management of a property including managing additional full-time staff (maids, chefs, gardeners, etc).
I only brushed against it in being part of the yachting world, but it is fascinating how much money people like this absolutely blow away on making their lives slightly more convenient.
Don't even think about cheating on your wife
Startup idea: TaskRabbit but for ex-military Eastern Europeans who will do whatever a dodgy fuck wants.
Executive Outcomes?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes
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HenchRabbit?
"Execute like a billionaire"
> My (wealthy) father in law
> I've no idea how he compensates them
I'm going to guess with a lot of money. That likely doesn't get reported to relevant tax authorities.
this sounds like the kind of thing you shouldn't post on the internet :)
Some years ago, I met a guy at a bar in New York who said that he was Donald Trump's personal courier. He rode a bike around the city, and he'd deliver things to Trump in person, who would always give him at least $100 cash on the spot. I didn't believe the guy's story, and it offended him. Maybe he was telling the truth.
This is not unbelievable. I don't even live in a coastal city and I still know a handful of active couriers. They're faster than drivers in congested areas and pretty much get a pass on all traffic control/regulation if they don't truly endanger pedestrians. Not to mention that they don't need parking, can carry their vehicles up stairs and into buildings etc.
Plenty of people know these guys exist and having someone known to you and reliable on speed dial is worthwhile. The $100 also makes sense because it isn't just a tip, it is the 'retainer' to make sure the calls get maximum priority.
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IIRC the climax of the merger deal described in /Barbarians at the Gate/ essentially comes down to a bike courier race between various offices in Manhattan as last-minute bid adjustments got ferried about. Makes me wonder what the value of the truly fastest bike courier in New York would be to some large investment bank/PE firm/whatever. I imagine they are massively underpaid compared to the value they provide.
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These are primarily people delivering food orders at lunch time for less than $10.
The people paying for these services will not pay what it would cost to have a “personal assistant”.
Also they can only deliver so many orders at a time. If all of your clients order lunch around the same time, it’s not possible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time.
For food delivery, I imagine going back to pre-apps and have restaurant employed couriers for local takeout could be beneficial for both parties.
The problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above. The driver sits around in the restaurant parking lot twiddling his thumbs and then 10 lunch orders come in over the course of an hour, most of which while the driver’s out delivering the first order. The last order ends up taking 2 hours to get to the customer who is not at all pleased with cold, soggy food long after the lunch break ended.
The food delivery app business works like the insurance business: the aggregate drivers form a risk pool [1] to protect restaurants from the variability of demand. This allows a single restaurant to be able to accept 10 food delivery orders in a matter of minutes just as easily as they would for orders coming in from the tables in their dining room. The app would dispatch up to 10 drivers to handle those orders and even automatically batch them according to proximity of destination.
Of course the app can also handle multiple restaurants in a similar area in the same way so that drivers can be dispatched most efficiently to handle all the demand for an entire city. The more drivers, restaurants, and customers centralize on a single delivery app, the more efficient the system can be (assuming the app developers know how to optimize the transshipment problem [2]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_pool
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transshipment_problem
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Well, you can also - shock horror - drive (or bike, if possible) over to the restaurant and pick up your order yourself! That's of course assuming that the restaurant has another means of placing orders than through the delivery apps (e.g. a phone number)...
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most of the folks getting ubereats delivery are not the target demo for being a PA client. but you don't have to be super wealthy for the economics of it to work out.
most tech employees make enough that they could pay 10-15 hrs of low wage work every week to do stuff like pick up your laundry/groceries, pick up a food order that you've called in, take stuff to the post office, etc.
most tech employees in SF
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It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent. Making the gig app as a discovery mechanism.
That's why none of the attempts at making housecleaning part of the gig economy have succeeded.
It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent.
That used to be considered a success, not a failure.
When agencies like Kelly place someone in a position like that, the person is required to work for Kelly for x number of months/years. Once that obligation is complete, they are free to jump to working directly with the Kelly client. Been there. Done that.
This is a solved problem. And solved a hundred years ago.
Part of that solution is to either sell a cleaning service that people only use occasionally, like deep cleaning of your floors, or to lock the client in to a contract that allows you to detect those private deals.
But the basic, "I'd like someone to clean my house once a week" doesn't work so well. People sometimes stop the cleaning after a bad experience. And sometimes hire the cleaner after a good one. And from the company's point of view, those look exactly the same. Customers will refuse 6 month contracts, and so there is no real recourse.
> i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
I think you might be over-estimating how much of a personal connection gig work delivery drivers have with the people they deliver to.
How many do you recognize? How many do you even know the names of? I'm not even sure if I've ever had a repeat delivery person, except from one restaurant that does delivery in-house instead of farming it out to one of the services.
they don't have connections to them because they're still gig workers going through the app.
but all they need to do to start those relationships would be to drop off a business card if doordash/ubereats/etc sent them to somebody that seemed pleasant/tipped well/etc. then network effects from their as they recommend among their (presumably wealth) friends
Don't get on Uncle Enzo's bad side though.
> select a handful of good clients
Probably because the gig worker's client is Doordash, not the individuals ordering delivery, to which they have little to no contact and most likely wont ever see them again. As a delivery-orderer in NYC, I cannot recall ever having the same delivery person more than once, let alone so often that we developed a client-relationship.
UpWork would let people do this today.
That's already a thing, it's a just a normal courier service.
big companies care more about how easy it is to automate the labels, the accounting, the scheduling, ... Saving 2 euro per delivery but requiring a few hour of human effort is typically not worth it
Could even make an app for that.