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Amazon Launches 'Home Services' For Repair, Installation, and Other Work
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has quietly rolled out a new business called "Home Services," which aims to be a middleman between customers and all sorts of contracted services. It includes things like appliance repair, home cleaning, installation/assembly of products in your car or home, tutoring (academic and musical), and even performance art. Amazon makes money on this by taking a cut of the total price — between 10 and 20 percent. Since everything is geolocated, they have many more options available in big cities than in small rural communities. One of Amazon's goals is to help standardize the price for various services, so there aren't any surprises when the bill comes due.
And so it goes.
Yet another step to insert a system to mediate and "facilitate" peer-to-peer transactions. I can almost feel the middle class getting poorer as more and more middlemen scrape off their percentage.
The technology that so many people thought would set us free is being applied to bring us back 100 years when most labor was casual and few people knew if they'd have a job next year.
Car sharing, house sharing, "free" content generation, task rabbit type casual labor.... no wonder the middle class in the USA is hurting. This might be more effect than cause but we're in an undiscovered country, that's for sure.
I think it was Sears and, in fact, it appears to be active today. Although likely ignored by pretty much all.
Perhaps Amazon has more reach - it certainly has more cachet - but I don't see this as terribly effective. For one thing, standardized prices imply consistent quality. That might happen when you're making widgets. For labor with any degree of skill - I'm rather doubtful that this is the case.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I like being able to see reviews from Amazon customers with "verified purchase" next to their names, means much more than random comments online.