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Amazon Expands Home Services To 20 New Cities, Seeks 'Home Assistants' (arstechnica.com)
Amazon today said it has expanded its Home Services business to 20 new cities across the country. Home Services is an under-the-radar offering from Amazon that lets customers hire professionals for things like plumbing, furniture assembly, car repair, home cleaning, and more. From a report on ArsTechnica:Home Services launched in 2015 and is now available in cities including Boulder, Colorado; New Haven, Connecticut; Indianapolis, Indiana; Trenton, New Jersey; and San Antonio, Texas (among other places). The expansion comes as Amazon seeks applicants for a new position called Home Assistant. The Seattle Times reported a couple of listings in the Seattle area for those jobs, which call for applicants with hospitality or service experience. Home Assistants would be "helping Amazon customers keep their home" by "tidying up around the home, laundry, and helping put groceries and essentials like toilet paper and paper towels away."
Furniture assembly, eh? Well, I already know how to program in assembly. I can't imagine furniture assembly being much different.
The local unions need to sit down with some local devs and figure out their own solution or become irrelevant.
"Alexa, schedule a plumber for tuesday" is infinitely easier than wading through the phone book (as most of these trades don't even have websites), calling up a guy and scheduling it around their schedule (not mine).
All restaurants will be Taco Bell because they've always been Taco Bell. There has never been any other restaurant. Just like Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Damn, memory's going: wasn't there a site that tried to do this? Give it your location and the kind of task you had (plumbing, electrical, whatever), and it would match you to one of the people who had registered with the site to offer their services.
Ah, here it is: Thumbtack. It doesn't have the best reviews, from professionals trying to use it to get contracts: some people think it's doing like dating sites, only with virtual customers instead of virtual women.
It's not a bad idea, but you need a lot of professionals to reach critical mass. You also need a good ratings system, because anyone can claim to be a professional, but quality varies...um...widely. Ideally, you'd like to keep the incompetents out in the first place, just like a store should avoid carrying counterfeit products.
This will also open the door to the same kinds of issues that Uber and Lyft have: Are these professionals (if they are individuals) really independent contractors, or are they employees? Who is liable, when the amateur plumber floods your house? Really, it's not an area I would expect Amazon to dabble in - it seems to me that they are just inviting all sorts of unpleasant legal problems.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
They were called maids. At some point that got changed to hired help and a few less savory things.
At one time we had a middle class that could afford to support people who worked in their home. Short of a gigantic economic shift that's still true. I'm at a severe loss as to how Amazon is going to make this affordable and simultaneously worthwhile for people to pursue as gainful employment.