Amazon Takes Fresh Stab At $16 Billion Housekeeping Industry (bloomberg.com)

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from Bloomberg: Amazon is quietly hiring house cleaners in Seattle as direct employees. The online retailer is swapping the low cost of contract workers for the greater control of employing its own people. Doing so puts it on the hook for things like minimum wage, workers compensation and overtime pay. But it also lets Amazon determine how the workers are trained, which cleaning products they use and how they organize their schedules. Amazon's experiment signals it's concerned that saving money by using independent contractors can compromise the customer experience and make it just another online matchmaker. So it's conducting a trial to see if investing in its own housekeepers will differentiate its services by linking them more directly to the popular Amazon brand. The new housecleaning service, Amazon Home Assistants, offers home cleanings in Seattle that vary in price by the size of the home and frequency of visits. A weekly cleaning of a 1,500-square-foot home runs about $156.

Comments

You know what this means...

[SuperKendall]

Housecleaners on demand, descending from the sky from drones like a futuristic Mary Poppins!

Or possibly more like a Starship Trooper drop suit...

The great thing is, if someone in your house mentions how messy your place is a housecleaner just shows up! No need to let her in thanks to Amazon Key.