HUFFINGTON
10.28.12
THE HELP
Nick Ramirez, a vice president
of business development for Red
Butler, says demand for reasonably priced online personal assistants to handle errands and menial tasks has been growing.
“We’ve actually increased staffing,” says Ramirez. “We’ve hired
more concierges.”
Customers pay less for these
types of concierges by virtue of the
fact that requests are usually handled over email, and that a rotating
cast of characters might be helping
them on any given day. TaskRabbit, for example, which launched
in 2008, pairs people looking for
errand-runners with vetted local
service providers online. Customers
can name their own price and service providers then bid on the task.
Ted Roden, the man behind
Fancy Hands, uses the tagline
“Assistants for Everyone” on his
website. Roden is making an effort to appeal to people who want
to have a personal assistant, but
can’t afford one.
A $25 a month membership
gets customers five requests that
can be as specialized as they want,
and $65 a month buys 25 tasks.
Roden says his assistants have
fired off lists of the best Twitter
accounts for Broadway reviewers
and ordered flowers for wives on
behalf of their husbands.
Roden says he knows from his
tracking system that his company’s assistants are already logging
more than 24 hours each day on
the phone fulfilling tasks for
wits customers.
“I’ve heard people say this
kind of business is for the 1 percent,” he says. “We’re breaking
down that wall.”
According to Sherman, services providers marketing to those
outside the 1 percent often try to
make their clients in middle income ranges feel like they’re entitled to contract out errands and
personal tasks, as opposed to selling them as a luxury.
“It encourages people to think
that there are certains kinds of
things that they’re not doing for
themselves anymore, just like
when you first hired someone to
clean your house,” says Sherman,
the sociologist. “It creates a hierarchy of tasks, some of which are
appropriate to pay people to do,
and some of which are not.”
Eventually, that mentality might
start to become normal for a consumer, redefining what we consider personal enough to
do ourselves.