alt Hacker Newsi'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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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