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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

One thing that has really opened my mind on this is Amazon Home Services. Basically, if you're incorporated, insured, and can provide a few references proving you do decent work, Amazon will shovel business your way. And you can limit the services you provide. For example, one of the services you can buy on Amazon Home Services is "Door knob replacement." This is a VERY low level skill that requires only the most basic tools. The price in my zip code is $77. Amazon takes 20% off the top, so your business makes $61. By the time you include travel time, fuel, etc, you're probably making $20-30/hr doing ENTRY LEVEL labor.

And there's a ton of services you can offer through the AHS portal: home theatre setup, house cleaning, lawn maintenance, plumbing, computer repair, electrical etc.

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What's amazing to me is that there are people who don't feel like they're capable of changing their own doorknob.

(I get it; there are some people who would rather just pay, but surely some of these people just don't feel like they could manage this task. That's wild.)

One obvious market is elderly folks who aren't getting around well anymore.

I think the more likely market is those elderly folks' children, who'd rather pay on Amazon than take the time to visit their parents.

Assuming they have children.

Though you're right, that's probably common too, particularly when the children live far away.

That's wild to me too, but rich lazy people who subcontract out everything is much better for society than rich people who hoard their money forever, so I'm certainly not going to shame them about it :)

maybe they are rich because they work hard/long for more than $30/hr ?

It doesn't really matter to me why they're rich as long as a proportional amount of their earnings is reinvested in their local community, jobs, and infrastructure :)

There's as much here that's cultural as economic. There's no ceiling on how much I'd have to earn before I'd pay somebody to do that kind of work for me, because (for someone with my working-class background, at least) hiring someone to do that for you feels degrading and emasculating.

It's a simple task you can and should do yourself. Money has very little to do with it.

There aren't enough rich people who need services to give people jobs. Martin Ford's "The Lights in the Tunnel" makes this point.

I live in a duplex and my neighbors are always impressed when I do simple things like fix cat5 cable caps, screw/caulk down a loose doorframe trim, or sometimes even just for having basic tools at all.

When I was installing my blinds when I first moved in, a group of neighbors from down the street were walking by and asked me (through the open window) if I was the hired help (guess cus I looked too young to be the owner and too not-hispanic to be the usual hired help in the area, and god forbid anyone do their own manual labor). That was awkward.

Yea I don't get it either, but I know exactly what you're talking about. It's like when you see the meme/trope about Ikea furniture being hard to assemble. Really? What?

> It's like when you see the meme/trope about Ikea furniture being hard to assemble.

Oh dear, I always thought that was about missing parts or pieces not fitting. This gives a new perspective …

I don't think missing or misfitting parts is a common problem with Ikea -- I've certainly put together a fair amount and haven't run into those problems.

TBH, I think many people don't have the patience to follow the instructions. Even with the wordless ones Ikea uses, it can take a few minutes of study to understand the exact orientation of pieces a diagram is calling for.

I actually find wordless instructions much harder to follow; insofar as Ikea builds.are difficult (they rarely are particularly, mostly just time consuming drudgery which isn't the same thing), it's because of rather than in spite of wordless instructions.

The ikea thing is different. (ok, you’re probably right for many people, but...). I find their issue to be that it’s easy to miss a step, and if you do, you often don’t catch it until 30 minutes later. And then you have to undo everything back to that missed step.

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