Amazon Takes Fresh Stab At $16 Billion Housekeeping Industry (bloomberg.com) 70
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.
It's got nothing to do with control (Score:5, Insightful)
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$16 Billion, my glow-in-the-dark-ass (Score:3)
If the figures are for the domestic industry, puntended, that's $16,000,000,000 / 325,000,000 (US population) for a total of $49 per person, per year... hogwash.
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I honestly can't tell if you think it should be higher or lower.
I can't tell either. About $49/person seems reasonable to me, since most people spend $0 on house cleaners.
I pay $120 per month for a housekeeper. She comes once per month, and works for about 3 hours, dusting, vacuuming etc. That is $1440 per year, but there are 4 people in my family, so we are paying $360 each. If for every family like mine there are 8 more than pay $0, that will average out close to $50 per person spent on housekeeping services.
Disclaimer: This is all on the books. I issue my house
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I'm getting the feeling I'm getting a bargain on my cleaner.
She comes in for 90 minutes every week (but only does half the house each week) and I'm paying her £11/hour.
It's all on the books, but it's her books not mine. She runs her own company, I merely hire her services. She has right of substitution too (although we never discussed that) which means I've had her husband, her son and her daughter in cleaning at various times.
There's nothing wrong about a 14 year old girl in school uniform clea
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I don't employ a cleaner, but I do get a few fliers for cleaning agencies through my door periodically. About £11/hour seems about right for the reputable-looking ones, one was £8.50/hour. I did pay a cleaner when I was a PhD student, because it was far cheaper to split the cost of an hour of someone's time per week between four of us than to argue about who was responsible for cleaning. The agency there was quite up front that most of their customers use them as a finder service, pay them fo
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Seems like you're getting a lot less service than I do. We're in the northern VA, DC suburbs, and using a major housecleaning firm (bonded and insured, which came in handy when one had a fall on our staircase) every two weeks at a monthly cost of $125. They don't bill us extra for the extra for the months with three visits, so that's $1750/yr. They typically show up with 2-3 workers, and stay for 2-3 hours.
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If it's only 3 hours per month, then I would have to wonder why you would have a cleaner at all, especially with 4 people in your family. Even if the kids are to young to clean, that still means that you're paying almost $1500 a year for something that would amount to no more than about half an hour a week for each adult. Over 20 years with 6% interest and assuming your payments increase with inflation at 1%, if you invested all that money you would have $60,000. Over 40 years, assuming you needed a clean
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If it's only 3 hours per month, then I would have to wonder why you would have a cleaner at al
She works much faster than me, so it would likely be 6 hours instead of 3 if I did it myself. I hate housework, and my time is worth way more than hers. So financially, it makes sense for me to pay her and spend my time on what I am good at and what I enjoy.
By hiring a housecleaner, I am redistributing my income, reducing inequality, and providing her family with a living. Doing your own housework is selfish.
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What's the point of money? Generally, the point of acquiring money is to allow you to spend your time doing things that you enjoy. Unless you really enjoy housework, paying someone else to do it means that you have more free time and less time doing something that you don't want to do. If you save the money, what would you do with it? Over 40 years, if it's saving you an average of 6 hours a month, that's a cumulative 120 days of free time. Can you buy an extra 120 days of free time with $270,000?
Th
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$120 per month for a housekeeper. She comes once per month, and works for about 3 hours
Wait... 3 hours a month, for $120 that month? Something fishy about that.
That $40/hour you're paying is more than skilled professionals get around here....
This is all on the books. I issue my housekeeper a 1099 at the end of the year.
In my experience that's very unusual; from most people who have housekeepers: I hear they're hired and paid in cash the same day of service,
just like babysitters, so even if ther
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Wait... 3 hours a month, for $120 that month? Something fishy about that.
That $40/hour you're paying is more than skilled professionals get around here....
OP is presumably just showing off how rich he is. It's like casually mentioning that your Bugati gets 4mpg and costs more to insure than the average teacher's annual salary.
"$4 an hour? $400 an hour? It's all the same to me, I earn $1.8million a day in interest on my investments alone".
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I suspect the housekeeping market is largely for unreported cash, and by independent contractors who don't need Amazon or another corporate behemoth pimping their gigs.
If the figures are for the domestic industry, puntended, that's $16,000,000,000 / 325,000,000 (US population) for a total of $49 per person, per year... hogwash.
According to your ignorant math here, there are no billionaires in the US because the concept of wealth concentration doesn't exist. News flash: There are people who likely spend thousands per month on shit like house cleaning, gardening, lawn maintenance, and pool maintenance. $16 billion probably isn't far off at all.
You know what this means... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Wrong film. Precogs predict when your house is going to be dirty, and troopers descend from a dropship.
They can also be summoned by saying 'Alexa, clean my house'. You don't even need an Echo, the Precogs KNOW.
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But if you want to speak to them you have to call them all "Alexa"
The Business Model - Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Schedule based on Amazon orders in a given area (with cleaning requests as well),. Send an Amazon delivery truck with 2-3 teams of cleaners and packages for that area. Cleaners clean, delivery people deliver.
I think the key is geographic consolidation, but cleaners being able to deliver could be a reasonable part of it (I'm not sure if that would be legal, not sure why it wouldn't...).
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Further thinking.
Make custom buses (delivery and other service storage in back/available from the sides, seating for crews up front) and then add yard work, pool maintenance (probably not in Seattle much), dog poo pickup services, etc. (if they buy into house cleaning they might want cat box maintenance). How about LAUNDRY! (that shit never stops).
Vary buses/vans/cars for crews by demand for whatever on a given day. Multiple vehicles could visit an area if needed (to optimize time spent which = $ spent on
Another Way In (Score:5, Insightful)
I fully expect Amazon to start 3D mapping your house and everything in it. They'll do it for your security, cameras on the cleaners to prove they aren't stealing anything. Then they'll use the videos for profiling the types of things you like. Then they'll offer a virtual furniture makeover. And finally a percentage of your house sale when you list it through Amazon and use their virtual walk-through.
Guess what. These cleaners can deliver your and your neighbor's Amazon purchases when they visit too. They can even pick up things you're selling through Amazon.
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I fully expect Amazon to start 3D mapping your house and everything in it. They'll do it for your security, cameras on the cleaners to prove they aren't stealing anything. Then they'll use the videos for profiling the types of things you like. Then they'll offer a virtual furniture makeover. And finally a percentage of your house sale when you list it through Amazon and use their virtual walk-through.
Guess what. These cleaners can deliver your and your neighbor's Amazon purchases when they visit too. They can even pick up things you're selling through Amazon.
Insightful comment. I have no mod points left, so I'm replying to it just to increase its visibility.
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These cleaners can deliver your and your neighbor's Amazon purchases when they visit too. They can even pick up things you're selling through Amazon.
Why not? I'm sure it's not the first time someone had a trusted housekeeper pick up their mail.
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Cleaning as a pretext ? Why not ? (Score:1)
If certain entities want a house checked out inside, just send people who pose as cleaners and they can inspect the house thoroughly while
a couple of genuine house cleaners clean up.
I'm surprised no one has posted the above scenario as a possibility.
Google and Facebook are both almost certainly linked to the NSA ( Palantir, anyone ? )and perhaps Bezos wants a piece of that action.
Call me paranoid today, but a few years from now you might instead call me prescient.
They Took My Job! (Score:1)
Seriously, this is what Mexico does.
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They took his job!!!
loose lips (Score:2)
I don't hire a house cleaner until they've signed a non-disclosure agreement.
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I don't hire a house cleaner until they've signed a non-disclosure agreement.
I didn't know Stormy did windows. Oh, nevermind, you said house cleaner, not pipe cleaner.
Front Door Access (Score:2)
Well they've already got the keys to the front door. Now they're just letting more people in.
$700 a month (Score:2)
Do people really spend that kind of money just to get their house cleaned once a week?
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Yeah, and honestly, its a bargain. Keeping a fairly large place squeaky clean (not just kind of clean, but ACTUALLY nicely clean) is a lot of work. My place is a little larger than the example, at 2000~ sqft, but between the kitchen (especially the kitchen appliances like the grill, cooktop and oven), the floor (there's, well, 2000 sqft of it on 2 floors plus the stairs), the bathroom, the entrance, the shelves, the furniture, etc, along the fact that I'm getting old, it would easily take me 5-8 hours a wee
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Well, yes. The post I was replying to wasn't saying "Do everyone pay this much money to get their house cleaned?!". It was "Do [some] people pay this much to get their house cleaned?"
I was giving an example of why, yes, some (A LOT!) of people do. It's still only a tiny percentage of household. But that's true of a lot of things. The vast majority of people will never go through a kitchen renovation. There's still an entire industry around it.
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Every two weeks, I have a team of 2-3 that show up for 2-3 hours, and cost me $125/month. It's worth every penny, not to have to clean my own toilets, or the mildew in my shower. They're legal, bonded, and insured.
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This is a whole 'nother ball game (Score:2)
On the other hand, we know that Amazon is getting into the health-care biz [nytimes.com]. Perhaps this is a foot-in-the-door to at-home n
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Why did they try contractors in the first place? (Score:2)
Contractors usually don't work well for repeated and word-of-mouth businesses like housekeeping. Here, consistency becomes an important characteristic
So, In addition to... (Score:2)
So now, in addition to collecting and tracking our virtual trash, they'll also have access to our physical garbage. What could go wrong?
Same day (Score:2)
Amazon Takes Lemon Fresh Stab (Score:2)
Headline almost imported some humour there from the lemons department.
Feedback (Score:1)