Noted today, the attractive places to gig. Care.com ranks highest, perhaps because it requires the most skill and cannot be reduced to the cheapest price for caring for an elder? “Yeah, I want care for my Dad, but only the cheapest care,” is not a phrase you hear a lot. THESE ARE THE TOP 10 […]
Food delivery is consuming the soup business. Campbell’s Soup appears to be losing out when consumers want a fast easy lunhc or dinner. The analysts on the CNBC segment make the point that GrubHub’s current valuation is momentum-driven and that Campbell’s is underpriced. What about Campbell’s delivery? When does the food brand move to engage […]
California’s gig economy is not sufficiently broad and deep — that is, there are not enough types of work to create real differentiation of labor — to support prosperity, as 47 percent of surveyed gig workers say they are impoverished. Note, too, that Californians are suggesting to their children move elswhere for better opportunities. If […]
Sarah Kessler, author of “Gigged: The end of the job and the Future of Work,” appeared on PBS’ NewsHour this weekend. She offered some interesting and cautionary words about the future of work that contrast and reinforce ideas expressed by Louis Hyman in The New York Times on Saturday in a piece, “It’s Not Technology […]
ClassPass, the New York-based health club subscription service, raised a new round of $85 million to expand domestically and in Asia. Here, in a nutshell, is what this trend means: Real estate is completely fungible. Location, location, and location still matter, but the physical property must be tuned to what product or services are in […]
56 percent, 36 percent, and 30 percent — the share of large, medium, and small news organizations that have experienced lay-offs since January 2017, according to Pew. These are interesting numbers that describe the inverse scaling problem in news. After the New York Daily News cut half its staff yesterday, New York is facing a […]
Information asymmetry has been the basis of the Gig Economy to date. Marketplace providers know so much that the worker cannot possibly negotiate a better deal. Consequently, we see that millions of people who earned far more as full-time employees are now scraping by on one-third or one-fifth the pay they used to earn when […]
Kindly Care is taking a marketplace approach (e.g. “the Uber of…”) to home caregiving. This is a category ripe for the on-demand approach. Like Uber, Kindly Care will take 20 percent to 25 percent of hourly wages and handle all the financial transactions and tax “arrangements,” which seems to hint at tapping Medicare and other […]
BMW’s new ReachNow Seattle-centered service experiment turns on quality and differentiation of service. But it also will use full-time employees contracted from a local vendor. Differentiation of service relies on more than commodity workers, it involves an eye for customer preferences — ReachNow includes in-app preferences, such as “Quiet ride” and air temperature. These preferences […]
Amazon has captured half of U.S. e-commerce revenue, according to eMarketer. Not coincidentally, Jeff Bezos became the richest living human the same week. So what’s left to do with online sales? Almost everything. Jeff Bezos knows this, which is why he pushes Amazon into so many new markets. There is, however, a limit to virtual trust. Bhaskar […]