4 ms·

We have something similar here in the US. For certain types of services, every listing you find online (it used to be in the phone book in the olden days), is r

We have something similar here in the US. For certain types of services, every listing you find online (it used to be in the phone book in the olden days), is really the same generic service. In fact, the service you’re calling is some middleman who doesn’t actually perform the service, but instead contracts it out to someone local to you. They often live and operate elsewhere in the country. This is the case for flower delivery, and, I recently discovered, bee removal. I’m sure there are others. But in general if you go to a search engine and type “$service $location” (I.e. “bee removal Los Angeles”), you’ll get tons of these types of listings.

s0rce 4y ago
Lots of long distance movers work like this, they are just some broker middle-man often based in Florida that just makes the process more complicated and worse.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Most long distance movers aren’t. There’s a local truck and guys who load it, and then everything is offloaded at some central depot and sent to another depot where it’s loaded on a different truck for final delivery. Door to door locked trailer is more expensive and harder to find unless you do something like pods.
  - Groxx 4y ago
    Where "local truck" is "a vehicle that can fit at the location, unlike a semi" and "depot" is "nearby, where their semi is parked", sure. And they do frequently hire local help, rather than cart them across hundreds or thousands of miles. But it's not like they're going to post office / Amazon / etc "hubs" and changing vehicles along the way - the human labor cost and increased risk would be far too high, though pods might be feasible. The same semi and the same driver does 99% of the distance, and often hires their own helpers. The local shuttling and helpers are entirely reasonable and often unavoidable.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The problem is each mode change is another chance for loss and damage. You’d often be better off palletizing everything so they can forklift it (though that has additional shipment risks).
      - s0rce 4y ago
        You can't really palletize a sofa or bed, you'd need to crate it and then its going to be more expensive. If you are moving $100k+ in equipment or art thats the way to go, for home stuff maybe worth a few k$, just put it on the truck or container and hope.
  - s0rce 4y ago
    That hasn't been my experience, for a few interstate moves my stuff is on the same trailer at the delivery as it was when it was loaded, although it seemed to be combined with other peoples stuff and made multiple stops for the longer moves. In certain cases when the destination street was narrow it was offloaded onto a smaller truck for the last mile. Regardless, my experience trying to find movers is that there are a lot of brokers that will arrange either service and don't provide added value.
AussieWog93 4y ago
Same in Australia. You'll get these websites that whole pages consisting of nothing but text stating: Carpet Cleaning Mount Waverley Carpet Cleaning Glen Waverley Carpet Cleaning Notting Hill Carpet Cleaning Clayton (Repeat for every suburb in Melbourne...) etc. etc. All of them actively seem like scams, give wildly varying quotes and frustrate you to the point where you just don't book the service at all. Absolute parasites.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Absolute parasites. Might I disagree. They are vandals. A parasite is an organism that survives by extracting from others. These are bots or bots designed by mindless individuals and set loose to do harm. They deserve even less respect than computer viruses that at least mimic proto-lifeforms. There is no "it" to have a survival agenda here. Having done with "Harms", as I research the "Motives" chapter of Ethics for Hackers I've taken an unexpected dive into criminology and now see a blind-spot in the entrepreneurial, late-capitalist mind-set of the "Silicon Valley" hacker space. There's a tendency to see everything through a rather narrow lens of financial motives. Not everything is about making a buck (although much is - at the end of the day). So for example, some motives out there are purely destructive. Or at least they are so lowbrow and random in their consideration as to be indistinguishable from entirely senseless acts. We look at them and say "What's the business angle here?". Sometimes there really isn't one. And it's not ideological either, like championing free-speech, democracy, communism or whatever. Nor discordian, nihilistic and chaotic. Boredom, resentment, disrespct, low cost and consequences and "just because you can" are on the up because of "AI" and automation. I think we presume certain motives declined after the early years of trophy-hacking and ego hacks gave way to structured cybercrime in the 90s. But machine learning and "at scale" thinking is unleashing a different breed of senselessness. Poisoning of public data spaces by ostensible "advertising", whether as email spam, highly adaptive link-farms, GPT generated bait-copy and whatnot is a new quality of threat. Search engines don't seem able to manage it, so the "internet" (what is left of the Web) is starting to resemble a derelict neighbourhood with smashed windows, upturned trash cans and graffiti everywhere as bored and desperate gangs roam.
  - 4y ago
SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
Google Maps is gamed like this too https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-lock...
conductr 4y ago
We also have the Home Advisor variant that just sells your leads. Fill out a form and get 10 phone calls in the next 2 minutes. They also make entire sites to appear as a local business like “Joe the Plumber.com” and advertise those side by side. But it’s the same leadgen bs.
- quesera 4y ago
  See also Angie's List, now "Angi" a/k/a "Angry". A/k/a spam-as-a-service. 18 offshore leadgen consumers jump on your post, pretend to be calling from local numbers, and offer to broker a call to a local vendor on your behalf. Then they keep calling for several weeks just in case you don't hate them enough.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
This is a common scheme with certain predatory "locksmiths" in Germany that charge extortionate fees for lockout calls, and aggressively demand it be paid cash on the spot (legally, you are entitled to pay by invoice for this service). They extremely aggressively game Maps and AdWords to ensure that their numbers are on top of results. Most of the guys they send out also I don't think are qualified locksmiths, based on the level of damage they tend to do when gaining access! When I lived there I simply told my friends to call me instead, I'd get their doors open for a few beers.
dannyr 4y ago
This video from VICE about a kitchen in NYC that has 15 restaurants under it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru2irhp3yPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru2irhp3yPo
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

s0rce 4y ago

Lots of long distance movers work like this, they are just some broker middle-man often based in Florida that just makes the process more complicated and worse.

bombcar 4y ago
Most long distance movers aren’t. There’s a local truck and guys who load it, and then everything is offloaded at some central depot and sent to another depot where it’s loaded on a different truck for final delivery. Door to door locked trailer is more expensive and harder to find unless you do something like pods.
- Groxx 4y ago
  Where "local truck" is "a vehicle that can fit at the location, unlike a semi" and "depot" is "nearby, where their semi is parked", sure. And they do frequently hire local help, rather than cart them across hundreds or thousands of miles. But it's not like they're going to post office / Amazon / etc "hubs" and changing vehicles along the way - the human labor cost and increased risk would be far too high, though pods might be feasible. The same semi and the same driver does 99% of the distance, and often hires their own helpers. The local shuttling and helpers are entirely reasonable and often unavoidable.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The problem is each mode change is another chance for loss and damage. You’d often be better off palletizing everything so they can forklift it (though that has additional shipment risks).
    - s0rce 4y ago
      You can't really palletize a sofa or bed, you'd need to crate it and then its going to be more expensive. If you are moving $100k+ in equipment or art thats the way to go, for home stuff maybe worth a few k$, just put it on the truck or container and hope.
- s0rce 4y ago
  That hasn't been my experience, for a few interstate moves my stuff is on the same trailer at the delivery as it was when it was loaded, although it seemed to be combined with other peoples stuff and made multiple stops for the longer moves. In certain cases when the destination street was narrow it was offloaded onto a smaller truck for the last mile. Regardless, my experience trying to find movers is that there are a lot of brokers that will arrange either service and don't provide added value.

AussieWog93 4y ago

Same in Australia. You'll get these websites that whole pages consisting of nothing but text stating: Carpet Cleaning Mount Waverley Carpet Cleaning Glen Waverley Carpet Cleaning Notting Hill Carpet Cleaning Clayton (Repeat for every suburb in Melbourne...) etc. etc. All of them actively seem like scams, give wildly varying quotes and frustrate you to the point where you just don't book the service at all. Absolute parasites.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Absolute parasites. Might I disagree. They are vandals. A parasite is an organism that survives by extracting from others. These are bots or bots designed by mindless individuals and set loose to do harm. They deserve even less respect than computer viruses that at least mimic proto-lifeforms. There is no "it" to have a survival agenda here. Having done with "Harms", as I research the "Motives" chapter of Ethics for Hackers I've taken an unexpected dive into criminology and now see a blind-spot in the entrepreneurial, late-capitalist mind-set of the "Silicon Valley" hacker space. There's a tendency to see everything through a rather narrow lens of financial motives. Not everything is about making a buck (although much is - at the end of the day). So for example, some motives out there are purely destructive. Or at least they are so lowbrow and random in their consideration as to be indistinguishable from entirely senseless acts. We look at them and say "What's the business angle here?". Sometimes there really isn't one. And it's not ideological either, like championing free-speech, democracy, communism or whatever. Nor discordian, nihilistic and chaotic. Boredom, resentment, disrespct, low cost and consequences and "just because you can" are on the up because of "AI" and automation. I think we presume certain motives declined after the early years of trophy-hacking and ego hacks gave way to structured cybercrime in the 90s. But machine learning and "at scale" thinking is unleashing a different breed of senselessness. Poisoning of public data spaces by ostensible "advertising", whether as email spam, highly adaptive link-farms, GPT generated bait-copy and whatnot is a new quality of threat. Search engines don't seem able to manage it, so the "internet" (what is left of the Web) is starting to resemble a derelict neighbourhood with smashed windows, upturned trash cans and graffiti everywhere as bored and desperate gangs roam.
- 4y ago

SturgeonsLaw 4y ago

Google Maps is gamed like this too https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-lock...

conductr 4y ago

We also have the Home Advisor variant that just sells your leads. Fill out a form and get 10 phone calls in the next 2 minutes. They also make entire sites to appear as a local business like “Joe the Plumber.com” and advertise those side by side. But it’s the same leadgen bs.

quesera 4y ago
See also Angie's List, now "Angi" a/k/a "Angry". A/k/a spam-as-a-service. 18 offshore leadgen consumers jump on your post, pretend to be calling from local numbers, and offer to broker a call to a local vendor on your behalf. Then they keep calling for several weeks just in case you don't hate them enough.

nibbleshifter 4y ago

This is a common scheme with certain predatory "locksmiths" in Germany that charge extortionate fees for lockout calls, and aggressively demand it be paid cash on the spot (legally, you are entitled to pay by invoice for this service). They extremely aggressively game Maps and AdWords to ensure that their numbers are on top of results. Most of the guys they send out also I don't think are qualified locksmiths, based on the level of damage they tend to do when gaining access! When I lived there I simply told my friends to call me instead, I'd get their doors open for a few beers.

dannyr 4y ago

This video from VICE about a kitchen in NYC that has 15 restaurants under it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru2irhp3yPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru2irhp3yPo

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]