It didn’t used to be the case that there was appreciable demand for professional line-waiters, but Samuel’s company competes with people from the likes of Task Rabbit, a website for hiring strangers to do odd jobs, and Craigslist, a website for hiring strangers to do odder jobs. His response, then, has been to turn to branding. He’ll show up at long lines just to hand out business cards, and he’ll write his company’s name in chalk on the city’s sidewalks.

Executive assistants used to be the province of the wealthy, and the fixed cost of taking the time to seek out someone to do your laundry or buy your groceries every once in a while was too high for most people. But sites like Task Rabbit have streamlined this process to the point where anyone willing to pay $20 an hour can have an executive assistant whenever they'd like.

Of course, unsavory things can happen when people pay others to exempt themselves from mundane tribulations, and maybe not all lines are in need of professional waiters, but companies like SOLD have brought to the middle class banal services previously available only to the wealthy. Samuel’s experience with SOLD attests to this; when Business Insider asked him about his clientele, he described them as “everyday people.”

Task Rabbit and Craigslist have presented middle-class people with their very own errand-runners, and their success in doing so has suggested there's untapped demand for services that do trivial but pesky tasks. As a result, there are now a number of new companies that have formed to accommodate this demand: They'll do your laundry or assemble your Ikea furniture. But whereas Craigslist is a peer-to-peer platform—which is a relatively new concept—these companies market their services in a traditional, business-to-consumer manner. In this way, companies like Samuel's, which trade the risk that comes with hiring a stranger for the trust that can be built by a brand (a risk that still lingers even considering the user reviews that Task Rabbit compiles), represent a decidedly old-school response to Craigslist and Task Rabbit, two uniquely modern developments.

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