There is a business category that initially claims to do what one would want, called “personal concierge.” They market themselves to the very rich and claim to be able to do essentially anything for you. The most successful one is: https://www.quintessentially.com/services
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Although they *say* they can deal with routine stuff, virtually all their marketing is about being a high-end travel agent, plus they can do ridiculous things like get a live trained elephant to your child’s birthday party.
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(That’s re the category in general, not just Quintessentially specifically.) Afaict they are not going to deal with insurance bills for you, or get the dishwasher fixed, or sort out Mom’s house title snafu, or fill in her 239 change-of-address forms.
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Closer to the mark is personal-assistant and personal accountancy services. These are often individuals, or at most very small companies, that market more to an upper-middle-class demographic. They can handle some fraction of this sort of bullshit.
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But they aren’t a one-stop-shop, and you have to manage them, and they can and do screw up, or outright embezzle, and since they’re individuals, you don’t have the “this company wouldn’t risk its reputation over this” trust factor.
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So… there’s clearly a need here, and it’s clearly not impossible to fulfill, just difficult. As a business, you’d start by marketing a very expensive service to the actually-rich. You’d need lots of Respectable People involved initially to provide trust.
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Or, potentially, a big well-loved company (Apple??) could develop it initially as an in-house offering for senior employees, establish its trustworthiness, then open to public. (Maybe sort of like the “Haven” Berkshire/Amazon/JPM heathcare initiative)
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Once you had economy of scale, it could become affordable for the middle class. Maybe it costs $10k/year, which no one would sign up for initially, but once it became understood that it frees up your weekends… priceless
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One main way of achieving economy would be to force streamlined procedures on providers. “We are going to switch our 100k upper-middle-class clients to a different provider unless you make this easy for us.” Forces internalization of administrative externalities.
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the interesting thing about this is it would positively impact those who have not signed up for the service due to "intolerance of the minority" effect
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Yes, I think it could be a huge win for everyone. Therefore, it will be vigorously resisted by entrenched interests. Need to strike fast and with overwhelming force. This could be one of those “really giant” things VCs want so badly to invest in… $1bn initial funding maybe
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what this makes me think of is like a consumer union, analogous to a labor union, or maybe consumer insurance... insurance for your insurance :( where money is pooled and allocated for difficult to navigate administrative conflicts
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Replying to @metamitya @Meaningness and
a different approach then an assistant service, but could have the same effect of curbing companies' abusive behavior
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