TaskRabbit - a.k.a. your very own personal assistant

Sometimes I feel like my days are filled with nothing but a bunch of things I have to get done. Thankfully, there's a new website that hooks people like me up with someone willing to help with everything and anything, from grocery shopping to cooking dinner. 

 

The new website TaskRabbit is a more dignified-than-CraigsList-way to hire someone to do something you don't want to do.

You post the task you need done on their message board with an amount you're willing to pay. Then wait for offers to come in from their background-checked "task rabbits." Next, you hire whoever makes the lowest bid. The nice thing is, you don't have to pay for the task until it's completed.

For me, top of my "hate to do" list has to be shopping at IKEA. (Sorry, IKEA!) So when given a chance to give the service a test drive, which has an IKEA -shopping specific option, I said yes faster than you can say kitchen chairs (which happens to be exactly what I needed at Ikea).

My experience with the service was completely seamless. I offered $30 for shopping there and delivery of the items to my doorstep. I got responses back immediately from two different women in my area. I hired the first one. After a few back and forth emails about specifics, she showed at my door a few days later with my chairs. Instead of paying her with cash, I like that I was able to pay for the service as well as reimburse her for the purchases directly through Task Rabbit.

I did feel a little bad about her shelling out the money, but she was very trusting and nice about the whole thing. And I guess that's how it works.

Back to the whole background-checking: TaskRabbit does extensive interviews and uses social security numbers to make sure their posters aren't serial killers. Always a good thing.

I would totally use TaskRabbit again. In fact the only complaint I had about the whole experience is that one of the chairs was missing a part. Sadly, I may have to hire another tasker to return the chair back to IKEA. -Melissa

TaskRabbit is now available in NYC, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, LA area and Portland with more cities coming soon.

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