Gigonomics: How new apps are revolutionising the way we work and live

Thanks to London's booming 'gig economy', hairdressers, taxis and plumbers can be summoned to us with one click.
Giganomics: many services are just one click away

Have you stopped going to the hairdresser’s, last saw the inside of a pedicurists’ salon over a year ago, long since ceased waving down cabs and had your curtains put up by someone better versed in passementerie than you — acquired at the click of an app? Living in London is a whole lot less stressful since we started to embrace the “gig economy” and let the world and its wares come to us at home, rather than queuing up for appointments or waiting till the local builder deigns to turn up for a long-promised job.

The gig economy combines two big drivers of behaviour for modern Londoners: convenience and time-saving in a city where feeling run off your feet is the norm, saving money and stress. A giddy array of new apps is peeling away the more tension-laden layers of human interaction. For one thing, we deal with the actual human when they arrive on your doorstep, because the faff of finding the right person, booking and paying them is done using hi-tech. At its most basic, the “gig economy” is a rebirth of the old idea of bartering: it connects individuals who need something done with others who can do it, from delivering champagne, to cleaning the cornices or doing your VAT. It has also created a micro-job market — distinct from traditional freelances, in which people with niche skills can find people wanting someone just like them.

It struck me recently that with a bit of planning, a lot of irritatingly necessary small but important things that needed doing could be done without schleping from one part of town to another if everything came to me instead. This is no longer the preserve of princesses: it is now commonplace for time-pressed professionals, too. So there is CitySwish for a pre-party makeover or Blow Ltd (which could be all sorts of things but is, thankfully, a delivery service for a variety of make-up and nail care). Jinn, a courier firm, will deliver you anything “so long as it’s legal”. Gradually, we are moving from a city in which we recommended places to go to get things done, to the essentials (and some fripperies) coming to us.

This is the next step in the growth of what Tina Brown called the “gig economy” of more casual working relationships and trades. Ms Brown noted that the end of many fixed-salary jobs meant more people living with a concatenation of deals, contracts, erratic commissions and sporadic tasks.

The gig economy is not only about the worlds of freelance set-designers, fashion designers and young journalists finding staff jobs more elusive. The technical term is “disruptive innovation” — an updated version of the theory of creative disruption espoused by Joseph Schumpeter, a far-seeing economist who in the 1950s described capitalism as a cycle of disruption: “incessantly destroying the old, incessantly creating the new”. Schumpeter might not have anticipated Michelin-starred meals being delivered by courier or Shyp, which will wrap your last-minute presents and deliver them cost-effectively, but the pace of change in how capitalism works might have convinced him it was not as doomed as he thought.

To some, the speeding up of this has left behind a curse of short-term, changeable work centred on quick response to demand. That makes it harder for those who enter a busy job market like London’s to plan for the future. “What’s your career plan?” ran the old New Yorker cartoon of a senior executive addressing a junior one. “I plan to coast along to about 50, hit a plateau and then flake out suddenly,” comes the reply. Those were the days. Gigsters have the freedom not to be tied to a single employer and liberation from staid office hierarchies and set job routes. But they do need iron discipline and sound planning — and they also need grit and good ideas to move from wrapping presents or delivering champagne on a moped to running a tech start-up (let alone making money from it).

A highly regulated business such as London’s black-cab taxis facing competition from Uber is perhaps the ultimate expression of that gig economy on wheels. Uber drivers choose when they work, don’t undergo formal training or join an existing guild. Its competitor Gett — based in Tel Aviv but up and running in London — is intent on adding more delivery services and catching our eye with a £50 offer or yellow-label champagne and two flutes. Brought, genie-like, within 10 minutes to your office (if you still have one) or home, should you feel the occasion for instant fizz.

Critics bemoan the short-termism of the jobs in such sectors. But trying to stop people using their assets and time to work flexibly looks doomed. You can see it in the proliferation of short-term work-office rentals and hubs like Rohan Silva’s Second Home, where young tech start-ups huddle together in Hoxton. Or the Notting Hill entrepreneurs William Sieghart and Roddy Campbell’s nifty invention, Vrumi — a sort of Airbnb for professionals.

Tech and gadget gifts - in pictures

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Most of these ideas feed on the proliferation of freelance work and the fast development of online technology that enables us to deal as easily with a web designer in Seattle as Sunderland. Gradually, such developments are feeding through to a change in human relationships, too. A friend who works from home has installed her very own “virtual” online PA to do her admin and act as a gatekeeper. Providers, such as TaskRabbit UK, have evolved a model to cope with demands as various as finding someone to help you move house or clean out the cellar, offering temporary work for the idle, or as one critic sniffed, “lackeys on demand”.

If it all sounds too good to be true, that’s because it sometimes is. The companies behind these transactions set the price and framework and TaskRabbit incurred the wrath of many of its previously willing workers when it changed its US business model to allocate workers to set tasks, rather than leaving selections open to a spontaneous market.

If the appeal so far has been low-cost chore-solving and a quick hit of income for those who either can’t find a regular job or don’t want one, the gig economy is fast moving into areas that were once the preserve of upper-end professionals. As more primary-care medicine moves to the use of tele-health or online consultation to save waiting times and patients making journeys to doctors’ surgeries, apps are springing up offering medical consultations via screen or smartphone. Babylon, set up by the health entrepreneur Ali Parsa, offers a subscription service, through which GPs respond to text messages from patients and hold video and audio conferences with subscribers. An American company, Heal, offers the more personal touch of sending a doctor round for a consultation or diagnostics, in the same way that we might have ordered a boxed pizza a few years ago. For those of us driven by hard work, whether of the office-based or gig variety, for muscle strain, Blue Whale’s Motion Doctor can deliver basic stretches and exercises to ward off the next visit to the virtual back doctor.

The biggest change wrought by the rise of the new gig economy, however, may be the way it alters existing workplaces, as well as offering funky new career paths to youthful entrepreneurs. Many more people are having to multi-task as part of what they do and vary the way they deliver their products. So anyone who expects their occupation to remain what it was when they started is probably in for a rude awakening. As clients and audiences expect more flexibility and ways to consume things they value, we have to keep pace, or end up like the office clerks complaining about the advent of the IBM computer in the Fifties. The gig economy is here to stay. Send round the pedicurist, who can work at the same time as the jobbing accountant runs through your bills. After which, you may well feel entitled to an app-ordered delivery of some fizz and a takeaway: Michelin or a burger.

Follow Anne McElvoy (Senior Editor at The Economist) on Twitter: @annemcelvoy

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