Ask HN: Why don't Americans hire human assistants for everyday tasks?
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
Having a housekeeping service come for an hour or so weekly and a lawn maintenance and snow clearing service every two weeks will cost around $10k a year total in many large or mid-size cities, and many upper middle class earners do in fact use those services.
i'll pay $20k a year to get 10 hours back a week (i.e., you an engineer that goes from making (120/yr to 100/yr). that's still a valuable trade that i think a lot of people would take given the choice.
and the assist would then be getting 80k/yr if they do a fulltime 40 hours a week which places their compentation at the level of plenty of white-collar (non-tech) office jobs. and it doesn't require any special skills or equipment.
i can't imagine spending 10k for snow/landscaping work. i havent paid for lawn mowing, but when we had a snowplow guy he'd charge $50 per plow event (when snow got above a certain level).
My point was that Americans very much hire household assistants, but they're specialized and on-premises for a short time to maximize value and minimize costs. In the past week, I've had housekeepers, lawn service, a plumber and a handyman at my house. They were all great, and did better work than I would do, but I wouldn't have any of those people do the jobs of any of the others. Why pay $20k to a generalist 10 hours a week when I can get specialists who can do more in less time?
There just isn't a great need for non-specialized assistance at $20k/year. My housekeepers and lawn service are on auto-schedule and auto-pay, so they require a bare minimum of my time. I would have a hard time trusting a low-paid part-time personal assistant to facilitate and review plumbing and construction work beyond the most basic fixes.
Think about a single renter with a small to medium size apartment. They don't need groundswork or maintenance, that's included in the rent. How much housekeeping do they need in a small to mid-size apartment? They often get grocery/food delivery and/or just microwave stuff. There are plenty of delivery laundry services or apartments with washer/dryers en suite. How many errands do they need to run that they don't need to be personally present for? You can't send an assistant to the DMV, after all.
Think about dual high earners with kids. They're going to need child care, and that's going to take a huge bite of their income. They don't need a 10-hour-a-week assistant, they either need more than that at home (a nanny), or they're white-knuckling it to save for their kids' current or future school tuition.
Think about a single-earner couple. One of the couple can stay home and take care of the kids and all of the things that an assistant could do.
tl;dr: Americans absolutely hire human assistants, just not in the kind of generalist model you're thinking, because it's just not worth the kind of money it would take.
Firstly, are you offering this assistant Paid Time Off? Paid Sick Time? Are you making social security contributions? Health care contributions? Or do they need to do that?
You're happy with 10 hours per week. So say 3 to 5 pm? Or would some of the tasks be time-of-day dependent? Would you be happy
By the time you're paying a living wage, and all the extras are added in, it's costing more like 25 to 30k a year. Maybe some folk can afford that, but I'm guessing most can't.
But what fo randos on the internet know? Find 3 mates. Pony up some cash. Hire a person. When it's working, find 4 more randos and hire another. This is how businesses start...
And these countries with greater inequality than that are the only countries with human assistants?
I have some friends here in NYC that have visiting housekeepers that come weekly to clean their apartments. To be frank, I’m still kind of “wtf, you can’t clean your own place?” when they mention it.
It was also a culture shock when I went to Australia and found everyone cleaning up after themselves. Apparently it doesn't work as well in richer countries due to higher cost of living/minimum wage.
Excluding childcare, I'm not sure people spend 10 hours per week on domestic tasks. We have dishwashers, clothes washers/dryers, plenty of options for frozen meals and meal delivery, etc. Even stuff that's often hired out like vehicle maintenance and yard work would be tough to bring that up to anyone average of 10 hours per week.
Childcare is cheaper in group settings than at a single family level, so that wouldn't make sense.
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It’s why rich people here contract out house keepers and middle class uses robo vacuums.
We don’t have people in slums that live on a dollar a day. Yet. And I hope it never comes to that.
For example, I "delegate" tax preparation to an accountant, but the amount of time I spend giving them the information they need and answering their questions is probably 70% of the amount of time I would spent filling the tax myself. If my situation wasn't so complicated, I would deal with it myself (I hire them for the risk mitigation regarding my incompetence, not for saving time).
- getting someone reliable who works for such low wages is especially hard
- people are cheap generally and don't have the disposable income
- I think many people have house cleaners, people who mow the lawn and shovel snow, nannies
Maybe a lot would. Although I could certainly afford it, I wouldn't. There are a lot of more useful/fruitful things I can put that money towards.
> is there something about American class psychology where it feels wrong to employee somebody to do this?
Personally, I don't think it feels wrong at all, nor is it a question of trust. For me, it's just that the cost/benefit ratio isn't good enough (the cost is more than just the financial outlay, and the benefit of gaining a bit less than 1.5 hrs/day isn't that much). That said, I have certainly hired people to come in once a week to clean my house before and could see doing it again if my time and/or energy budget demanded it.
- Psychology: self-worth gets tied to “doing it yourself,” so outsourcing feels like weakness or elitism.
- Trust: Handing over personal tasks (groceries, errands) feels riskier than it is.
- Friction: hiring, scheduling, and managing another human adds overhead.
- Perfectionism: many would rather do it “their way” than risk compromise and not have the job done perfectly.
Ironically, these same barriers make people more comfortable with AI assistants, where with AI, you have less friction, less stigma, fewer trust issues.
The real productivity hack isn’t just saving hours, it’s getting past the belief that you must be the one doing everything.
Shame: I feel like I should be able to handle it, and would be embarrassed to have to pay someone to clean up after me. I’d feel the need to clean before they come. I also think it would be awkward to be sitting there, probably doing nothing, while paying someone else to work. Realistically, I’m not busy enough to say I don’t have the time; I just don’t do it.
Trust: I don’t trust people to be in my home when I’m not there, or even to be alone when I am somewhere in the house. So the whole idea of having someone in everything to clean becomes a non-starter.
Having experienced what it’s like to have housekeepers when staying with my dad for a bit, there is a third thing, and thats having to set things back up after they’re done. Every time the housekeepers came I would have to go through random cupboards and drawers to find things they moved out of the way while they were cleaning surfaces, and didn’t put back. It drove me nuts. My dad also had some security cameras setup, so I saw them playing around with whatever he had lying around, which didn’t help my trust issues.
I do hiring people to handle my lawn and landscaping. I have allergies, so that’s an easy one to excuse, and it’s all outside, so the trust thing isn’t so much of a problem.
A lot of these problems go away with a robot. The trust issue is still there, but it’s more about trust in the company providing the robot to not collect or use personal data, I would want it to be completely offline. I don’t have to worry so much about theft or it messing with my stuff. The shame issue goes away completely, assuming there isn’t a social stigma to owning one.
Finally, $10k a year probably won’t buy loyalty or promote long term stability…you are competing for labor and not offering a living and not offering attractive opportunity…
…or to put it another way, doing the same work for a rich person has more upside.
For grocery shopping, if I actually did work outside of the home, it would be a simple matter of using Instacart and drive up to the grocery store after work to pick up the groceries. Occasionally, if I’m out, my wife will order groceries and I will swing by and pick them up.
Meal prep? Before we moved, we had a friend who was a professional chef and we would occasionally pay her to do meal prep. I’m sure we could find someone here.
Housecleaning? There are plenty of services you can call.
The only other errands I run on a regular basis are haircuts, manicures and pedicures (something that. Lot of men don’t do) and doctors appointments.
Funny enough though, I live in a unit of a condotel that we own (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp).
It is a 2/2 with a full kitchen, living room and washer dryer, everything came with it. We pay $800 a month for the HOA that covers everything - electric, water, minor maintenance, internet, part of the insurance, someone comes in every other day to change the trash.
When we decide to leave for an extended period of time, the property management company rents it out and we get half the income - we just pack up our stuff in suitcases.
When we are here, we can schedule a full cleaning for $80.
My wife hasn’t worked since 2020 - I “retired her”. She has her passion projects that keeps her busy and brings in some pocket money for her. But it does help when it comes to things like going to get the car fixed, following up with various things, doing some of the arrangements for our crazy traveling schedule etc. and she does 100% of the cooking which we don’t do that much.
Furthermore, most of the upper class already does hire cleaners, cooks, etc. The upper middle class, which is roughly the group of people you're referring to, is typically composed of people that are money-focused enough to think spending $10,000 a year on something they can do themselves is a waste.
There's also the simple fact that many people would rather have $10k a year + a dirty apartment and subpar food than the opposite.