When we recently built our pool, we were intending to care for it ourselves. The contractor that built it paid for the first month of pool servicing to get it started off on the right foot. At the end of the month, the pool servicing company came out and gave us a one hour lesson on the proper care of the pool and equipment. Of course, it was also a sales pitch.
It worked. They offered to take care of cleaning and servicing the pool, as well as keeping the chemicals in balance for $160 per month. That seemed economical to me, so we hired them. It went well for the first couple of weeks. The pool girl that came out did a good job, until she brought along a new trainee who would be taking over the route.
The new girl, Shamiqua, screwed things up from the start. The first week, she left the control panel open for the pool equipment and left it in service mode. It stormed that afternoon, and we were lucky that the electronic controls for the pool didn’t get water damaged. We complained, and they told us how she was new and they would talk to her.
The next week, she came out and didn’t bother cleaning the water filter. She left her filter cleaning tools next to the pool until she came back the following week, which indicates to me that she went a week without using them on anyone else’s pool, either.
The fourth week of her being on the route, and I watched her visit on the security cameras. She didn’t do ANYTHING but sit there on her phone for 10 minutes before leaving. The only thing that she did was retrieve her tools from the previous week.
We fired the company the next day. I received calls and emails from more than one person, asking us to give them another chance and saying they would retrain the woman. I told them that it wasn’t a case of substandard training. This woman was lazy and had no work ethic, and no amount of training can fix that.
The district manager offered to put another person on the route. I said no, we were just going to use a robot to clean our pool from now on. I spent $2,000 on remote monitoring equipment and a robot that automatically scrubs the pool.
The monitoring equipment tells me what chemicals to add, the robot cleans the pool. All I have to do is add the chemicals and empty the filter and skimmer basket.
When I am buying services or labor saving devices, my first and only consideration is value. That is, how much money would I make if I went to work for the same number of hours it will take to do the chore myself. If the cost of paying someone or buying a labor saver is less than half of what I would make, then I buy the product or service.
For example, mowing the lawn was taking me about 2 hours. You have to do it once a week most of the year, except winter, when you have to do it once a month. In total, I would spend about 90 hours per year having to mow the lawn. My choices are:
- Hire someone. Lawn companies gave me quotes of $2400 per year to mow it for me.
- A Husqvarna Automower that can mow my 3/4 acre costs just over $2000. All I need to do then is run a string trimmer around the edges of the house and blow off the driveway, which only takes about 8 hours per year.
I went with the robot. The same sort of choice was made with the pool. I can pay someone two grand a year to not clean my pool, or I can get a robot to do it. My lawn robot cost me a bit up front, but now that I have had it for over a year, it’s already paid for itself. Now I get free lawn mowing. The only thing I need to do now is replace the razor blades that it uses once a year.
So this is what minimum wage labor is facing- I can get a robot to mow the lawn or clean my pool for less than what it cost me to hire a lazy moron who won’t do a good job. The only barrier to automating these jobs is the large upfront cost, but once that is paid off, things get much cheaper. The bonus is fewer workers eyeing up the stuff in my house, and considering that the person most likely to burglarize your home is a worker who has been in it before, that’s a big bonus. Lazy morons need to watch out- they are about to lose their jobs.
Check it out, if you are interested. The robot is pretty cool:
