Damla’s Kitchensurfing interview happened in 2012, and by the time we met in the summer of 2015 she described herself as working “full time” with Kitchensurfing. It was the first time I’d ever heard someone talk about their gig economy work in such a way, and I asked what she meant by full time. “My first job came through someone actually reaching out to me. . . . And it was a cocktail party for thirty or so. I did that, and the customer was very happy. And, still thinking to myself—and talking [it] over with my husband—I said, ‘I’ll give it six months or so; we’ll see how it goes.’ If I see that I’m not carrying my end of the deal here, I’ll find a real job—or, of course, regular job.” With the holiday season beginning, her schedule was soon full of catering work. But she was hesitant to commit to doing Kitchensurfing as her sole source of income, explaining, “I didn’t know if I could make a reasonable decision based on those three months. But then January came along, and I was thinking to myself that it would be dead, because I know no one really throws parties in January, February. But January ended up being one of my busiest months. . . . So after January, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to focus on this full time and I won’t bother finding another job; this makes me totally happy.’”
Damla enjoyed working with clients directly and getting to cook her ethnic food, but she also appreciated the flexibility of the work and the opportunity to pick and choose her hours.
It’s very flexible, in terms of the gigs that you can accept or don’t accept. So it was kind of perfect for me. I mean, I have been in the food industry before, and that was the main thing about it. It’s a ton of work, and you do get a lot of gratification; but when you’re working with somebody else, that’s not directly to you. Not to sound selfish or anything, but I like the gratification to come directly to me, and the compliments to come directly to me, and with Kitchensurfing, they do. And along with that, the money, so it’s just a dream job, really.
SKILLS AND CAPITAL ARE CRUCIAL TO SUCCESS
The sharing economy promises freedom, flexibility, and equality as everyone works peer-to-peer. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a TaskRabbit errand runner or an Uber driver describing her work as a “dream job.” This is one of the issues at the forefront of the sharing economy. While the platforms promise equality and opportunity, there is still a rigid hierarchy to the work that can be traced back to the divide between skills and capital discussed in chapter 2. Simply put, those who succeed in the gig economy, and especially those who view themselves as entrepreneurs, are often those who have the skills and capital to succeed outside the sharing economy. TaskRabbit and Uber have low skill-barriers and are open to virtually anyone, while Kitchensurfing Tonight has high skill-barriers, and Airbnb and the Kitchensurfing marketplace have high capital- and skill-barriers.
Just as in the mainstream marketplace, the work that requires higher levels of capital and skill is more remunerative in terms of financial and psychic rewards, but it also allows for a greater level of professionalization and creativity. Working as a chef or running a bed-and-breakfast is often a daydream job, a career that an upper-class professional briefly considers after serving his family a particularly elegant meal, or ponders as a postretirement career. The platforms themselves also contribute to this divide—on Kitchensurfing and Airbnb, workers can highlight their experience and include multiple photos of themselves and their product (food or housing). Marketing is much more important. TaskRabbit allows profiles and information about one’s experience, but with a rigid character limit. While Airbnb and Kitchensurfing have response-time requirements, they are much more generous than those of TaskRabbit and Uber (twenty-four hours, compared to thirty minutes or a matter of seconds). This additional time lends a sense of calm professionalism to the endeavor, as opposed to promoting a mad scramble.
A STIGMATIZED OCCUPATION OF LAST RESORT
Perhaps one of the biggest signs that the gig economy is not as it appears to be is the stigmatized nature of the work that TaskRabbits and app-based drivers do. Erving Goffman defined stigma as a “process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.”1 Although stigma is more commonly thought of as affiliated with overt or external deformations, such as scars, disabilities, or medial conditions such as leprosy, stigma can also arise from deviations in personal traits, such as unemployment, welfare dependency, or teenage parenthood. Stigmatized individuals often feel different and devalued by others, and many experience psychological distress.2
Richard, a middle-age white male TaskRabbit, opened an interview by telling me that his girlfriend of two years had broken up with him owing to embarrassment over his TaskRabbit work. Rebecca, thirty-four, a TaskRabbit with an advanced degree and a side job as an adjunct instructor at a local college, admitted that she often lied to her mother and friends about her work—telling them that she was temping in an office, not tasking in people’s homes. The embarrassment wasn’t limited to TaskRabbit workers either.
Even though I assured participants that their identities would be hidden, one Uber driver emailed me after an interview to reiterate the importance of not mentioning him by name. He explained, “Uber for me is a feeling like ‘when you get really drunk and regret whatever you did last night.’ That’s exactly it. I really don’t want to be associated as an Uber driver at any point of my life. I really don’t want it to come up when people search my name on Google.” Another driver—who had previously worked as a professional gambler—said that his embarrassed wife told him not to tell people that he drove for Uber.
Although research suggests that stigma is sometimes associated with entrepreneurship, such stigma is usually associated with entrepreneurial failure.3 Stigma associated with one’s work is much more common among sex workers and those working in minimum-wage fast-food jobs or in blue-collar fields.4 The embarrassment associated with working within the gig economy suggests that this may be an occupation of last resort for some workers.
MAKING ENTREPRENEURSHIP “EASY”
For Damla, however, Kitchensurfing lived up to the entrepreneurial ethos promised by the site. She soon turned a spare space in her apartment into an office to store her catering supplies, including large coolers and bins. Her health insurance and a good deal of her household income came from her husband’s unionized job, so she was financially stable. Her Kitchensurfing work essentially paved the way for her to start a de facto catering company, and by 2017 she had incorporated her business. Kitchensurfing simplified the entrepreneurial process to the point that while she identified as an entrepreneur, she also noted that she felt like she was “cheating a little bit.”
She explained, “[It’s] just because they make it so easy. This might have been in the back of my head—a dream for years and years—but the fact that I could just go onto this website, and put in my information and my menus, made it really easy. Because otherwise, I’m not really a techy person to try to set up my own website, or I wouldn’t be able to reach the marketplace like they’re able to reach. So I do feel like an entrepreneur, but at the same time I feel like they made it really easy to do that.”
Damla wasn’t the only chef who used Kitchensurfing to branch out and get away from the cutthroat nature and daily grind of traditional restaurant work. Randall, the Kitchensurfing chef who found himself catering a sex party, described in chapter 5, and Allen, who closed his restaurant after a landlord-tenant dispute, both found that the Kitchensurfing marketplace opened up new entrepreneurial possibilities by providing them with a marketplace in which to promote themselves. This further illustrates McAfee and Brynjolfsson’s point that the Internet creates and strengthens platforms over products because the platform takes on a huge role in the reach and success of the product.5
Kitchensurfing allowed established chefs to pursue the flexibility offered by gig work and assisted potential chefs in getting a toehold in the food world. For instance, Ashaki, thirty-five, a full-time financial planner for a major retailer, had dreams of opening a West African restaurant. Working
through the Kitchensurfing marketplace as a chef for hire allowed her to test recipes for her upcoming restaurant and gave her an opportunity to meet and market to prospective diners.
Since I love to cook and I love to educate people about my culture through my food, I decided I wanted to start a company. For me, I knew Friday and Saturday [are all] that I can fit into my schedule right now. So it’s a great testing ground for me, to test: “Do people even like the food?” Because people have heard of African food, they’ve heard of Ethiopian food—but not sub-Saharan African food, . . . and I cook sub-Saharan African food, which is the West African part of it.
For me, it’s just a way to test the ground and see what people are reacting to. Because as I create my company, I want to be able to have data on the foods that they actually react to the most, or this is what they don’t like, so that when I eventually package the food, I actually have results. Like proven data. . . .
My whole thing is, I want to build a brand. . . . I want to be at the beginning of it, as well, so I can leverage it as it grows.
In addition to testing out the market for West African food, Ashaki’s Kitchensurfing work served as a springboard to get her started on her marketing efforts. During Thanksgiving one year, Ashaki recruited her family to assist in staging and photographing the food she listed in her Kitchensurfing menus. She explained, “It dresses it up. It makes it more presentable, more appetizing. You want to try it. It’s not just cooking. It’s just the presentation of it. It’s everything.”
The gig-based nature of Kitchensurfing also helped her test-market descriptions of her food to see which explanations made sense to clients and had sticking power. She explained,
My whole thing is trying to make connections about African food for people. Kind of: “You might have tried tamales before. We have moi moi that is Nigerian—that’s almost similar to tamales, but they’re not the same.” The process of cooking them is the same, because you put them in plantain leaf. It’s black-eyed beans versus corn. You put different seasonings. So they are from the same family, but they’re just a different flavor.
That customer made that connection. When she did my review, she basically did a lot of that, like, “When me and my husband tried it, it reminded us of tamales. When she cooked this, it reminded us of this.”
I love that.
GIG WORK AS A MARKETING OPPORTUNITY
Using Kitchensurfing as a way to establish or grow a business was not limited to those using the marketplace version of the service. Even Kitchensurfing chefs working for an hourly wage for the prix fixe Kitchensurfing Tonight service were more likely to view themselves as entrepreneurs overall, and to consider their work for the service to be part of a larger marketing strategy for their entrepreneurial ventures. For instance, Laura, twenty-nine, a self-described cheesemonger, used Kitchensurfing Tonight as a way to literally get her foot in the door to talk about her cheese-tasting-party company. She explains,
I figured it would be a good way to network with my potential clientele, or at least my target market, and get comfortable speaking about my services. Because, honestly, sometimes the hardest thing is just talking about it, just pitching yourself. And when people ask me, “How much do you charge?” it’s a really difficult conversation for me. [Laughs.] It’s my own thing, and it’s my baby. . . . So this has given me a chance, too, in a very, very low-key way, because obviously I’m here to cook, and they are not—I’m not expecting anything from the interaction, but when people ask me, “Oh, so what else do you do?” it has given me so many opportunities to just refine what I say that I do.
Likewise, David, fifty-four, a personal chef and tutor who wanted to grow his clientele, also saw Kitchensurfing as way to introduce himself and become a known quantity, explaining, “The hope is I can build up some clientele or get some opportunity. . . . My ideal job would be to be a family’s personal chef and tutor their kids as well.”
I want to caution here that Kitchensurfing was not some idyllic oasis of entrepreneurship in the midst of the sharing economy. For one, the service shut its doors, with little notice to workers, in April 2016.6 For some workers, Kitchensurfing Tonight was simply a means to an end. They had full-time cooking jobs that took up most of their time, but had evenings open and wanted to supplement their salaries on a part-time basis. Or they were students who wanted to make additional money without the obligations of long hours or a boss-set schedule. While the fifteen-dollar-per-hour pay was roughly on par with that of other cooking jobs, Kitchensurfing shifts ended by ten o’clock each night, virtually unheard of in the food world.
Kitchensurfing was not the only service with a large number of Success Stories or workers who identified as entrepreneurs. Successful Airbnb hosts who had multiple units, or who felt that they treated their listings as a company—often by hiring others, incorporating as a business, or otherwise professionalizing their work—also described themselves as entrepreneurs. The most notable of these included Yosef, twenty-seven, the self-described “hotelier” discussed in chapter 5; and Joshua, who described his Airbnb hosting as part of a “syndicate” in chapter 6; and of course, Ryan, twenty-seven, featured in the opening chapter. Yet, the entrepreneurial mind-set isn’t limited to male Airbnb hosts or to those with large-scale Airbnb operations.
Jessica, thirty, began her Airbnb hosting as a way to reduce the waste of an empty apartment while she traveled for work as a consultant. Realizing the income potential, she soon professionalized her Airbnb hosting.
Once I saw the potential, I got real serious and basically turned it into a part-time business. I hosted over fifty people last year. . . . [I]t paid for my entire rent. . . . I was like, “Oh my God, I need to really get serious about this.” That’s when I hired a key person and a cleaner. I made an official guidebook, got a whole separate set of linens that are just for my Airbnb people, and started thinking about the guest experience, like buying wine or other little small things for my guests to make it feel personalized.
A recent job change meant that Jessica wasn’t traveling as much, but she continued hosting on occasion. “My rule is: I never want this to make me crazy; it’s not worth the extra money to feel like your life is an inconvenience,” she said. “It enables me to feel like I can travel anywhere for free, kind of. I went to Morocco for Christmas and New Year’s Eve [a high-demand and high-profit time for New York Airbnbs]. It more than paid for my whole entire trip to Morocco. So it’s crazy not to do it.”
When we met, she hadn’t yet expanded her Airbnb hosting by adding a second site. But she was considering it, and she identified her concern about the future of Airbnb in New York as part of her hesitation. She didn’t want to take on the risk of committing to a second apartment if the city was going to increase its efforts to crack down on violators of the illegal hotel laws (for more on this, see chapter 6).
Jessica has the financial capital to rent an additional apartment, but she also has the needed cultural capital. She knows how to market the apartment, such as by talking about the exposed brick walls and the neighborhood, in a way to make it appealing to prospective guests. But, as in the case of Kitchensurfing chefs, not all Airbnb hosts identified as entrepreneurs. And as noted earlier, many hosts were Strivers and a few would fall within the category of Strugglers. There are also a few notable differences between the sort of people who become Airbnb hosts and the sort who work with Kitchensurfing. For instance, while some Kitchensurfing chefs engaged in their food work full time, few Airbnb hosts only hosted. Most had full-time occupations or identities outside Airbnb, whether as students, lawyers, writers, or small business owners, and their Airbnb work was a side hustle or part-time effort. Part of this divide derives from the fact that while Airbnb hosting can require multiple emails or being on call part of the time, it is often less labor-intensive and time-consuming than creating a menu, shopping for ingredients, and cooking for clients. Additionally, while Kitchensurfing chefs often hired assistants to help with large events, they were
still expected to show up for such events. Airbnb hosts often seemed to be free of the same personal expectations as long as the apartment or home was roughly what people expected. They could pass off a potential or future guest to a “key person” or assistant without causing any issues. The “star” of the interaction was not the host but the apartment.7
SKILLS, CAPITAL, AND CHOICE
But aside from these differences, what sets Airbnb and Kitchensurfing apart from the other gig economy services described in these pages? Three words: skills, capital, and choice. As noted in chapter 2, Kitchensurfing and Airbnb present higher skill or capital-investment barriers. While the Kitchensurfing Tonight service didn’t require capital investment—the service provided the food to be cooked, clients, and the necessary equipment—both forms of Kitchensurfing necessitated a high level of skill and obliged prospective chefs to audition by cooking a restaurant-worthy meal.
And while Airbnb doesn’t require much in regard to skills, success on the platform demands that one have a rental space desirable enough (in terms of location and amenities) that potential guests will be sufficiently interested to request a reservation. It also requires that hosts have the requisite cultural capital to make their space seem appealing. Hosts talk about highlighting the architectural components of their apartment, the convenience of their location in regard to transportation or landmarks, or amenities such as designer bath products or outdoor space.8
For instance, James, thirty-six, noted that he took “probably forty shots” for the apartment’s listing on Airbnb and then chose the best twelve to feature. He explains, “I was conscious with the opening shot. Everyone else has a picture of their living room. I have a picture with a view from my roof. . . . Because people are looking to come to New York, and here’s a picture of the skyline in New York versus a tiny spot. It’s like, tiny spots? There are plenty of those. Here’s a beautiful view. Then I have a pool on my roof; I feature that too.”
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