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How much of this is just the hacker news demographic skewing perceptions? For a lot of people here, it makes far more sense to hire someone to do home maintenance while you continue to work on a well-paid technology job. Doing a lot of home repair is a hobby/choice, not something you're doing out of necessity.

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For techies, for sure. Also most techies (in my experience) don’t have a lot of exposure or hands on with blue collar type stuff, which most of this is.

Every town in America has at least one, if not several Home Depot’s, Lowe’s, OSH’s, etc. and at least 75-90% of the traffic at any given time is private home owners, not contractors. Americans do a LOT of DIY.

There isn’t any real comparison anywhere else I’ve been able to find, and I’ve looked. Not as much in France, but Germany, Switzerland, Italy, India, Bulgaria (closest to having something like that), Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, etc.

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