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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried to get in touch with a handyman, or a building contractor, or a pool service guy, or a CPA, or a doctor’s office or basically any service provider lately? Nobody seems to be picking up the phone anymore in any profession. I had to leave a message on a home painter’s voice mail saying “I have a stack of cash right here that I want to give to you to paint my house! Please for fuck’s sake call me back!”

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Hypothesis: most service providers were previously operating on an interruptible work stack (LIFO), because persistently-annoying people could "jump the queue." Now with work-from-home they're doing strict FIFO (as they should!); and it turns out their queue is long.

I've got a different theory. Tradespeople prioritize based on how much a job pays. So if you haggle them down, make them deal with insurance, or your type of job doesn't command much money, they'll happily keep you in their queue as an option in case work dries up, but won't be interested in doing your job as long as they're getting paid more for doing other jobs.

Which is entirely reasonable, no? They have every right to maximise how much they can earn in their available working time, they don't owe anything to anyone else.

That's logical as an argument, but I think it explains too much — why wouldn't tradespeople have been doing this before the pandemic? What was the counterveiling force to priority-queuing?

I'm sure it has always existed, but has seemingly gotten much worse. I'd say the general boom in demand plus the continual upwards price marches of trumpflation have made the dynamic much stronger.

There's also a general feeling that the pandemic "changed things". I can't quite put my finger on the whole extent of that, but I can definitely see the overall feeling of everyone being out for themselves contributing to shamelessly playing the BATNA.

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