This week in Shanghaiist
Chinese e-commerce site, Taobao
According to the China.org article:
[Zhang] will stand in lines for you, if you hate waiting in too long a line; if you were tired, she could go shopping for you; she might buy you coffee, or a ticket -- the one you desperately needed ahead of the country's Spring festival when it took too much time and energy to buy one.
For Zhang, this venture is just a way of earning "pocket money" and an entryway into creating "[her] own business". So far some of her jobs have included buying contact lenses and "shopping" for clients, but she has turned down a few personal requests asking her out for dates, which she disregards as "meaningless".
With the global financial crisis, the panic for the 6.1 million college students in China hoping to secure a job upon graduating this year has undoubtedly increased. Adding to the stress is the fact that 1.5 million of last year's graduates failed to find jobs and are thus competing in the job market with these new batch of graduates.
Zhang might be onto something here - fear of securing employment could end up prompting a trend of selling one's time.
Kudos to Zhang for her entrepreneurial spirit. Here we are, searching on eBay for cheap chocolate and deodorant that can be shipped to China when Ms Zhang could have done it for us for a nominal fee!
[Photo from UCD China]
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This is not news, at all
Shanghaiist may have completely missed last years Xinhua story of this Guangzhou entrepreneur who started the "queueing up business" business for money, became extremely successful, employs now a dozen or so people and makes more than RMB 10 K per month.
This is just another attempt to copy a successful concept.
I remember seeing professional line place holders reported on in both the SCMP and the Toutiao Ribao (and probably the Standard too) about six months ago. This is supposedly quite popular in Hong Kong.
Prix, homeless dudes have been standing in line at the train station ever since lines started never existing in China. And Ross Perot used this concept in the 60s to start EDS. The interesting/cute thing about the article is that Zhang is adapting the idea as a Chinese college student.