Busy day at work? No time to pick up a present for a friend’s birthday? You don’t need a secretary — just contact one of Taiwan’s thousands of errand runners. They will not only buy a tie for your dad, pick up a cake from the bakery, or line up for hours to secure a pair of limited supply Levi’s, but also sweep your deceased relative’s grave or even pose as a pseudo boyfriend to fool your parents.
In these tough economic times, errand running, a profession that began a few years ago in Taiwan, is a mushrooming business.
There are about 1 million people registered as errand runners in Taiwan and 10,000 active runners, according to the estimates of industry experts. Short-term work assignments, which usually pay NT$150 an hour, are helping many people survive the economic downturn.
“With the economy being bad, we’ve actually seen a higher demand for errand runners because companies want the cheapest cost, so they hire us instead of say a delivery company, which charges more,” said Lawrence Lee (李政達), founder of Parttime (跑腿幫), the first errand running group in Taiwan.
For no fee, anyone can register online to be an errand runner. If they want benefits entitling them to business cards and insurance against broken or lost items, they only need to pay a one-time fee of NT$1,000. There are no middlemen fees.
And all they need is a computer and access to Web sites where errand requests are posted. The first to reply to a customer’s online request usually gets the job.
The only job qualification is that one be flexible and punctual.
“In 2004 when we started this group, we had only a handful of members, now we have 30,000 members and about 3,000 active members,” said Lee, whose group is one of Taiwan’s biggest.
“This is a reflection of the economy,” Lee said.
Some of the errand runners had been laid off from factories, while others had been unable to find stable work for some time.
TWO BIRDS, ONE STONE
It’s a profession that allows them to make ends meet and kill time while continuing to look for a more stable job. They also get to meet a wide variety of people. Some tasks, such as waiting in line for an item, even allow errand runners to do other things at the same time, such as returning phone calls or writing music, as one of them is doing.
Chang You-wu (張耀五), 35, one of the best-known and most successful errand runners in Taiwan, manages to make NT$30,000 to NT$40,000 a month, which helps him and his wife pay their NT$20,000 a month mortgage.
His favorite job is lining up.
“The longest time I’ve lined up is 24 hours, for 12 days. It was for tickets for Taiwan’s pop band Mayday’s (五月天) concert last December. There were only 100,000 tickets available. I helped 100 people buy tickets. I could only run off for brief bathroom breaks, I couldn’t take showers, so I took a bottle of water to wash myself,” Chang said, adding that he made tens of thousands of NT dollars that time.
“To be a successful pao tui (跑腿) (Chinese name for errand running), the more you know, the more opportunities you have,” Chang said.
Most errand runners have no problems making at least NT$3,000 to NT$5,000 a month, while the average is around NT$20,000 per month, Lee said.
Lately, because a lot of people have been laid off or put on unpaid leave, and are consequently turning to running errands for a living, there has been increased competition for assignments and the profession is not as lucrative as it once was.
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