You can’t talk about the advent of the gig economy without mentioning TaskRabbit. Since it launched in 2008, it has been one of the very first companies to pioneer and revolutionalize the gig industry.
TaskRabbit was created to help busy people and those in need of some kind of assistance find skilled labor that can help them execute tasks at an affordable price.
Whether you need someone to clean your apartment, babysit your pets, pick up groceries, wash your laundry, assemble newly purchased gadgets, or run some kind of errand, TaskRabbit will connect you to people who are happy to assist.
Likewise, if you want to make extra money helping people make their lives easier, you can sign up as a Tasker to experience the interesting scope of work that awaits. You can set your prices and pick up gigs that match your skill set and preferences.
Sounds like a breeze, right?
Not exactly. Things are not always as straightforward or pleasant as you might think when using TaskRabbit.
As much as there are tons of positive reviews for the gig platform, there are also plenty of negative stories filled with regrets and frustrations from customers who offered their services on TaskRabbit or used it to hire help.
This post is going to highlight some TaskRabbit horror stories and less-than-stellar experiences that both gig workers and employers have faced while using the platform. Having a balanced view of how TaskRabbit operates and what to expect when you use it.
This way, you can prepare for any potential issues and be better equipped to address them when they arise should you decide to offer your services or hire someone for gigs through TaskRabbit.
Horror Story #1
In 2018, Lara Pia Arrobio, the brains behind the coveted fashion brand, LPA, was spending most of her free time setting up her home and had almost completed the process.
All that was left was some art pieces that needed to be hung, plants to be arranged, and a TV to be put up on the wall.
One Sunday, she decided to hire someone on TaskRabbit to come to her home and hang the TV. She purchased everything needed to get the job done including a universal mount and a kit to hide the TV wires.
Although she initially scheduled the task for 2:30 P.M. that day, the Tasker who took the job messaged to ask for a postponement to 5:30 PM which Pia reluctantly agreed to. The arranged time came and went and by 7:30 PM, Tasker was still nowhere to be found.
When Pia texted him again, he claimed he was on a plumbing job that was taking more time than expected so he would arrive an hour later, by 8:30 PM. Despite the Tasker’s assurances, he still hadn’t arrived by 9 PM so Pia called him by 9:45 PM to reschedule.
This time the Tasker said that was already close by and that he had witnessed a horrible accident along the way that claimed someone’s life.
He ended up arriving at 10 PM but instead of getting to work right away, he spent 45 minutes staring at the instructions with confusion and YouTube videos for guidance.
This was someone who claimed on TaskRabbit that he had loads of experience mounting TVs. Pia ended up canceling the appointment and rescheduling for the next day because it was already late and she needed to go to bed.
The next day, the Tasker showed up late once and spent hours watching instructional YouTube videos once again. By 10 PM, four hours and 30 minutes after the work was supposed to begin he began drilling Pia’s walls which amounted to a serious disturbance to her neighbor’s.
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As if that wasn’t bad enough, he drilled too big a hole in the wall and hit the beam in the middle. He continued to drill additional holes in the wall even after Pia told him to stop because she needed to go to sleep.
When he finally finished hanging the TV, Pia’s living room was unrecognizable. Spackle, drywall, dust, and lumps of wall were littered everywhere, her TV dangled in midair, the wire kit was installed lopsided, and the wires which she wanted to be hidden were still very much visible.
When Pia tried to put the wires behind the TV as an alternative, the Tasker told her to stop because it’d cause the TV to fall. When Pia reminded him of his earlier promise that it’d never fall after he was done mounting it, the Tasker just apologized over and over until Pia made him leave.
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Challenges, issues, or negative experiences and the impact faced by the user
This horrible experience is a shining example of how TaskRabbit’s Taskers can exaggerate their skills even though they do not have the competence to carry out the tasks they’re accepting.
It also points to how unprofessional they can be due to the informal nature of the arrangement. Twice, the Tasker turned up to the appointment later than agreed and still wasn’t prepared to do the job.
So Pia, who lived alone, had to put up with the risk of having a strange man in her apartment late at night.
The worker made a giant mess and failed woefully to perform the one task he was hired to do despite being given multiple chances. The experience was charged with a lot of tension that caused stress, discomfort, annoyance, and a great deal of inconvenience for Pia.
Horror Story #2
In May 2022, another TaskRabbit user, Rafael Dos Santos, took to Medium to share the negative experience he was subjected to at the hands of a TaskRabbit worker whom he hired to change the front door of his dishwasher.
After the dishwasher door came loose, Rafael purchased replacement parts for it and reached out to some handymen on TaskRabbit. One of them, Mohammed, responded to his request and agreed to come over to Rafael’s house to fix the door.
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Unknown to Rafael he would come to thoroughly regret the decision to hire Mohammed. After Mohammed arrived at Rafael’s residence, he was also asked to fix a chest of drawers because the bottom was falling out.
Mohammed spent two hours trying to reattach the front door of the washer and two additional hours repairing the chest of drawers. It wasn’t after he was done working that Rafael realized that the Tasker had done a piss poor job and made things even worse.
The locks on the washer’s door were not installed in a level position, making them impossible to close properly. Also, for some reason, Mohammed used fewer screws than required for some of the locks and didn’t even bother using screws on others.
He drove nails into the chest of drawers in the most obvious and irresponsible way that did nothing to fix the falling bottom and caused further damage to the drawers.
Immediately after Mohammed left, Rafael sent an email to TaskRabbit narrating the experience and attached photos as proof of his complaints.
Despite this, TaskRabbit’s customer service team kept asking him to provide “proof of purchase” before they could refund him for the awful service.
After exchanging over a dozen emails with the company’s customer support, they claimed he had failed to provide the necessary documentation and closed his claim on that ground.
Challenges, issues, or negative experiences and the impact faced by the user
This particular TaskRabbit horror story suggests that the platform doesn’t make any effort to verify that its Taskers actually possess the skills they are advertising, particularly those that require some kind of technical know-how.
There’s no way someone who had tangible experience with carpentry and construction as Mohammed claimed would have made the egregious errors he did fixing a simple drawer and washer door.
Also, the story shows that TaskRabbit’s customer support team is not very reliable and will pass through corners to avoid taking liability for any mess or damage that their Taskers cause.
Following this awful encounter and the ineffectiveness of TaskRabbit’s customer service response, Rafael has understandably vowed never to use the platform again and recommends that it is in everyone’s best interest to not use them either.
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Horror Story #3
As it turns out, bad things do not just happen to people who hire help via TaskRabbit, it also happens to the Taskers who are contracted to do things.
One particular Tasker was hired by someone who wanted them to do his laundry. The person claimed that it was only going to be four loads of laundry before the Tasker agreed to the job.
When the Tasker arrived, they realized that the person had grossly understated the size of the laundry. What was described as four loads turned out to be over 10 loads of laundry that were covered in some nasty stuff.
The Tasker decided to go ahead with the task anyway. They did such a good job that the person hired them again because he liked the way they did his laundry.
Once again, he claimed it was going to be four loads but the Tasker ended up having to wash a mountain of clothes that filled more than 10 double-loading washers. However, this time they made a discovery; the nasty stuff that was all over the clothes was cat diarrhea.
After the situation repeated itself a third time, the Tasker contacted TaskRabbit to explain what was happening.
Aside from the hirer taking advantage of their time, they were contracting them to wash laundry covered in cat diarrhea even though the Tasker’s profile mentioned their cat allergy.
The Tasker felt that if they had to do it, they should earn more than the paltry $25 they received for the task. TaskRabbit promised to talk to the customer about it but seemingly failed to do so because the customer requested the Tasker to do his laundry again a few days later.
This time around, the Tasker bid $300 to make a point and the customer messaged them directly to say he assumed it was a typo.
When the Tasker responded saying there was no typo in the bid because it was at least 10 loads of laundry, not four, and it was covered in cat diarrhea, the customer reported her.
TaskRabbit then sent the Tasker an email saying they were rude and unprofessional and threatened to fire them if they spoke to a customer that way again.
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Challenges, issues, or negative experiences and the impact faced by the user
This experience indicates that TaskRabbit is not as revolutionary as it’s touted to be. Sure, it helps people find gigs here and there that can help them earn some money, but it’s far from being lucrative.
What the people on the hiring end seem to want are peasants or elves who come in the night to do their dirty work for very little money. Sometimes, people hire you for a particular task but when you go to their house, it turns out that they’ve downplayed how much work is involved.
The Tasker has to choose between doing more work than they’re getting paid for or turning down the offer in person and risking a negative review that’s almost impossible to appeal. Or even getting removed from the platform permanently.
All in all, the situation makes it easy for Taskers to be exploited and manipulated into taking on dangerous, hazardous, and overly strenuous work. So keep that in mind before registering to become a tasker.
Horror Story #4
In August 2022, a businessman named Dave hired a handyman via TaskRabbit to help install some new shelves he purchased online from IKEA, TaskRabbit’s parent company.
The first sign of trouble was when the handyman failed to show up on schedule, arriving a day later than the agreed date.
The next troubling action that Dave noticed was when TaskRabbit’s handyman didn’t bother to put down a sheet to protect the floors and minimize the mess before starting the task.
The Tasker then went on to break the light bulb in the room while trying to set up his ladder. Despite the light being out, the Tasker continued working in the dark.
When he returned the next day, Dave handed him a sheet to lay down and the Tasker used it for a while. However, when the Tasker moved to another section of the house to set up shelves there, he surprisingly didn’t take the sheet along.
Although the mess the Tasker made was pretty frustrating for Dave and his family, it was mild compared to what followed.
A few hours after being installed, one shelf collapsed but the screws came free of the wall cleanly so it didn’t do much damage. When the shelves were reattached a second time, they collapsed again but this time it caused significant property damage.
The entire wall needed to be repaired, replastered, and repainted, all of which were projected to cost Dave around ÂŁ1600.
So not only did he waste money to pay TaskRabbit’s handyman for a horrible job, he still ended up with no shelves, and had to spend a tidy sum on unplanned repairs.
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Challenges, issues, or negative experiences and the impact faced by the user
The whole experience left Dave and his family rattled. He tried to reach out to TaskRabbit’s CEO to seek redress but he had a hard time finding the company’s UK address.
As an alternative, Dave decided to focus his efforts on raising awareness about what he experienced with TaskRabbit so other people who are in the same boat can realize they’re not alone. He wanted to warn potential customers of the dangers of using the gig platform.
Also, he hoped that by sharing his horror story, he could prompt IKEA to assume responsibility for the substandard service and damages caused by one of their TaskRabbit contractors.
Horror Story #5
In yet another instance of customers suffering undue damage at the hands of handymen contracted via TaskRabbit, a user enlisted the help of a Tasker to fix a leak at the back of their bathtub but they ended up with more issues than they bargained for.
After the Tasker showed up to fix the leak, the house owner asked him to also look into the failing water pressure for the shower, to which he agreed. This simple action will lead to a cascading series of preventable accidents.
First, the Tasker destroyed the faucet for the bathtub and dislodged the plumbing for the bath drain by over-torquing the pipe while trying to rectify the water pressure issue. This resulted in the crawl space and basement getting flooded.
Then while attempting to fix the pipe, the Tasker displaced an HVAC duct, causing further damage.
Challenges, issues, or negative experiences and the impact faced by the user
After the handyman completed his task and left, the user had to hire a specialist to come and repair the HVAC duct. Despite the extent and severity of the damage they endured, the user only submitted a reimbursement claim of $345 for the HVAC repair to TaskRabbit.
However, TaskRabbit denied the request on the grounds that the receipt was not itemized even though it was the official and only kind of receipt issued by the repair company.
TaskRabbit has a “Happiness Pledge” to govern and offer reimbursements for claims up to $10000 for damages resulting from the actions of their Taskers. They also charge users a Trust & Support Fee in addition to Tasker’s fee, VAT, and their own service fee.
Naturally, the user assumed that TaskRabbit would reimburse their claim because they provided all the necessary evidence including before and after photos.
They were sorely disappointed to find out that instead of paying out the claim as pledged, TaskRabbit wriggled out of paying them a dime, citing the most ridiculous reason.
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Common Themes and Lessons
There are several commonalities present across the TaskRabbit horror stories discussed above. One of them is the presence of incompetent and unprofessional workers on the platform.
So many users have enlisted the services of taskers who turned out to be wholly ill-equipped to do the jobs they were hired for. These taskers end up taking up more time than is necessary forcing users to pay more than they budgeted.
They also do their jobs poorly, which results in further damage and additional expenses, not to mention the stress and inconvenience they cause.
Another running theme amongst these stories is TaskRabbit’s poor customer support.
Whether you’re a Tasker or a customer, depending on TaskRabbit’s service team to address your concerns or resolve complaints after a negative experience might be akin to wishing upon a starless sky.
Even if you provide a mountain of evidence to back up your report, you’re still likely to not get any meaningful solution.
The truth of the matter is that when you use TaskRabbit to find work or hire help, you’re basically walking into the unknown or a potentially dangerous situation. If you or your property gets harmed in the process, TrustRabbit will likely not claim responsibility.
What’s more, as a Tasker, you might find yourself facing punishment or getting removed from the platform if you do anything—no matter how reasonable or justified—that the company doesn’t like.
If you’re uncomfortable with these flaws and potential outcomes, you’re better off staying off the platform and using a better-rated competitor instead.
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Conclusion
From Taskers arriving late, proceeding to do rubbish, and causing damage to property to customers deceiving Taskers into doing more work for less pay, TaskRabbit has plenty of horror stories to give you pause.
But this doesn’t mean that the platform is completely horrible and should be avoided at all costs. Just as there are horror stories there are also thousands of positive reviews about TaskRabbit, so you might not have a bad experience if you choose to use it.
The important thing is to exercise caution, do your research before hiring anyone off the platform, and learn from the experiences of others so you can avoid certain pitfalls.
Understand that when you use gig platforms like TaskRabbit, you will have very little control over the arrangement and how it may turn out so hope for the best while preparing for the worst.
