The Dog Walker by Joshua Stephens

Author:Joshua Stephens [Stephens, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-452-3
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2016-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

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INDICATOR SPECIES

As the demand for dog walking has grown in particularly dense, gentrifying urban centers, many an entrepreneur has seized upon it as a scalable service enterprise like any other. It isn’t, and when the MBAs get going, an often illustrative bit of unwitting self-parody results, on a variety of fronts.

First, there is an open presumption of expendability when it comes to workers. Large-scale pet daycare and dog-walking agencies in New York City advertise weekly open interviews with candidates for whom they’ve seen not so much as a resume, signaling to workers their own precarity, and to clients an evidently epic turnover rate. The former is an extreme version of a longstanding and common tactic in retail industries. Management continues to advertise openings or accept applications even when fully staffed, so as to discipline their workers through a constant, enforced vulnerability. The latter reflects an utter lack of self-awareness and an obliviousness about the service they’re offering or how to market it. Setting aside the risks this sloppy vetting poses—both for the safety of living things, and the security of clients’ homes—dogs are incredibly sensitive beings, with often complex needs and interests. Stability in their relationships is of a premium. The only reason a service provider wouldn’t advertise their sensitivity to these considerations is that they don’t get them. At all.

At the same time, the lack of barriers to entry in the trade tends to attract some very questionable members of the managerial class. No qualifications are required; one needn’t even have ever so much as looked at a dog. Often, these businesses are acquired through purchase. So cluelessness and self-infatuation make for a dangerous combination: grown adults acting the part they bought their way into, as though sticking a card in your bike spokes makes you Evel Knievel. I’ve had agency interviews where owners courted me with the delusional “genius” of their expansion into online pet-supply retail or nebulous pet-care certification credentialing services, with negligibly little explanation or sense of why any of what they were selling was even desirable (much less competitive with existing models). Another feigned to contract me as a consultant, when she discovered her underpaid, overworked staff was cutting corners (mostly, skipping walks), a situation paired with abysmal employee retention, which put her at risk of being unable to meet the needs of her existing clients. I asked if she’d considered paying them more, or perhaps offering benefits or some profit-sharing structure. She countered with the suggestion I cover her existing labor gap, at the same shitty pay the rest of her staff apparently resented. Perhaps most telling of all, I was once asked to interview my potential employer, as though their fascinating responses would be sufficient compensation for my time, prior to even being hired.

A recurrent and rarely understood feature of commercial dogwalking outfits is the noncompete clause as a standard, baseline condition of employment. In effect, in exchange for any hope of being hired, an applicant is compelled to sign a document that

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