Make money as a E-scooter wrangler

Here's the guy from Financial Wolf channel looking into, and trying, the side hustle/business of being a scooter wrangler.  With some tips from the pros, him and  a friend actually made money one night, even though they rented a U-Haul to pick up and distribute the scooters.  This was about a year ago, the job has changed somewhat since then.  

Since coming up to L.A. in 2019, I've seen the urban e-scooters all over the place.  There was Lime, Bird, Uber, and I think a couple of other scooters, for a while.  You needed a different app for each one.  Now it's down to Lime and Bird scooters in my area.  Some places, like Hollywood and downtown L.A., there are lots of them, and in some places there are only a few scooters visible, and they're more spread out.  As a guy on the streets, literally, I started seeing weird trucks coming around and picking up the scooters.  I've never talked to these guys, but I figured out they're the guys who take the scooters to be charged, and then put them back out somewhere else.  I saw one of these guys dropping off scooters in my area of the San Fernando Valley, just last night, which reminded me to look this up as a side hustle/gig job for this new blog.  

These days the scooters have replaceable batteries.  I also just learned these guys are called "juicers," who charge scooters.  So the jobs now for the juicers are to either pick up scooters and move them to different locations, and to pick up batteries at a warehouse, take them out to scooters with low batteries, and to switch out the batteries.  There are also scooters that need repairs, at times.  As the guys in the video above found out, this is physical work, scooters are heavy, and you need to pick them up, put them in a truck, and unload them later.  You also need a truck.  I've seen guys doing this job with old school Toyota and Nissan mini trucks (small pick-ups), I've seen one guy in a former tourist van with cut-out sides, and also larger pick-ups.  Juicers get paid per task they complete, somewhere around $3-$7, according to these videos.  

For those of you in smaller towns, are not familiar with these, here's the deal.  A few companies came up with battery powered, electric scooters, for people to use to get around urban areas.  To ride a scooter, people have to sign up for the phone app for that company, and put some money in their account.  Uber account holders can pay for a Lime scooter with Uber or Lime.  People scan on the handle bars of the scooter itself, to turn it on.  Then they can ride around, wherever they need to go, and leave the scooter when they're done.  There was a lot of uproar from cities about these scooters at first, but I see all kinds of people riding them now.  They have become really popular to get around urban areas these days.

Who needs this service?  Lime and Bird are the main companies at this point, at least here in L.A..  There may be other companies in other regions.  The videos I see on this gig range from about 4 years ago to about a year ago.  

Here's one more video below, the newest video I've seen.  This guy became a "logistics partner" for Lime, which included getting a business license, insurance, and all needed requirements.  This video below is a much more in in depth, a more long term look at this gig.  He's working out of Columbus, Ohio:  

How I started with Lime scooters.  How I make $500 a day without charging scooters

So... these E-scooter companies need juicers, who pick-up, charge or swap batteries, distribute, and sometimes repair scooters, on a day by day basis.  They need people to do tasks every day, seven days a week.  So there's the basics.  

If this appeals to you, watch these videos, talk to local juicers in your area, if you can, and see what the business is like in your city.  Do the research, and see if this makes sense in your area.

YouTube as a business: video creation supports 390,000 full time jobs

Have your parents, spouse, or friends told you that nobody really makes a living on You Tube?  They're wrong.   According to this May 2023 Forbes article, citing a recent report from Oxford, explains that the YouTube ecosystem supports 390,000 full time jobs.  That mass of channels, as businesses, plus You Tube itself, contributes $35 billion to the U.S. GDP.  According to U.S. taxpayer data, there was a 207% increase in the number of people who call themselves content creators, streamers, or influencers, from 2021 to 2022.  A fact that surprised me is that nearly 50% of YouTube viewing is on actual TV screens, as opposed to phones, tablets and the like.  YouTube is the most popular streamer on big screen TV's, beating out Netflix, Apple, Hulu and the rest.  It accounts 8.1% total time watching TV.  I had no idea YouTube was that widely watched on actual TV's.  As for the actual YouTubers, the number of channels with over 1 million subscribers went up 15% from 2021 to 2022, and the number of channels earning $100,000 or more per year, went up by 5%.  For more details on YouTube's stats in business, check out the article.  

Why start this blog? Our world has changed... and it just keeps changing

I thought about embedding David Bowie's song "Changes" above.  I'm not a huge Bowie fan, but it's a great song, and the lyrics fit well with my idea for this post.  But this video above, of the Gen Z kids trying to dial a rotary dial phone, just sums the idea up so much better.  If you're over 40, maybe 45, you likely remember rotary dial phones, and probably knew someone who had one.  I'm 56, I spent years using them as a kid.  This was how THE WORLD communicated when I was a kid.  We don't live in that world anymore.  We are all struggling with the changes being throw at us, to some degree.  That's what this blog is all about.  

When I had just finished 3rd grade, my dad got a new job, at company called Fate Root Heath, later called Plymouth Locomotive Works.  He worked as a draftsman/engineer, in the office part of a factory in tiny Plymouth, Ohio.  The company made custom locomotives, custom lift trucks, and ceramic extruding machines.  For the 4 years he worked there, my dad designed locomotives, like this one.  PLW was bought out, and went out of business in 1983.  There are still a few Plymouth locomotives running in places 40 years later.  

Our family moved to a big farm house on route 603, a couple of miles southwest of Shiloh, Ohio, which was a few miles from Plymouth.  That was in the summer of 1975.  Like all the houses I'd lived in up until then, we had a rotary dial phone on the kitchen wall, with a long cord, and a second one, like the one in the video above, in my parents' bedroom.  Both phones shared the same line, which was how things were in those days.  But not only that, our house, since it was way out in the country, shared a single phone line with houses at five other farms.  It was called a party line.  Even in 1975, that was rare, and only still being used in very rural areas.  

That meant that when my mom wanted to call someone, she picked up our receiver, and had to make sure no one else, at any of the five other houses, was on the line.  Really.  It wasn't just my mom, dad, my younger sister, and I sharing a single phone line, it was five other whole families.  Sometimes two of the older women would pick up, since we could all talk to the other five houses for free, and two of the older women would be gossiping or sharing recipes, and my mom would have to wait half an hour or more, until they hung up, to make her call.  

Now, compare that to now, 2023, where there are 5-year-olds walking around with a super computer in their pocket that can call, text, take photos, and share photos and videos, with maybe 4 or 5 billion people on the planet.  And they watch Peppa Pig videos, or whatever the cool 5-year-olds are watching these days.  This is just one tiny example of the changes, just in telecommunications, in the lifetime of Generation X people, like myself.

I've been interested in thinking about the future since I was a little kid.  I'm just old enough to remember watching the later Apollo space missions on TV, back when TV's had three main channels.  The Space Race was on, the future looked bright, and most people thought there were all kinds of great achievements in our future.  We were told that we'd all have flying cars, and be able to go to space, in the far off year 2000.  Technically, flying cars do exist, but they're not practical or widespread.  Sorry George Jetson.  And, technically, we can go into space, for a few minutes, if we have a quarter million dollars, or more, to drop for the ride.  

My point in this opening post is that our world has changed tremendously since I was a kid.  The world has changed dramatically since today's young Gen Z kids were little kids.  It keeps changing at a rapid pace.  Life, work, school, shopping, and society, in general, are struggling to catch up to all these changes in technology and social norms.  

Personally, I've always wanted to run my own business, but I was really shy in my younger years, and terrible at selling things, which are key factors in any business.  The closest I've come to owning my own business is driving a taxi for 6 1/2 years, which is in the gray area between a job and a small business.  But I've worked for many entrepreneurs and small business owners, and was always thinking up ways to make those businesses better.  In addition, I've always been fascinated by where things are heading in the future.  I finally realized that I'm an amateur futurist, by nature, many years after diving into the work of the late futurist Alvin Toffler, over 25 years ago.  

I've been studying economic and market trends for over 30 years now, just as a personal interest, and have blogged about many of my ideas over the last 14 years, in bits and pieces.  This blog aims to bring my thoughts of where things are headed in the future to the people who run microbusinesses (one person businesses), and small and medium sized businesses.  Small businesses, in general, have gotten hammered over the past three and a half years, and thousands of them have closed down.  We all know that.  I believe that the actual future of the United States depends on building up a really strong base of small businesses in the coming years, and helping current businesses navigate these crazy times.  Millions of jobs have been lost to new technology in the last 40-50 years, and millions more will be lost in coming years.  The only way to the numbers work to put so many people in new jobs is by the creation of millions of new small businesses.  In this blog, I'm going to dive into the economic trends, business trends, the changing business landscape, new opportunities, and any other ideas that may be helpful to micro, small, and medium sized businesses in today's world.  Hang on, I think the 2020's are going to continue to be a bumpy ride, but they will also provide amazing opportunities as well.