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Thursday, September 22, 2016

Care.com- Couldn't Really Care Less



To be clear, I have no problem with people needing help to clean their house.  
My problem is with the way this ad  "others" people in positions of service by:

1) appealing to consumers basic desire for happiness and free time and then
2) implying that their target audience is white (stock image of the blonde woman with her child) and entitled to those basic desires ("get that time back"). Then
3) by juxtaposition, suggesting the housekeeper's free time is "supposed" to be full of cleaning and that they are *not* entitled to that free time, because their *clients* are the ones who are entitled to it. Which is why clients pay housekeepers to service them.
Since housekeepers usually cannot "get more quality time" by hiring someone, this implies that those who do not have the extra money for that service simply don't need that "quality time".

This creates a hierarchy within the ad's premise:
-You (client) have money but no extra time to be happy.
-Pay a someone else to do it, so you can be happy.
-that someone else *IS* the solution to this problem, so who can that someone call for assistance in order to get time back and "be happy"?
-That's not really any of your concern. It's not as important as your free time. You deserve free time because you have the money to pay for this service.

The fault is with the ad for equating money with deserving happiness. Obviously it's an ad strategy as old as time (buy our thing; be happy!), but in this case, the message of the ad comes at the cost of service workers' humanity.

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