Was That a Goat?

Over the years I’ve written a lot of posts about Amazon for much the same reason that a sports blogger would write about the New York Yankees – love them or hate them you can’t ignore them, any more than someone in the business community can ignore Amazon. We’ve all spent time pondering Amazon, and watching them as they diversified from an online bookstore to a retailer of other kinds of media to a retailer of practically everything. Now it appears that the company has moved into providing random home and personal services as well, which appears to be taking them into some very strange waters indeed. Who would have imagined, back in the old days, that this modest Internet bookstore would one day grow up to be a place where you can rent a flock of goats?

I got the story off of the Business Insider website, but it looked too fantastical for words, so I went onto the Amazon site and looked for myself. Sure enough, there is an Amazon Home Services page which lists services available through the auspices of the company. Some of these include things that make perfect sense as a value-added adaptation for a retail company, such as service personnel who will come to assemble the outdoor grill you just purchased, or install the wall-mount for your new plasma-screen television. Some are just mundane things, presumably for people who don’t want to deal with Sears, get referrals off of Angie’s List, advertise on Craig’s List, and so on, like gutter cleaning and pressure washing services. And some of them are quite eccentric indeed, such as aerial yoga classes (yoga done while hanging from the ceiling on loops of soft fabric), language lessons (currently in Spanish, French or English, but keep checking back!), musical and vocal performers (hire a band for your next big event!) or hiring a goat grazing service…

As I have mentioned in some previous posts, goats are an extremely efficient and cost-effective way of clearing brush, or unwanted vegetation in general, from almost any terrain. They don’t require gasoline or electricity, don’t make much noise compared to chainsaws and wood chippers, dispose of the cut vegetation (except for the occasional goat dropping, which the Amazon page points out make excellent fertilizer), and can actually work faster than some human brush-clearing services (depending on the terrain and the number of goats, presumably). How much the service will cost depends on how much land you want cleared, whether it is fenced in or whether goatherds will be needed to keep control of the flock, and how many goats you want, but unfortunately I can’t tell you how it compares in price to other methods or contractors…

When I pulled up the Other Services page it was immediately clear that none of these services were available anywhere near my zip code. There weren’t any offers on the Lessons page, either, which is disappointing to anyone who wanted to learn aerial yoga in the Lansing area. Nor did I find anything under the Home Improvement or Lawn and Garden pages before I gave up. As was the case with Angie’s List and Craig’s List, there are no listings for services of any kind anywhere near where I live…

Now, in fairness, we should probably note that Amazon Home Services is a fairly new area for the company, and it may take them a while to get enough contractors listed to cover everywhere. We should also note that East Lansing is kind of a backwater – it’s a nice enough place, but it is somewhat remote when compared to Seattle or Chicago, for example. It’s quite possible that if you live in or around a major city that you would find plenty of offerings in every one of these categories (although I suppose the goats might be a challenge in urban areas). A much more serious point is that every other business referral service out there should probably take notice of the fact that Amazon has now entered their industry, because if they aren’t careful the same thing that happened to all too many local bookstores could also happen to them…