Many things have changed since the advent of the Internet, and why shouldn’t babysitting be one of them? I’m willing to bet that for a lot of you, your most recent interaction with babysitting was being babysat upwards of 10 years ago, so it’s not exactly surprising that you haven’t been keeping up to date on tech side of the babysitting scene. Well, let me sum things up for you; you can find your babysitters online now, and a lot of them are going to start taking credit cards.
A website called SittingAround has been a pretty major force in bringing the Internet’s power to the problem of finding a babysitter. SittingAround takes the “asking the local neighborhood kids who you only sort of know to watch your kids and then awkwardly negotiating a price” part out of finding a babysitter by making it all digital. Sitters can sign up for an account and advertise their services through the site, and parents can find sitters in their area, rate them, and build a list of several sitters they can come to know, and more importantly, trust.
All that has been going on for a while. What’s new is that now, SittingAround is providing free Square credit card readers to those who sign up with the site as sitters. This, ultimately, should take that last annoying part of hiring a babysitter — awkwardly paying them in crumpled bills you scrounge up from several different hiding places around the house — out of the picture. With this new promotion, SittingAround is also allowing sitters to list whether or not they’ll be accepting credit cards on their profile, letting parents who don’t have time to stop at an ATM pick a sitter who they can pay with plastic.
It doesn’t stop there either. SittingAround has plans to add even more payment options through the use of the mobile app that — of course — they have, bringing the babysitting fully into the world of convenient digital payment. It seems pretty great for everyone involved. It’s pretty amazing, really, how the whole world seems to be trucking along into the future, whether or not you happen to be paying attention to any given pocket of it. At this rate, it won’t be long until you can buy a tiny cup of the neighbor kid’s watered down lemonade by putting some money in his PayPal account, or even subsidize his lemon purchases with a few bucks toward a Kickstarter or something. Technology is marching on all over the place, so get ready to expect some surprises whenever you look into something you haven’t thought about in a few decades.
(via TechCrunch)
