Clean City Offering COVID-19 “Decontamination Service” At The Click Of A Button – Here’s Why That’s A Hard Sell

Clean City a subsidiary of Cassava Fintech recently started offering disinfectant services for homes and businesses.

Some Econet subscribers have been receiving the following message from Clean City announcing the service:

Contact 0772222541 to request for decontamination services against COVID-19 for your home and office space. Make your health your priority. Stay Safe.
Clean City

I tried to contact the number provided a few days ago and I haven’t been able to get through (despite texting and trying to call) to get more details. At the time of writing, I have no details regarding how the service is actually conducted or how much it will set you back.

The article will be updated with that information if I manage to get through to the number provided.

The biggest barrier to on-demand services of this kind!

Locally a number of people have tried to offer on-demand services in the home and the results aren’t encouraging. Lytee was one such concept which would allow you to hire someone to do chores around your house (laundry, gardening etc) or wait in a fuel queue on your behalf.

There was a service similar to Lytee called Fixa and that didn’t break much ground. Whilst I don’t know for a fact why these two services were not a hit – I suspect trust was the biggest issue.

Users had to fire up the app and look for a stranger on an application to come to their home or drive their car. I have a hard time believing that many people are comfortable with that.

Those pitching the services believed that a rating system and police clearances would be enough to incentivise both customers and errand runners or service providers to sign up. It wasn’t the case. The fear of having a maniacal murderer step up to your door step and have their way with you after doing your laundry is a real one.

What has this to do with CleanCity? Well they’re selling something pretty similar. For businesses where employees come and go home everyday and interact with other people to and from it might make sense but the cost might be prohibitive.

For home owners the first thing will be do I trust whoever is doing the disinfecting? Whilst Clean City has a bigger reputation and might take more measures to ensure the safety of customers – on-demand services that require service providers to come into your house have traditionally proven to be a hard sell.

Maybe people’s fear of the novel Coronavirus could result in a citizenry that is more open to having strangers in their house all in the name of doing away with the diseases but I highly doubt it. Or maybe I’m just too paranoid?