Blog 9

In class this week we talked a lot about women's roles. The most interesting thing I found was the article that dealt with maids. No doubt, most of us fail to recognize women's actual roles in the home. They really are "maids" no matter how you look at it. It was interesting to read a story from a personal point of view about how it is to be a maid, what's degrading, etc. My workplace is currently looking for a cleaning service for our new construction. While I was searching for estimates, I decided to do a little bit of investigative research of my own. Some things that came to mind were; How are the cleaning people portrayed on different websites? How are they described? What types of words/language are used? I decided to visit the site of the well known "Merry Maids." What I found was a very generic site. They use a "team" system for their cleaning. There would be anywhere from 1-3 people in a home at one time. They pride themselves on being a very universal cleaning service with operations in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. They continually remind you that they are an established business and strive to fill website visitors with a sense of "comfort." (They speak a lot of being able to trust the maids and not having to worry about theft.) It seems like an okay service, but not very personal. They are aimed at impressing customers with how many homes they clean rather than the quality of the cleaning, or the caliber of the employees. I think the employees definitely deserve more recognition. I also visited the "Molly Maid" website. It seemed eerily similar to the Merry Maids site. Although, it didn't seem to have a very customer focused vibe. They make sure to tell you the Maids workday is from 8-5 and they cannot guarantee an exact time of arrival. They seem to care about their maid's personal time as well as the customers.