Business Opportunities Weblog

July 17, 2007 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

Entrepreneur:

At 6:20 p.m., a line pops up on the screen of Hur Rak’s palm-size digital wireless device with his first order of the evening: a shoe dealer has had too much to drink and wants to be driven home in his own car.

Mr. Hur rushes off into the subway and then finds his customer — and the car, a red subcompact — in less than 15 minutes.

“Speed is money in this business,� said Mr. Hur, 43, who received about $16 for driving his customer home.

“You want to get as many orders as possible before dawn breaks,� he said. “I sleep in the day, work at night, six days a week.�

Mr. Hur is a “replacement driver� who makes his living by delivering inebriated people and their cars home. There are tens of thousands of them operating in this hard-drinking metropolis of 10 million people. They go to work when Seoul’s streets blossom with neon signs and end their shifts well after the last lights blink off in the early morning mist curling up from the Han River.

Photo by Seokyong Lee.

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Tags: Niche, Safety