Roadie is a newish mobile app that, at first blush, appears to want to be the Uber of the shipping sector. With the app, you can post a ?gig,? which amounts to paying to have an item sent across town or cross-country in a random person?s car or truck. Or you can take on a gig and get paid to transport an object for a stranger in the unused cargo area of your car or truck. To test out Roadie, I decided to try to send a bottle of homemade hot sauce to a friend in New Orleans. I posted the gig and waited.
A Billion Cubic Feet of Unused Space
Roadie launched in 2015 when founder Marc Gorlin of Atlanta needed to get some boxes of custom tile from a warehouse a few hours away to finish a bathroom renovation. When he realized there would be no possible way to get the tiles the same day through traditional shipping methods (not to mention the cost of same-day shipping), he had a eureka moment from which the concept for Roadie was born. This kind of impromptu need is where Roadie hopes it can fill a niche. By its own estimates, vehicles traversing U.S. roads have about 1 billion cubic feet of unused cargo space. Company spokeswoman Jamie Gottlieb said the figure is based on the 252,700,000 light vehicles on U.S. roads in 2014 and figuring 15 to 70 cubic feet of cargo space in each car or truck.
Roadie aims to fill that space with items as small as a shoe box or as large as a couch. Gottlieb said using the app can save money on shipping clumsier items such as furniture or car part...