App Leaves Jersey Shore Chores To Someone Else
By KYW tech editor Ian Bush
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- If you're looking forward to a Jersey Shore trip this weekend or later on this summer, you might be dreading the schlep -- getting all your stuff from the car or the house to the beach and back again. But there's an app that allows you to outsource the hassle.
Danielle Pizza enumerates her family's haul: "Five chairs, two beach bags -- one with towels, one with toys -- a cooler, three boogie boards, shovels, an umbrella, and a tent for our little one. It was two trips for my husband."
So she helped come up with a better way to handle the haul: the Beach Caddy app. It connects you with teenage 'porters' who transport your stuff to the shoreline or carry it inside your digs. That frees you to wrangle the kids, or just relax.
"It's like Uber for the beach," Pizza explains. "Once you're in the app, you can locate a caddy close by or you could schedule a pickup for a future date and time. They will arrive at your home, rental or vehicle, pick up your things, load it into our Wheeleez beach carts and take you down to the beach and back again."
The one-way fee is $15. In its inaugural summer last year, Beach Caddy logged 323 trips.
"We're also adding an additional service this season which is a move-in and move-out service for the folks that are checking in to a rental or their house for the week," she says.
Beach Caddy is available only in Ocean City for now, but Pizza says with feedback like this from one of their customers, they're hoping to expand -- perhaps to Margate, Sea Isle, Wildwood, or Avalon.
"You really took the hassle out of my trip to the beach," she recounts. "You really put the enjoyment back into something that can really just feel very overwhelming at times especially when you have children."