How much are you willing to pay someone to queue for your bak chor mee?

SINGAPORE — Hankering for a bowl of bak chor mee from Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle, but dreading the more than hour-long wait?

Someone might brave the heat and crowds to get the Michelin-starred dish to you — but for a price.

Local app LaborMe, a peer-to-peer mobile platform that connects people who have tasks or errands to complete with those around them launched in April this year, is offering foodies a shot at skipping the queue while still getting their bowl of noodles.

All you have to do is download the app, click on Promotions, find Tai Hwa, and make an order. After setting a time you want the meal delivered, you would have to set an offer price for the task, also known as a “tasker fee”.

The amount is a delivery service fee one is willing to pay a “tasker” to buy and deliver the order, and this is on top of the cost of the meal.

Interested taskers will bid for your task and you can select a preferred one based on their bid prices.

The app allows users to request food delivery from any food outlets, but the promotion “is a faster way for users to create popular food delivery tasks as we pre-fill information for them”, said Sebastian Raphael San, LaborMe’s head of marketing and business development. In future, they will also be offering discounted deals there.

Other promotions offered by LaborMe include BAKE cheesetarts and egg tarts from Tai Cheong Bakery, and durians from Ah Seng Durian, Kong Lee Hup Kee Trading and Combat Durian.

San said the tasker fee for BAKE and Tai Cheong’s baked goods is around S$15 to S$20 while for Tai Hwa, the average tasker fee is about S$20 to S$30.

Since launching the queue, buy and deliver service for Tai Hwa yesterday, they have received 20 tasks for 43 packets, with queues taking about two to three hours, he said.

For BAKE, some 1,000 boxes of its cheese tarts have been delivered to date since it was launched in May. Over 700 boxes of Tai Cheong Egg Tarts have been delivered since late May.

San says they are looking at launching a similar service for the other Michelin-starred hawker Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle, and expect the queues to be just as long as Tai Hwa’s.

Asked whether it is a tad steep to pay S$25 to S$35 for a  basic bowl of bak chor mee, San said ultimately the service is “worthwhile”. “Users save time as they do not need to travel down, queue up for one to two hours and travel back home again,” he pointed out.

“We believe that our users use us because we deliver convenience to them. As our lives are getting busier with work and family duties, we free up our users’ time with non-essential tasks so that they can focus on the more important things in life. Assistants aren’t just for the rich anymore — with workloads increasing, everybody can use a little help.”