Everything’s easier in China, even managing the end of your relationship. Users of the eBay-like site Taobao managed by Alibaba are making a killing on outsourcing their breakups to complete strangers in exchange for a little bit of dosh.
You met someone and thought it would turn into a great relationship, only to be disappointed later on by the harsh reality that they just are not that into you. Well, for a few yuan (eight yuan roughly equals a dollar), you can hire someone to be the emissary for this hardest of all social missives.
For the price of a meal for two in Greenwich Village, you can put the kibbash on that budding – or festering – romance.
According to this China blog, people calling themselves “break-up agents” are getting everything from stock trading software to enough money to buy a few iPads just to tell someone they don’t know that someone else they don’t know doesn’t really want to know them anymore, “in that way.”
Here’s one example from the report: one of the guys that Shenzhen News interviews says that he got the idea from watching a Korean movie about the same kind of practice. On a recent sortie, he was paid about US$15 by a Chinese man to send a message of heartfelt breaking up to a young woman. When the break-up agent arrived at the door of the young woman, she handed him about $80 to do the same thing.
She said that it was she, not he, who wanted to do the breaking up.
The freelancing post sounds pretty lucrative, if not a little dangerous. Another source is quoted as saying that sometimes medical treatment is needed when the boyfriend receiving the message blames the bearer of the news.
Image courtesy of Lifehack.org
