buying products is easy. consuming services is easy. but hiring a person, an individual, to perform a task for you - how do people do it? i have never understood and i still don't.
if i want a hamburger, i can make a decision between fast food based on experience since i've sampled all the options, or i can choose a non-chain burger specialist based on a mix of vibes and data, by looking at the decor, the menu, maybe pictures or reviews online if they have a page. if i want an electric fan, i go to home depot. if i want to use a gym, i look at their site to see what services they have and whether the place looks creepy or wet, and if that's impossible, i just go there and look around. there's lots to inspect without much commitment in all these cases.
how do you find a plumber? a doctor? a roofer? a CPA? a lawyer? i have no idea. theoretically they are all equivalent. i mean, we know that isn't true per se, but we also know that incompetence is most likely the exception. most of these people can basically do their jobs or they wouldn't be in business. but like. that makes it worse
if i was looking for the competent person in a sea of losers, I'd be able to form some kind of metric. but you can't ask whether a contractor "makes a pretty good burger" because everyone who hasn't lost their license is going to have good portfolio pieces to show you. even if they took the photos from a very specific angle to hide their shoddy work.
reviews are useless because they only really work (insofar as they work at all) for businesses you visit many many times. reviews on a burger joint make sense - occasionally you might get an iffy burger from a good place, but by and large, if most people are satisfied and the pics of the burger look appetizing, you're good to go. if you happen to show up on an off day and they put limp lettuce on your burg, they'll probably have fixed the problem the next time you come through. and the gym might be smelly on one visit, but they can easily correct that if you complain, and if they don't, you can go somewhere else.
you hire a roofer once in 20 years, and if they fuck up your roof, you'll be in litigation until the next time you need a new roof. it will ruin your life, in at least one and probably several senses. same with a plumber or an electrician. they can do 500 good jobs, then ruin yours, and it's not like you can just throw out their bad burger and get a better one next time. you're stuck with the work they do. even moreso for doctors or CPAs.
and the worst part is that there isn't even a way to look them up formally. you can find out what food is available in your area from google maps. you want a CPA? there's no starting point other than google, there are thousands of CPAs in your town, and their awful sites are all populated with generic sludge that tells you nothing but is engineered to try to get their shit to come up first on google.
who should you go with? Harold A. Arheim, CPA? Seattle Tax Assistants? Lamp Family Accountants? or one of the other 50 listings that's just a guy's name?
in the 15th century, when you "hung out a shingle", you... you literally hung out a shingle. people chose service providers based on who was nearby. cars and phones and the internet fucked all this up, you now have to choose from your entire metro region. the last time i had my taxes done, it was a guy in portland, solely because that's the only rec i could get. he fucked them up, too, which just really nails this all down: it sucks, there's no way to get any guarantees, and i have no idea how to fix it.
one of the only solutions that sorta simplifies things is business conglomeration. the only contracting work i've been able to figure out how to get done on the house was plumbing, heating and electrical... because those all happened to be provided by a single local company that employs a bunch of people, so we just told them what we wanted and they assigned the right staff. i was able to trust that they sent over well supervised people, and sure enough, the work was done cleanly and on time and we had a good central point of contact for the few issues we had.
but not everyone can or should work for Firms, and sure enough, H&R Block, the McDonalds of tax prep, is widely despised. so what's the solution? in the modern world, how does an individual service provider hack it, how do they get from where they are to me, and how do i choose one when they're all theoretically equivalent and there's no way to know who's secretly a fuckup? i have no idea and it's bugged me for over a decade now.