I think the unprofitability is purely due to inefficiency. A lot of "gig economy" companies have taken the startup model of "don't worry about profit yet, just

I think the unprofitability is purely due to inefficiency. A lot of "gig economy" companies have taken the startup model of "don't worry about profit yet, just grow as fast as possible to get investor s attention" and pushed it beyond reason. GrubHub has ~2700 employees [0], do you really need that many people to run a food delivery app that doesn't even employ delivery people? And then you get totally avoidable stupidity like pizza arbitrage [1]. There is no reason that most people on this site couldn't build an equivalent app for their city, and in fact people are doing just that [2]. [0] https://craft.co/grubhub https://craft.co/grubhub [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 [2] https://coopcycle.org/en/ https://coopcycle.org/en/