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The real "economy of scale" in these platforms is not actually providing any support , moderation, fraud prevention. It's not that they scale it better, it's ju

• MichaelZuo 3y ago
  >If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business. In a very small town, you won't go out of business because you'll be the only taxi service in town. Everyone can establish their 'monopoly power' in a small enough area.
  • alexey-salmin 3y ago
    Not really, because the entry barrier to create a small town taxi service is incomparably lower than creating a new Uber. 20 years ago my small town had around five fiercely-competing taxi services with cars arriving within 4-5 minutes of a phone call. In many respects that was better than the new times. Especially when it came to customer service.
    • cortesoft 3y ago
      How small a town are we talking about? I grew up in a 100,000 person city and we only had two taxi services that would take ages to arrive, depending on where you were.
      • alexey-salmin 3y ago
        Around 100k. It was in Russia though and owning a car wasn't as common as say in US. Public transport wasn't very pleasant to use either. It was an interesting case, a sort of a breakthrough in transportation habits achieved by loads of 15-years old right-hand-drive Toyotas converted into taxis. The cheapest ride was around $1 and people literally started riding taxis to the next building on the same street.
        • margalabargala 3y ago
          A population of 100k is large enough to appear on the wikipedia list of "largest cities in Russia". A small town it is not.
      • bee_rider 3y ago
        It must depend on the demographics also, right? Which would apply some skew to our personal impressions, making it hard to say much. I’ve lived in a couple college towns and they tended to have smaller populations, but pretty good taxi services—which makes sense when you have a bunch of young people who want to go out to drink, might not have cars, and probably are willing to spend money on that sort of thing, and tend to all go to and from the same destinations. I bet the hackernews demographic skews toward college educated, so I wonder if people are commenting with truthful experiences, but from that particular (IMO, at least questionably representative) niche.
    • MichaelZuo 3y ago
      When I say a very small town I mean way less than 100k people. There is a very high barrier to entry in being the second taxi service for outsiders because when it's that small everyone knows everyone else or their family by name so they don't trust outsiders easily. Regardless of how permissive the regulations and bylaws are on the books. And even when it's a second group of locals that want to establish a second taxi service, you can still establish your 'monopoly power' on one side of town, or specific areas. There's no practical bottom limit.
• Aurornis 3y ago
  > If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it. People don’t use Uber because they’re a monopoly. They use it because it’s convenient, it’s a known quantity, it’s mostly predictable, and they can use it almost anywhere they go. People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services was far worse. The hypothetical case of Andy’s small town taxi service that provides exemplary service either didn’t exist or was such an outlier that you couldn’t reliably find it while traveling.
  • cvalka 3y ago
    Taxis prior to Uber SUCKED.
  • alexey-salmin 3y ago
    > People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services was far worse Did you live in a small city back then?
    • Aurornis 3y ago
      I’ve used plenty of small-town taxi services, yes. If you’re only remembering the gold standard small-town service that did everything perfectly, you’re looking back with rose colored glasses. The typical experience back then was not good.
      • alexey-salmin 3y ago
        Well I'm pretty confident in my memories because it wasn't too long ago. The thing fell apart only around 2016 with the rise of apps and the inflection point was a complete misery hard to forget: drivers taking your order and not moving, drivers calling you to ask about the destination point and then refusing to go there, drivers telling you that you should've put the destination point into comments, driver asking you to cancel the order and pay them in cash etc. However the apps were able to price-dump for around three years until all small players died, then hiked the prices back again. I'm not saying anything about the "typical experience back then" however I do know that in right circumstances (high demand, cheap supply, no lock-in) competition between independent small companies can have remarkable results.
• cortesoft 3y ago
  > If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business. We know this isn’t true, though; taxi services sucked before Uber. In small towns, there wasn’t competition at all, so know reason to fix issues. In larger cities, most taxis were hailed on the street or sent from a central dispatcher, so no individual taxi driver cared about their reputation… people weren’t choosing a specific taxi, and there was little repeat business, so customer service wasn’t important.
• 8note 3y ago
  If I'm Andy's small town taxi company, I actually bet that nobody will spend thousands of dollars using me over a 20-50 dollar ride. I don't need to care, and no lawyer will go for a class action suit because the class is too small