A latter point of this essay, corporations implementing top-down control over hard-working, customer-facing employees, is a plot point in later seasons of the sitcom Super Store. Overall that show does a really good job humanizing workers attempting to survive in dead-end retail jobs (and overall pretty funny too)
The Juicero typo, which is a reference that I cut out entirely, is for once not my fault - Substack has a problem with the CMS failing to connect and autosave when you're in the process of drafting, so I sometimes have to reload and look at what edits I've made and remake them. This typo was a casualty of that.
While I'm totally sympathetic, and particularly Zipcar sounds terrible (at least in NYC), I personally feel like I usually get pretty good customer service via apps, particularly food delivery. When I've had problems with an order and open a complaint ticket, I've generally gotten a message from a human (or sufficiently humanish AI) in just a minute or two that was able to apologize and give me a credit for the food item in question.
The apps are definitely at their worst when things are running really late and it's not clear why or what you can do about it. But at least out here in Cleveland, Ohio, that's pretty unusual, and a lot of drivers are good about calling or messaging to let you know what's going on. It's also normal IME for the driver to call from the restaurant if something can't be fulfilled, and it's always been a reasonably pleasant human interaction getting those sorts of issues dealt with in a flexible way.
So idk. My personal experience is that app-based services are still pretty human - Uber drivers will run through a drive-thru or make an extra drop-off if you ask nicely (and tip well, of course), delivery people will text and let you know they're running late, etc. I'm curious to know other people's experiences with this.
My experience with Zipcar was 100% identical to yours and I cancelled for exactly the same reason. I think it didn't used to be like that. When I started using them 10-15 years ago I had fewer problems with cars and better access to customer service (I am also in NYC). I imagine this is probably a problem of scale; as they get more users and grow to more cities, it becomes harder to manage the system, and there's little financial incentive to get better.
What you say about the appallingness of Zipcar is absolutely true in Philadelphia, where I live. But the damage caused by App World is even worse than you suggest. Here, taxis have simply disappeared, forced out, I assume, by the Lyft and Uber apps. You can still find a few taxis at the 30th Street Station but I rarely see them now on my busy street. And since both Lyft and Uber are targeting public transportation, the future looks monopolistic and bad.
Zipcar sounds awful. Sure seems like a lot of problems pop up in App culture, and companies care even less than ever about customer experience. Ho hum.
The managers for gig workers are ruthless algorithms, and algorithmic management will come for every job and turn everyone into "gig workers" if we don't stop it (I use scare quotes on gig workers because I'm pretty sure that's a phrase invented by these companies. They are in fact normal workers that have been misclassified). Venture capitalists have started saying this themselves after Prop 22 passed. Why employ a graphic designer full time and pay for their healthcare and benefits if you can just hire one for exactly the time that you need? The only reason that certain jobs haven't been subjected to this is because of prestige or a perception that the work is not suitable for gig work, but I am confident that there will come a time when the balance sheet demands that sacrifices be made and well, I guess we can only hire software engineers on an hourly basis now.
The implications for the union landscape are obviously very bleak, and some of the large institutional unions are so pathetic at this point that they are "making deals" with these companies.
Great article and I agree with everything you say, but one big thing I think that may have the most deleterious effect is the amount of money these companies are essentially funneling out of the local communities. The food delivery apps are replacing calling into a restaurant and placing your order that way. I spoke to a hot dog joint owner in my town about how the apps are a necessary evil, but he just wished more people would take an extra couple minutes to phone their orders in (I know he could also set up his own online platform for far less than Uber Eats or DoorDash) and keep all of that money with his business.
I fear, like you, that this perceived efficiency and flexibility is actually not that flexible and is really only programming us so that they can keep phasing out workers. I mean, many restaurant apps now either force you or make it seem easier to order online and pay in advance just so they can keep training us to accept that this is now the world we live in. It’s a very scary future and one where I think you may see some towns start to push back against to try to maintain some semblance of community.
I think you are making a little too much of the labor angle. I'm not sure it's true that technology companies are obsessed with reducing labor (after all, Silicon Valley campuses are overflowing with overpaid drones); but rather the current business model (rent-seeking) of the largest companies is probably dribbling down into startups put together by managers and investors from the largest rent-seeking firms.
More and more I find myself frustrated with the rent-seeking practices of monopoly companies like Intuit, Google, Microsoft, etc. Clearly for most of these guys they have reached a threshold where they have no interest in improving or maintaining their products (except in ways that benefit themselves rather than the customer) because, after all, THEY DON'T HAVE TO (Quickbooks has become such a buggy piece of shit my accountants tell me they and their other clients are desperate to find an alternative, but of course there are no real alternatives and Intuit knows it). And if you need help, well, nothing says "WE HATE OUR CUSTOMERS AND WISH THEY WOULD FUCK OFF AND DIE," more than outsourcing your customer service beyond the International Date Line.
And Google has worked out they can get by with no customer service at all! No phone number, no e-mail address, no chat, not even an online form.
I don't know what goes on at Facebook and Twitter because I don't use them, but I imagine it's not much different.
So what happens when people from these highly successful tech giants leave to set up startups like Zipcar? They superimpose a lot of the same business practices and concepts that work so well in the rent-seeking firms from which they defected.
Of course, most business models attempt to reduce labor costs one way or another; but when all your business experience in a rent-seeking firm has demonstrated you can be successful without any communication, accountability or flexibility, why invest in those concepts at all?
I enjoyed reading about your Zip Car annoyances. Entertaining and relatable. It seems like the reduction of human interaction via customer service started before apps, although aps have certainly made this worse. I’m thinking that the long wait time on the phone to actually speak to a human has been around for a while. I now hate FB even more for only employing 14,000 people, that is insane. It is too bad that there is less flirting all around going on, not just in airport check-ins. Technology has reduced real human interaction in commerce and also our everyday experiences . I’m so glad I got to enjoy urban single life without iPhones. All around you, people made eye contact and random conversations ensued. Now when one enters a cafe or bar and is sitting alone, they are surely looking down at a screen.
If it's any consolation, the business models of Uber, Lyft, Doordash, etc. are all completely unsustainable. None of these companies are anything close to profitable, they're just burning tons and tons of VC cash in the hopes that maybe one day they might make money. And unlike, say, Amazon, which was unprofitable for years but eventually turned it around, they have no reasonable, realistic plan for making money. I don't think too many of these companies are going to be around in anything like their current form for much longer.
I also highly recommend this post from last year about a restaurant owner who got Doordash to pay him to deliver pizzas to himself. Hilarious and demonstrates the absolute bankruptcy of this business model:
I think ZipCar itself is an interesting case because while it essentially looks like 'an app company' today, it predates smart phones and comes from the weird in-between era where technology let us do some new things but not with the convenience or speed that we expect from apps today. I never used it, but most of what my friends used it for (occasional grocery trips, etc.) is now in 'call an Uber' territory. The business model for this particular form of carshare ended up being pretty niche - not short-trips, not long-trips, only 'kinda long-trips'. That in turn limits what this particular model can offer in terms of cars and service.
Now it's owned by Avis, so really it's geographically distributed car rental run by an actual car rental company. Could that model have clean cars and good customer service? Conceptually I don't see why they couldn't have Avis human beings do better upkeep and customer service for geographically distributed cars, perhaps it's a big corporation being cheap or perhaps the numbers just don't add up.
It's a tangent, but this piece helped me think through why some of my efforts to create and make available open datasets have had limited results. Those communications, flexibility, and accountability to get people using them, particularly for when in initial rough forms. Without that, just being free and having already done some of the cleanup work isn't enough for it to be useful for most people.
Pushing the silicon valley economy as what everything should be will inevitably result in total fraudsters dressing up a non-tech company as if it is one, see: WeWork. The founder just had a lot of charisma and dressed up what essentially was a real estate company as if it was the next facebook. Also, Theranos, which was just a total fraud from the outset. "Startup culture" if you will can be high on hyperbole and low on fact, to the point that if I meet someone who says they're an "entrepanuer" I immediately assume they're some sort of megalomaniac or grifter or both. It doesn't help that the word has become basterdized via its overuse, guys use it to mean "I traded crypto once" and girls use it to mean "I have an onlyfans."
You are, as so often, dead right. If nobody with a name and a job title and a defined role is available and accountable then ultimately nobody is responsible. There's nobody at Zipcar with a nametag that says "My name is Steve and I am here to help."
This is by design, of course, and even if we allow the dubious tale that aggregated call centers are more efficient, they're now just used as shields to allow companies to get away with not supporting their products.
All of us have been frustrated while on hold, or getting put through and talking to someone who can't help. But we all like to think we're reasonable. Certainly we wouldn't take it out on the agent anymore than we'd be rude to waitstaff at a restaurant. We, the Good Ones, aren't supposed to get mad at a call center worker who is just doing their job - and anyway, that call center worker probably doesn't work for Zipcar. They probably work for an agency that staff dozens of call centers across the world and each of those call centers has contracts with support aggregators who provide scripts for hundreds of companies. In all likelihood the person you talk to has just taken off their Dell technical support hat and put on their Zipcar customer support hat and will in 28 seconds' time - they're already looking at the incoming call on their second monitor - they'll be providing an Xfinity outage update. So it would be unreasonable to expect them to care, much less be able to solve your problems.
Meanwhile anyone at Zipcar who actually *would* care is insulated by ten call centers from ever having to deal with a customer. They don't want to help. They want to farm out any semblance of help to either an aggregator, a "knowledge base", or the "community".
It is in this sense not just a removal of the labor force as an economic calculation but a cultural one, a functional one. Train the public into accepting all service as similarly unresponsive, similarly unhelpful, similarly interchangable, and they'll gradually accept it. Certainly some will take their frustrations out on the front line staff but most people won't, either through shame, manners, or just giving up.
(A further problem is that I'd estimate 99% of these apps and 'disruptive services' are built on quicksand. They are reliant on VC funding, will never be profitable, and inasmuch as they have a business model beyond "jump out before the plane crashes" it's "build a subscriber base and get a couple of patents, and then sell it to Amazon or Google, who can absorb our losses off patent lawsuits and cannibalizing our users.")
A latter point of this essay, corporations implementing top-down control over hard-working, customer-facing employees, is a plot point in later seasons of the sitcom Super Store. Overall that show does a really good job humanizing workers attempting to survive in dead-end retail jobs (and overall pretty funny too)
The Juicero typo, which is a reference that I cut out entirely, is for once not my fault - Substack has a problem with the CMS failing to connect and autosave when you're in the process of drafting, so I sometimes have to reload and look at what edits I've made and remake them. This typo was a casualty of that.
While I'm totally sympathetic, and particularly Zipcar sounds terrible (at least in NYC), I personally feel like I usually get pretty good customer service via apps, particularly food delivery. When I've had problems with an order and open a complaint ticket, I've generally gotten a message from a human (or sufficiently humanish AI) in just a minute or two that was able to apologize and give me a credit for the food item in question.
The apps are definitely at their worst when things are running really late and it's not clear why or what you can do about it. But at least out here in Cleveland, Ohio, that's pretty unusual, and a lot of drivers are good about calling or messaging to let you know what's going on. It's also normal IME for the driver to call from the restaurant if something can't be fulfilled, and it's always been a reasonably pleasant human interaction getting those sorts of issues dealt with in a flexible way.
So idk. My personal experience is that app-based services are still pretty human - Uber drivers will run through a drive-thru or make an extra drop-off if you ask nicely (and tip well, of course), delivery people will text and let you know they're running late, etc. I'm curious to know other people's experiences with this.
Speak for England, Arthur!
My experience with Zipcar was 100% identical to yours and I cancelled for exactly the same reason. I think it didn't used to be like that. When I started using them 10-15 years ago I had fewer problems with cars and better access to customer service (I am also in NYC). I imagine this is probably a problem of scale; as they get more users and grow to more cities, it becomes harder to manage the system, and there's little financial incentive to get better.
What you say about the appallingness of Zipcar is absolutely true in Philadelphia, where I live. But the damage caused by App World is even worse than you suggest. Here, taxis have simply disappeared, forced out, I assume, by the Lyft and Uber apps. You can still find a few taxis at the 30th Street Station but I rarely see them now on my busy street. And since both Lyft and Uber are targeting public transportation, the future looks monopolistic and bad.
Zipcar sounds awful. Sure seems like a lot of problems pop up in App culture, and companies care even less than ever about customer experience. Ho hum.
The managers for gig workers are ruthless algorithms, and algorithmic management will come for every job and turn everyone into "gig workers" if we don't stop it (I use scare quotes on gig workers because I'm pretty sure that's a phrase invented by these companies. They are in fact normal workers that have been misclassified). Venture capitalists have started saying this themselves after Prop 22 passed. Why employ a graphic designer full time and pay for their healthcare and benefits if you can just hire one for exactly the time that you need? The only reason that certain jobs haven't been subjected to this is because of prestige or a perception that the work is not suitable for gig work, but I am confident that there will come a time when the balance sheet demands that sacrifices be made and well, I guess we can only hire software engineers on an hourly basis now.
The implications for the union landscape are obviously very bleak, and some of the large institutional unions are so pathetic at this point that they are "making deals" with these companies.
Great article and I agree with everything you say, but one big thing I think that may have the most deleterious effect is the amount of money these companies are essentially funneling out of the local communities. The food delivery apps are replacing calling into a restaurant and placing your order that way. I spoke to a hot dog joint owner in my town about how the apps are a necessary evil, but he just wished more people would take an extra couple minutes to phone their orders in (I know he could also set up his own online platform for far less than Uber Eats or DoorDash) and keep all of that money with his business.
I fear, like you, that this perceived efficiency and flexibility is actually not that flexible and is really only programming us so that they can keep phasing out workers. I mean, many restaurant apps now either force you or make it seem easier to order online and pay in advance just so they can keep training us to accept that this is now the world we live in. It’s a very scary future and one where I think you may see some towns start to push back against to try to maintain some semblance of community.
I think you are making a little too much of the labor angle. I'm not sure it's true that technology companies are obsessed with reducing labor (after all, Silicon Valley campuses are overflowing with overpaid drones); but rather the current business model (rent-seeking) of the largest companies is probably dribbling down into startups put together by managers and investors from the largest rent-seeking firms.
More and more I find myself frustrated with the rent-seeking practices of monopoly companies like Intuit, Google, Microsoft, etc. Clearly for most of these guys they have reached a threshold where they have no interest in improving or maintaining their products (except in ways that benefit themselves rather than the customer) because, after all, THEY DON'T HAVE TO (Quickbooks has become such a buggy piece of shit my accountants tell me they and their other clients are desperate to find an alternative, but of course there are no real alternatives and Intuit knows it). And if you need help, well, nothing says "WE HATE OUR CUSTOMERS AND WISH THEY WOULD FUCK OFF AND DIE," more than outsourcing your customer service beyond the International Date Line.
And Google has worked out they can get by with no customer service at all! No phone number, no e-mail address, no chat, not even an online form.
I don't know what goes on at Facebook and Twitter because I don't use them, but I imagine it's not much different.
So what happens when people from these highly successful tech giants leave to set up startups like Zipcar? They superimpose a lot of the same business practices and concepts that work so well in the rent-seeking firms from which they defected.
Of course, most business models attempt to reduce labor costs one way or another; but when all your business experience in a rent-seeking firm has demonstrated you can be successful without any communication, accountability or flexibility, why invest in those concepts at all?
I enjoyed reading about your Zip Car annoyances. Entertaining and relatable. It seems like the reduction of human interaction via customer service started before apps, although aps have certainly made this worse. I’m thinking that the long wait time on the phone to actually speak to a human has been around for a while. I now hate FB even more for only employing 14,000 people, that is insane. It is too bad that there is less flirting all around going on, not just in airport check-ins. Technology has reduced real human interaction in commerce and also our everyday experiences . I’m so glad I got to enjoy urban single life without iPhones. All around you, people made eye contact and random conversations ensued. Now when one enters a cafe or bar and is sitting alone, they are surely looking down at a screen.
If it's any consolation, the business models of Uber, Lyft, Doordash, etc. are all completely unsustainable. None of these companies are anything close to profitable, they're just burning tons and tons of VC cash in the hopes that maybe one day they might make money. And unlike, say, Amazon, which was unprofitable for years but eventually turned it around, they have no reasonable, realistic plan for making money. I don't think too many of these companies are going to be around in anything like their current form for much longer.
I also highly recommend this post from last year about a restaurant owner who got Doordash to pay him to deliver pizzas to himself. Hilarious and demonstrates the absolute bankruptcy of this business model:
https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
I think ZipCar itself is an interesting case because while it essentially looks like 'an app company' today, it predates smart phones and comes from the weird in-between era where technology let us do some new things but not with the convenience or speed that we expect from apps today. I never used it, but most of what my friends used it for (occasional grocery trips, etc.) is now in 'call an Uber' territory. The business model for this particular form of carshare ended up being pretty niche - not short-trips, not long-trips, only 'kinda long-trips'. That in turn limits what this particular model can offer in terms of cars and service.
Now it's owned by Avis, so really it's geographically distributed car rental run by an actual car rental company. Could that model have clean cars and good customer service? Conceptually I don't see why they couldn't have Avis human beings do better upkeep and customer service for geographically distributed cars, perhaps it's a big corporation being cheap or perhaps the numbers just don't add up.
It's a tangent, but this piece helped me think through why some of my efforts to create and make available open datasets have had limited results. Those communications, flexibility, and accountability to get people using them, particularly for when in initial rough forms. Without that, just being free and having already done some of the cleanup work isn't enough for it to be useful for most people.
Pushing the silicon valley economy as what everything should be will inevitably result in total fraudsters dressing up a non-tech company as if it is one, see: WeWork. The founder just had a lot of charisma and dressed up what essentially was a real estate company as if it was the next facebook. Also, Theranos, which was just a total fraud from the outset. "Startup culture" if you will can be high on hyperbole and low on fact, to the point that if I meet someone who says they're an "entrepanuer" I immediately assume they're some sort of megalomaniac or grifter or both. It doesn't help that the word has become basterdized via its overuse, guys use it to mean "I traded crypto once" and girls use it to mean "I have an onlyfans."
You are, as so often, dead right. If nobody with a name and a job title and a defined role is available and accountable then ultimately nobody is responsible. There's nobody at Zipcar with a nametag that says "My name is Steve and I am here to help."
This is by design, of course, and even if we allow the dubious tale that aggregated call centers are more efficient, they're now just used as shields to allow companies to get away with not supporting their products.
All of us have been frustrated while on hold, or getting put through and talking to someone who can't help. But we all like to think we're reasonable. Certainly we wouldn't take it out on the agent anymore than we'd be rude to waitstaff at a restaurant. We, the Good Ones, aren't supposed to get mad at a call center worker who is just doing their job - and anyway, that call center worker probably doesn't work for Zipcar. They probably work for an agency that staff dozens of call centers across the world and each of those call centers has contracts with support aggregators who provide scripts for hundreds of companies. In all likelihood the person you talk to has just taken off their Dell technical support hat and put on their Zipcar customer support hat and will in 28 seconds' time - they're already looking at the incoming call on their second monitor - they'll be providing an Xfinity outage update. So it would be unreasonable to expect them to care, much less be able to solve your problems.
Meanwhile anyone at Zipcar who actually *would* care is insulated by ten call centers from ever having to deal with a customer. They don't want to help. They want to farm out any semblance of help to either an aggregator, a "knowledge base", or the "community".
It is in this sense not just a removal of the labor force as an economic calculation but a cultural one, a functional one. Train the public into accepting all service as similarly unresponsive, similarly unhelpful, similarly interchangable, and they'll gradually accept it. Certainly some will take their frustrations out on the front line staff but most people won't, either through shame, manners, or just giving up.
(A further problem is that I'd estimate 99% of these apps and 'disruptive services' are built on quicksand. They are reliant on VC funding, will never be profitable, and inasmuch as they have a business model beyond "jump out before the plane crashes" it's "build a subscriber base and get a couple of patents, and then sell it to Amazon or Google, who can absorb our losses off patent lawsuits and cannibalizing our users.")