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.
I'm autistic and frickin' love it, because I only very rarely have to interact with a person. But I also live in the suburbs and own a car, so my use of apps is basically just food delivery, which I don't think I've ever had a problem with, and meter parking, which is so much better as an app than as a coin slot machine.
We used Doordash a fair bit in the early part of the pandemic as it allowed us to get a lot of places with contactless delivery. We finally gave it up when it started to turn into a crapshoot whether we would get our food delivered to our door or at all. More times than I can count, it wasn't at our door, but at one of the others in the building. Then there was the guy who delivered to the wrong door, then began to creepily pester my wife by text to still give him a good review. Every time I had to retrieve the food, I'd hope the neighbor didn't have a Ring and wouldn't accuse me of stealing from their doorstep. Then there were the drivers who just never delivered the food. No idea what that was about. Maybe they had a fit of pique with Doordash and decided to eat my dinner as a way of serving notice they were quitting? I mean, fuck the man, but did you really need my banh mi in order to express that sentiment?
Anyway, yeah, gave it up. Decided I could just go get food from our favorite places and wouldn't have to sit on pins and needles for the 30-60 minutes until the food arrived.
Walmart in some places outsourced its grocery delivery service to Doordash. At the start of the pandemic, it was a disaster. Drivers wouldn't show up at all, and neither would their replacement drivers, or their replacement drivers. Then they'd partially deliver. Finally they started completely absconding with the entire order. It must have happened a lot, because Walmart customer service would just tell you "the Doordash driver stole your order." The driver would disappear after one delivery gig. Made me wonder how little they were getting paid if they thought they were better off keeping one grocery order than keeping the job. Doordash eventually worked the kinks out of their workforce, but the first 3-4 months were a joke.
The food apps are pretty good. The main problem is that they don't pay delivery drivers enough to give a shit, so my food has been stolen a couple of times. I've also experienced the hassle of the restaurant canceling my order an hour later, but at least it's effortless to get a refund.
I had to google this (thus using an app with zero customer service, but whatevs ...):
Leo "Amery is famous for two moments of high drama in the House of Commons, early in the Second World War. On 2 September 1939, Neville Chamberlain spoke in a Commons debate and strongly implied that he was not declaring war on Germany immediately even if it had invaded Poland. Amery was greatly angered, and Chamberlain was felt by many present to be out of touch with the temper of the British people. As Labour Party leader Clement Attlee was absent, Arthur Greenwood stood up in his place and announced that he was speaking for Labour. Amery shouted, "Speak for England, Arthur!" That strongly implied that Chamberlain was not doing so."
I've long thought that our zeal to replace jobs for human beings with technology that replaces, rather than eases, labor is the existential threat faced by our society and economic system (which in general I think have been a boon to humanity). Freddie--with whom I disagree about most economic issues--hit the nail on the head and I was just cheering him on from the back benches for saying something that the tech elite-funded Left often fears to utter.
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.
Yeah. My gf and I have been going carless in Atlanta, GA for over a year now but got a zipcar account for specific trips. We had reserved cars three times and three times in a row the car wasn't there, even after waiting an hour. Another time the prior renter returned it a few minutes late and said "don't drive it, the brakes aren't working". Customer service in all cases just basically gave us our money back, but we still wasted a bunch of time and had to miss appointments. We learned that it's just easier, although more expensive overall, to rent by the day from the airport. Sometimes, it's even cheaper to rent a small uhaul van for a few hours.
You've touched on a very important part of the problem: it's difficult and expensive to scale a service (as opposed to software or consumer products). That's why SaaS companies are the holy grail for investors: they're a "service" in that they bring in recurring revenue in the form of subscription fees but they scale like software because they ARE just software, except at the most high-touch enterprise levels. If you want to start a sustainable tech company with a real future as a business then you should start a software company. If you want to generate hype and VC funding until you can cash out and leave someone else holding the bag then go ahead a try to "disrupt" yet another brick and mortar industry.
I suppose I should have said "brick and mortar service industry" because startup direct-to-consumer brands seem to be viable, if not cash cows like software.
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.
Local restaurants routinely get hosed with third party delivery apps like Doordash. California is rapidly become a place where you're rich enough to doordash everything or you are a doordash driver.
The apps are so easy and convenient compared to the phone, though. No waiting on hold, no shouting your order to someone who can't understand you -- not to mention the hassle of reading a credit card number of the phone. Add in the social anxiety that afflicts many shut-ins... the apps are a dream. We're never going back. I wish some benevolent developer would make an app that restaurants can use for a very minimal cost.
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.
I don't know about customer service calls but I had some great conversations flying. The military crash investigator, for example. He was driving with his wife to NM to check out the art scene. He got the call to come back so he jumped on a plane while his wife drove on without him. The soldier from the military base with TBI. The guy who was driving across the country installing wifi networks into Walmarts. He was going home for the weekend, flying from NJ to NM. Interesting stories.
I hear you, I'm sure much is scripted. I am remembering one moment where a big corporation did an auto renew on me that I could not afford and things got real with the customer service rep. I still remember our conversation!
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 haven't heard or read anything about this in a long while, but Uber _was_ explicitly hoping that they could transition to driverless cars at one point.
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.
This is pretty common with acquisitions. The founders cash out and stop giving a shit about their company's reputation and if the company doesn't turn out to be a big moneymaker then the new parent company stops giving a shit too and essentially keeps them on life support until the cost of doing so is no longer worth it to them and they shut it down. Could also have been an acqui-hire and they just wanted the ZipCar engineers to improve their Avis software.
I think it was probably more than an acquihire - it's easy to imagine Avis seeing ZipCar as a 'disruptor' to the car rental system and thinking that it was worth hedging their bets. But they likely didn't foresee 2021 being a world where it's often cheaper (and way easier) to have someone else drive you around in their car than for you to drive yourself around in a rented car. I know ZipCar had a big year last year though, the pandemic provided an unusual situation where the lack-of-human became a selling point.
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.")
Your last point is exactly right based on my experiences working at startups.
As for customer service, there are a few companies that still maintain onshore customer service teams who are knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful. Whenever I luck into one of them it's like finding a $20 bill on the sidewalk: a genuine shock that brightens my entire day. I've noticed it's mainly banks, particularly investment divisions since they cater to wealthy people and deal with complex services, and a rare few tech startups like Simplisafe (best customer service I've experienced in like a decade). Those good experiences are a stark reminder of just how heinous customer service has become 99% of the time. Food delivery apps are particularly disgraceful.
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.
I'm autistic and frickin' love it, because I only very rarely have to interact with a person. But I also live in the suburbs and own a car, so my use of apps is basically just food delivery, which I don't think I've ever had a problem with, and meter parking, which is so much better as an app than as a coin slot machine.
We used Doordash a fair bit in the early part of the pandemic as it allowed us to get a lot of places with contactless delivery. We finally gave it up when it started to turn into a crapshoot whether we would get our food delivered to our door or at all. More times than I can count, it wasn't at our door, but at one of the others in the building. Then there was the guy who delivered to the wrong door, then began to creepily pester my wife by text to still give him a good review. Every time I had to retrieve the food, I'd hope the neighbor didn't have a Ring and wouldn't accuse me of stealing from their doorstep. Then there were the drivers who just never delivered the food. No idea what that was about. Maybe they had a fit of pique with Doordash and decided to eat my dinner as a way of serving notice they were quitting? I mean, fuck the man, but did you really need my banh mi in order to express that sentiment?
Anyway, yeah, gave it up. Decided I could just go get food from our favorite places and wouldn't have to sit on pins and needles for the 30-60 minutes until the food arrived.
Walmart in some places outsourced its grocery delivery service to Doordash. At the start of the pandemic, it was a disaster. Drivers wouldn't show up at all, and neither would their replacement drivers, or their replacement drivers. Then they'd partially deliver. Finally they started completely absconding with the entire order. It must have happened a lot, because Walmart customer service would just tell you "the Doordash driver stole your order." The driver would disappear after one delivery gig. Made me wonder how little they were getting paid if they thought they were better off keeping one grocery order than keeping the job. Doordash eventually worked the kinks out of their workforce, but the first 3-4 months were a joke.
The food apps are pretty good. The main problem is that they don't pay delivery drivers enough to give a shit, so my food has been stolen a couple of times. I've also experienced the hassle of the restaurant canceling my order an hour later, but at least it's effortless to get a refund.
Speak for England, Arthur!
I had to google this (thus using an app with zero customer service, but whatevs ...):
Leo "Amery is famous for two moments of high drama in the House of Commons, early in the Second World War. On 2 September 1939, Neville Chamberlain spoke in a Commons debate and strongly implied that he was not declaring war on Germany immediately even if it had invaded Poland. Amery was greatly angered, and Chamberlain was felt by many present to be out of touch with the temper of the British people. As Labour Party leader Clement Attlee was absent, Arthur Greenwood stood up in his place and announced that he was speaking for Labour. Amery shouted, "Speak for England, Arthur!" That strongly implied that Chamberlain was not doing so."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Amery
And now I admit that I don't get the point of this quote here ...
I've long thought that our zeal to replace jobs for human beings with technology that replaces, rather than eases, labor is the existential threat faced by our society and economic system (which in general I think have been a boon to humanity). Freddie--with whom I disagree about most economic issues--hit the nail on the head and I was just cheering him on from the back benches for saying something that the tech elite-funded Left often fears to utter.
Got it, thanks!
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.
Yeah. My gf and I have been going carless in Atlanta, GA for over a year now but got a zipcar account for specific trips. We had reserved cars three times and three times in a row the car wasn't there, even after waiting an hour. Another time the prior renter returned it a few minutes late and said "don't drive it, the brakes aren't working". Customer service in all cases just basically gave us our money back, but we still wasted a bunch of time and had to miss appointments. We learned that it's just easier, although more expensive overall, to rent by the day from the airport. Sometimes, it's even cheaper to rent a small uhaul van for a few hours.
You've touched on a very important part of the problem: it's difficult and expensive to scale a service (as opposed to software or consumer products). That's why SaaS companies are the holy grail for investors: they're a "service" in that they bring in recurring revenue in the form of subscription fees but they scale like software because they ARE just software, except at the most high-touch enterprise levels. If you want to start a sustainable tech company with a real future as a business then you should start a software company. If you want to generate hype and VC funding until you can cash out and leave someone else holding the bag then go ahead a try to "disrupt" yet another brick and mortar industry.
I suppose I should have said "brick and mortar service industry" because startup direct-to-consumer brands seem to be viable, if not cash cows like software.
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.
Local restaurants routinely get hosed with third party delivery apps like Doordash. California is rapidly become a place where you're rich enough to doordash everything or you are a doordash driver.
This reminds of a line in an article posted in the comments on the Yimby article: In Ketchum you either own three houses, or you work three jobs.
The apps are so easy and convenient compared to the phone, though. No waiting on hold, no shouting your order to someone who can't understand you -- not to mention the hassle of reading a credit card number of the phone. Add in the social anxiety that afflicts many shut-ins... the apps are a dream. We're never going back. I wish some benevolent developer would make an app that restaurants can use for a very minimal cost.
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.
Oh no. I have had very nice, meaningful, big empathy customer service moments, even on the phone.
I don't know about customer service calls but I had some great conversations flying. The military crash investigator, for example. He was driving with his wife to NM to check out the art scene. He got the call to come back so he jumped on a plane while his wife drove on without him. The soldier from the military base with TBI. The guy who was driving across the country installing wifi networks into Walmarts. He was going home for the weekend, flying from NJ to NM. Interesting stories.
I hear you, I'm sure much is scripted. I am remembering one moment where a big corporation did an auto renew on me that I could not afford and things got real with the customer service rep. I still remember our conversation!
I will add that scripted empathy is kinda nice when you need it, I always appreciated it! It is not in vain.
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
There's so much funny money in these app companies it's amazing that they can keep going.
I always assumed the business model (for Uber at least) was:
1) Offer artificially low fares by burning through venture capital and evade regulations with the "ride-share" conceit.
2) Put traditional yellow cabs out of business by doing the above.
3) Raise fares, keep wages low, profit.
I haven't heard or read anything about this in a long while, but Uber _was_ explicitly hoping that they could transition to driverless cars at one point.
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.
This is pretty common with acquisitions. The founders cash out and stop giving a shit about their company's reputation and if the company doesn't turn out to be a big moneymaker then the new parent company stops giving a shit too and essentially keeps them on life support until the cost of doing so is no longer worth it to them and they shut it down. Could also have been an acqui-hire and they just wanted the ZipCar engineers to improve their Avis software.
I think it was probably more than an acquihire - it's easy to imagine Avis seeing ZipCar as a 'disruptor' to the car rental system and thinking that it was worth hedging their bets. But they likely didn't foresee 2021 being a world where it's often cheaper (and way easier) to have someone else drive you around in their car than for you to drive yourself around in a rented car. I know ZipCar had a big year last year though, the pandemic provided an unusual situation where the lack-of-human became a selling point.
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."
Spot on. And lol.
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.")
Your last point is exactly right based on my experiences working at startups.
As for customer service, there are a few companies that still maintain onshore customer service teams who are knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful. Whenever I luck into one of them it's like finding a $20 bill on the sidewalk: a genuine shock that brightens my entire day. I've noticed it's mainly banks, particularly investment divisions since they cater to wealthy people and deal with complex services, and a rare few tech startups like Simplisafe (best customer service I've experienced in like a decade). Those good experiences are a stark reminder of just how heinous customer service has become 99% of the time. Food delivery apps are particularly disgraceful.