Uber, Automation, Mom and Pop Shops… Uber for X: The Ultimate Business Model
Or How we can create jobs for the millions of people to be displaced by automation.
Uber for X… its been played out.. and yet it has not changed much about the world.
Uber has changed much of the world… and they are forging on with their mission to make transportation as reliable as running water with their new (and first to market, even amidst competitors like Google, Tesla, and Ford) fleet of completely autonomous vehicles.
Unfortunately, very few, if any, Uber for X companies has made anywhere near that big a splash. In fact, one could say that most of them were just hopping on the bandwagon… without actually making use of the wagon.
The potential for the Uber way of doing things is incredibly powerful. It is disruptive in all the right ways (…. minus their predatory employee practices.. but we’ll talk about that later). What people still fail to realize, is how the uber model (ie the true on-demand/ sharing/ gig economy) will be what we will base our entire world on in the future.
But enough build up.
Here’s why…
There are a lot of services and products people want. A lot more that people simply dont have locally. Thats why Amazon is popular… its like Walmart, but better, it ships international… and you can get even the most remote things within days! In fact, Walmart itself is so popular, (despite the very well known ‘rumors’ about the immorality of the people that created it…) because people can get pretty much most any everyday item they may possibly need all in one place.
We freaking love simplicity and aggregation of resources.
Evolutionary reasons aside, getting everything we need in one place, or better yet, have it all come to us, makes life so much easier! Before you start agonizing about how this makes us lazy… Consider how productive this makes us!
If more people can get a larger variety of things… than more people can sell more things… they can provide more business to more people
Here’s a real-world example…
I met the owner of this long-time little shoppe… she sells a lot of bakery-related stuff… lil dollies and decorations and pretty much all the non-edible things folks need to bake or design cakes and whatnot.
Unfortunately, she barely gets business these days. While I was there, she had 2 in-store customers, and several that called through the phone, but it just happened to be a really good day. She even teaches classes on how to build and decorate bakery stuffs. This wasnt some rundown place. She has been there for over 10 years…
On the other side of town (literally, as in two miles round the corner and down the street), there was a computer repair shop that used to be there for as long as I can remember. It outlasted Blockbuster and RadioShack. The only other ‘competitors’ were only really small, niche repair shops. There was a Walmart… but no one goes there for repairs. Best Buy was over 5 miles away too… and of course, too expensive for many people.
Yet this long-time repair shop shutdown…. I havent been a while, but they must have closed recently, because a lady who was in need for repair went there just to be surprised about the space being for lease…
Perhaps you got it now… perhaps not…
These two shops are just a few of the MANY examples of how even good, small businesses are run out of business… by no business…
Not disruption or competition or anything of the sort… just simply not drawing enough customers.
They cant afford big advertisements, and it wouldnt even help due to their exclusively geocentric mom-and-pop status…
But people do indeed find value in them. Most people would still go to a small shop over stuff like Best Buy for their electronics or Hobby Lobby for their niche bakery crafts or whatever… simply because its close, cheap, and supports their community.
This is a big problem, and an even bigger opportunity… This… this is how we create jobs for the millions of people who will be replaced by automation.
By simply giving them their personal jobs back. Their local businesses…
Give them back their community.
Globalization is great… I love it!
Seeing your own community decline into just another line of abandoned shops now ‘for lease’… that’s damn tragic.
And it doesnt, nay, shouldnt be that way.
So why not bring the On-demand gig economy to the local level? This is how they started after all. This is how companies like Uber, Lyft, etc grow… by having the local folk see the benefit in this kind of system. By going hard on local services until it gains a hold in the community.
So we need to take it to the next level.
Use Uber for X locally to help that bakery crafts shop reach more customers…
Use Uber for X locally to help businesses like that electronics parts and repair shop help more people repair their devices…
Use Uber for X locally to deliver more pizza, more Cookout.. better yet, more freshly grown, local food!!
Use Uber for X locally!
In the short term, not only will it help more small businesses reach more of their community… it will also make services like Uber far far far more useful and lucrative to the drivers!
In the long term, when those cars become autonomous, not only will it help transfer the world to a more eco-friendly and safe place, it will also help even more people create and sell more products and services!
In a world where people can deliver themselves or their product at the tap of a button, then many more people will be able to simply create their own work, in their own community; rather than have to work for someone else after fighting through traffic just to work in someone else’s neighborhood…
We must be able to be self sufficient in order to be free to live the lives we want to live… And we will never be able to do that if we continue this trend of working for some random rich person just because we have to rather than working for ourselves however we want to!
Support our communities, support yourselves.
Fear not the future, fear the aggrandisement of greed.
Fear not the loss of what was, fear the fetishment of the past.
