Tech Has Given Rise To The Middleman Economy

[...] Curbside offers something in between — through its app, users place orders for in-store pickup at brick-and-mortar establishments and the service dispatches a Curbside employee to haul the stuff to the curb in front. [...] Curbside is the ultimate middleman. During the dot-com era, as people tried to figure out what impact the Internet might have on commerce, a dominant assumption was that it would wind up eliminating middlemen, creating instead opportunities for direct links between buyers and sellers. In 1997, the New Yorker ran a now-famous cartoon, depicting seven business people seated around a conference table with a caption that read, “On the one hand, eliminating the middleman would result in lower costs, increased sales, and greater consumer satisfaction; on the other hand, we’re the middleman.” Middlemen are often viewed as scalpers — those who employ a seemingly parasitic business model of buying up a resource (like concert tickets), then selling it for a much higher price. A middleman, in other words, does nothing to improve the actual product for sale, but instead sells an improvement in the process of buying and selling that product — either offering it for less money or making the purchase of it more convenient. The company inks deals with retailers like Whole Foods to deliver goods to customers who place orders online through Instacart’s website or app. [...] they offered a wider selection of goods for less money than their brick-and-mortar counterparts could afford to. Kozmo, the dot-com era darling that promised one-hour delivery of everything from DVDs to Starbucks coffee, famously went bust after raising $250 million in funding, expanding to 11 cities and filing for an IPO. Munger imagines that this kind of logic will continue “way down the chain,” with profitable companies emerging that perform even more niche tasks than picking up an order from Target and delivering it to the store’s curbside.