I think what he means is sometimes there is a benefit to having one service provider. For instance, it is cheaper if a city offers trash pickup in a district to one service provider. The logic is that it’s much more efficient to have one truck stop at each house versus trucks zig zagging around each other.

hm, being 'more efficient' would be true if the ideal way was known.

Waterfall would also be 'more efficient' if we knew the right product to make and way to make it. If agile has taught us anything it's that we don't know and we can't know. We learn through trial and error and continually innovate. If there is only one company there is no incentive to innovate and discover better efficiencies.

So while the 'logic' is right, the supposition[0] is incorrect.

This is why 'the market' is the best way in practice. We observe an ebb and flow of centralization (Amazon is a good example) and decentralization in various industries. This is caused by innovation and disruption. When one company innovates/disrupts so well and continues to execute it can become a de facto "monopoly," gaining near 100% market share.

When the industry and market are allowed to continue unabated[1] this 'monopoly' can eventually be broken if the company fails to innovate and leaves the industry vulnerable to upstart disruptors. The very possibility means even with 100% market share the company is not a true monopoly, and in practice the consumer benefits from the company's 'existential fear' which motivates it to continue to serve its customers in better and better ways.

[0] knowing the best way [1] assuming the major player(s) doesn't lobby/enact regulations to protect its market/industry position

edited footnote formatting

The data doesn’t support this though in the example I gave. This is why many cities like LA are switching to a single provider per area. Note, there still is competition. The contracts go through a bidding process and a competitor could try and develop more efficient processes in a different district of LA. It just doesn’t make sense to have five providers serving the same block in a residential area as it drives up the costs for everyone. For more rural areas, the issue becomes that the capex to support the landfill and truck buildout doesn’t typically support multiple competitors.

I suppose this isn’t much different than a development team trying to work in both Postgres and MySQL. Sure, maybe you hedged your bets and your team uses both to experiment which is better, but at some point, it likely is better to develop expertise and experience in one of them especially if it’s a small team.

Consumers benefit assuming all suppliers are equivalent, which is not at all the case with Amazon. They're gaining a price advantage over using real carriers mainly through incredibly exploitative labor practices in the warehouse and abusing uber-like contractors to cover the last mile for pennies on the dollar.

Not only is the human/societal cost high, consumers directly suffer as well as untrained contractors working irregular routes rush to meet unrealistic deadlines. Every day a different person in a rented van pulls up to throw armloads of packages at my building, may or may not be the right entrance, they don't know the place and have no time to check, before racing off to the next location.

Consumers benefit because of competition and redundancy several suppliers create.

Competition forces suppliers whose service is deemed inadequate by the market to change or disappear.

Clearly the market wants packages delivered fast and cheap.

If the model is failing as you describe, then more competition is a good thing. Consumers will flock to whoever that provides better service for what it is they’re willing to pay.

I’m not sure how consumers suffer - if trained or untrained contractors fail at their jobs, consumers take their business elsewhere.

It sounds like you’re against Amazons delivery practices. Fine. But the more competition there is, the better. UPS or Fedex absolutely shouldn’t own the private delivery market.