> What if you can have actual employees and offer flexible times?

Sort of. If you have actual employees you need to pay for benefits. Someone who only works a few hours a day may not bring in enough revenue to cover the cost of their benefits, so the employer may need to require longer, less flexible hours in order to make it worth hiring someone in the first place.

So, that's an optimization problem around cost of benefits versus amount of revenue, right? The company can view it from the aggregate perspective; they might lose money on some low-hour employees, but still capture the revenue, enhance their market share and convenience, and make it up on revenue versus cost aggregated over all employees.