And previous well functioning economies get destroyed in the process

I don't know what fantasy well-functioning economy you are taking about. You had to manually call a taxi company, and wait for an hour for a taxi that might now even show up.

Because it turns out personal chauffeurs for sustainable prices is just not that big a business?

I would hesitate to consider the flag hail taxi market, at least in my (semi extensive) experience, to be at all we’ll functioning.

I couldn’t get a taxi in Chicago with a full beard. Period.

If pervious economies were so well functioning, why couldn't I easily order pretty much any food from any restaurant within a 50 mile radius with a click of a button before Uber and DoorDash came along?

> If pervious economies were so well functioning

An efficient economy doesn't mean you can do anything you can imagine is technically possible; it means that market rates with everything priced in properly will discover whether or not enough people value it enough to pay for it.

50 miles radius? I bet you weren't only not tipping the delivery guy but also complained your food was cold.

Local economies were functioning well before for years, you were getting food from around your area, which is perfectly acceptable and efficient.

There existed many companies/people who would collect whatever you wanted and bring it where ever for a fee with a phone call.

People would not be willing to pay the price however.

Two things can be simultaneously true

- delivery was under-served and over-priced, and taxis charged too much, often because of viciously expensive auctions for limited legal taxicab slots, with the city raking it in and the drivers having to recoup it from fares

- Uber and friends are exploitative dumping schemes that tighten the screws on their gig workers even while they firehose money at customers

Concierge services have always existed.

You weren't willing to pay the unsubsidised price.

Because those economies functioned in a relatively closed system of finance, and the actual cost of delivery was covered within that system. The actual cost of delivery is reflected in the price of getting the delivery. Or, if no delivery was easily available, it was because the cost of keeping such a system up, running, and easily available was higher than could be managed profitably.

Doordash works today because venture capitalists are throwing millions of dollars at it, and dramatically subsidizing the cost of the delivery.

In other words, you can do that today because someone else is willing to pay. The VC's money won't last forever though. The question is if the economies of scale it creates will be enough to reduce the cost of delivery such that it is a sustainable business.

Most available data says "Probably not."

You absolutely could do that before. The average person just couldn't afford the prices until it became heavily subsidized by VC money.

Because most people weren’t willing to pay more for the delivery than their meal, so nobody bothered.

One could always just call

I have been thinking about this every now and then - I, and many others, hold no loyalty to any particular ride sharing or food delivery app, and the cost to switch to the one that is offering deep discounts is almost zero. I know people who are constantly exploiting these sign up offers across many businesses that are pulling the same sort of ridiculous discounting that Uber pulled - and therefore are effectively living off investor cash.

I've always wondered what the extreme end of this could look like. It seems like here in London companies in this same area are popping up almost weekly in areas like grocery delivery, food delivery, ride-sharing, etc, and they almost all have absolutely crazy initial sign up discounts. I suspect there is an entire class of people that are effectively taking advantage of this and I wonder how much they manage to save.

I suspect it's a not trivial amount of money. this reminds me of the San Francisco subsidy (the ability of people living in San Francisco to utilize a venture capital back startup for almost every aspect of their life at a tremendous discount) from a couple of years ago, anecdotally living expenses can be reduced by nearly 30%

I know a few people who've mostly survived on Uber Eats' welcome coupons for weeks now.