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How Much Of A Business Is There Catering To People's Laziness?
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15 years ago, a lot of tech startups pushed delivery of everything as the wave of the future. Remember Kozmo.com? They'd deliver anything, however small, anytime. Groceries, especially -- there were a lot of companies that would bring you your groceries and other things. And they all drew a lot of investors, and they all went bust. And proving that we are incapable of learning from history, there's another wave of delivery services, perhaps emboldened by Amazon's success with Prime, getting back into the delivery business. Even Uber's offering a delivery service. Investors are plowing money into the new companies. They think that software will make the difference -- this time, they say, software will make them more efficient. And they're all forgetting that the problem is scale- since it costs the same in things like gas and time to deliver one item as it does a thousand, you can't make the business scale. More business means more cost without necessarily more revenue. And some of the newcomers have already gone bust. We've forgotten the bubble. (New York Times)
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