Does it seem like our economy has become sort of a "middle man" economy?
It seems we don't produce many new manufactured products anymore, so third-party services like this are now considered "innovation.":
(Bloomberg) The problem with used cars, at least from the app-centric perspective of Silicon Valley's eager disruptors, is that prospective buyers can’t simply order up a test drive as easily as a pizza. You can imagine the elevator pitch for a startup promising to remedy this injustice: It's like Uber for cars. Well … used cars.
Shift Technologies has for the past year been trying to steal a slice of secondhand car sales from Craigslist, CarMax, and traditional dealerships. In the magical cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the marginally more convenient future sometimes arrives first, would-be buyers can now skip the used-car lots and awkward e-mails to strangers with a 2009 Honda Civic to spare. Flush with $50 million of funding led by the venture team at Goldman Sachs, the San Francisco-based Shift plans to take its car-shopping service to 18 more U.S. cities by 2017.
Here’s how it works: Someone with a vehicle to sell pings Shift, which collects the car and zips it back to its warehouse for a thorough mechanical audit and some light refurbishment. If the ride passes muster, Shift and the seller agree on a guaranteed minimum price and the vehicle is listed on Shift’s site. .......................(more)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/this-startup-drives-used-cars-right-to-your-door
= new reply since forum marked as read
