Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
- Tons and tons of users buying vehicles they can barely afford to drive for them
- Tons of restaurants already struggling to get by saddled with needing an iPad or two at their counter to intercept online orders, and needing to charge more and anger customers just to break even on the fees
- Huge amounts of sexual assaults because Uber didn't vet drivers
And lest we leave it merely implied: Uber is worth what Uber is worth because it's a taxi company that owns no Taxis and pays no taxi drivers a proper wage. That's why it's a billion dollar unicorn. Same as AirBNB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels, UberEats/Doordash are food delivery services that don't own restaurants, Instacart is a grocery chain that doesn't own grocery stores.
Honestly if you want to really be cynical about it, the true path to finding the next tech unicorn is figuring out how to be a $business that owns none of what a $business normally does, and hires no employees that $business usually does, and then wrap that up in an app, and convince poor people to do the work for you because they have no other options. Boom, unicorn.
The way taxi companies had languished in obsolescence was definitely a problem, but I struggle to consider if Uber was the best way to solve that on any front.
Put differently, a common business model in late 20th century and early 21st century US capitalism is to find a transaction that is already happening "at scale" and figure out how to insert your own company into the transaction and extract some percentage of the value.
The primary way of accomplishing this is to create a (new) story to tell about the value you claim you are adding to the transaction ("it's so easy", "we have an app for that", "so much quicker") even though in many cases nobody (or very few people) were asking for whatever you bring to it.
This does not mean that there is no value added. What these companies do not represent are new transactions: no new products, no new macro-scale services ("but you get a car with your phone now!" still boils down to "someone will drive you where you want to go").
Maybe you are right for the US, but here in Germany at least, and I could be wildly wrong about numbers:
- Uber: not a game changer, popular with a certain demographic, but taxis were mostly fine anyway
- airbnb: ok, huge
- doordash/etc: maybe executing a bit better, but delivery has existed just fine
- instacart et al: now we get to the real thing. groceries delivery had only been done by a couple of chains, and sometimes only for a couple years, then abandoned again already. so you never really got whatever you wanted, from where ver you wanted. Paired with our sometimes very limited shop opening times (6-20 at most, in recent years more, but just in some states) this was different, e.g worth it even if it is not your weekly haul and/or alcohol for a party.
Doordash/Instacart/Uber Eats/etc are just market solutions to the problem of everyone being worked too fucking hard and not having the time to exist as people anymore. And while in principle the idea of "hiring someone who has nothing to do and having them do your grocery trip" is perfectly fine, even innovative, in practice what it amounts to is someone making less than minimum wage while putting mileage on their vehicle and burning fuel while a startup in the bay area collects the lions share of the fees from the customer. My gripe isn't with the business itself, the concept is fine. My gripe is that Instacart takes the money that should be going far more to the person actually doing the work. They should of course collect some: what they are doing is not devoid of value, for certain: but they should collect significantly less.
Incidentally that's the same problem I have with Uber. Matching people who want to work with people who have tasks they need to do is not inherently evil. What's evil is doing that, paying the people working peanuts, and charging out the ass for the service anyway so you can pocket more profits for being a middle man.