every three months a new parking payment app appears. the market is 1000% saturated and has been for five years. there is literally no possible value add over "we take the credit card payment."
every single one of these companies is created with the assumption that they will convince some city government to switch to them for literally no reason. the existing company gets pushed out and there's nothing they can do about it because it has nothing to do with whether they were delivering a service. bob got to joe in the elevator and by the time the doors opened a contract was nullified, with no functional change except that now everyone has to install new software, sign up again.
pure, pointless churn. these are chaos demons. they exist for no reason except to make things more complicated and unsolve solved problems. they are copper losses. they are heat inefficiency. they are drag. we are a species of engineers. we should put our society in a wind tunnel and fix its aerodynamics.
just got a receipt in my email that ended with "sent via SwipeSimple, powered by CardFlight"
how many payment processors could there be? it has to be thousands. maybe tens of thousands. how could it possibly make sense that they're competing? i don't mean competitive, i mean coexisting at all. they have zero ability to bring "value" to the table. they are nothing. they are the definition of middlemen, they offer no product.
they are turnkeys for larger companies that just don't like dealing with retail and want to have fewer, larger customers. that is literally their value, they are a warehouse store, they buy wholesale and split it up, that's it. so their costs are absolutely married to the visa, mastercard and amex networks, their profit margins are absolutely fixed, they're known before they hire their first employee. it is literally impossible for a payment processor to undercut another one without simply choosing to pay their employees less.
and, yeah, i'm sure that happened. somebody sees Stripe and goes "ah, but we can steal their business, by making everyone work from home and hiring 100% of our staff from places where we can pay them less than subsistence wages" - that happened, no doubt. but it happened in 2010. it's been over a decade since this race to the bottom started! it has to be over by now! yet every single time i use a new ecommerce site, I am taken to a new payment processor.
how could there possibly be room for a new one? how could they possibly undercut an existing one? how could it possibly be easier to find or work with one of these compared to the immense multitude of existing major providers? how did this particular company I used wind up doing business with whatever the fuck SwipeSimple is?
my only explanation is that a sales rep just buttonholed a principal from this company and somehow, whether through straight bribery, lies, or blistering hot high pressure tactics, convinced them to go with a company that offers them nothing special other than a promise that they'll be out of business in six months, forcing them to find a new provider anyway. what else could be happening? nothing else is plausible.
