Delivering things — rather than actually making them — is a business anyone is allowed to get into. It's the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of startups, and where you see the most pitches in Silicon Valley. Enter "Here Comes The Airplane," a new satirical startup offering relief from the burden of putting food in your mouth:
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The joke plays off an apparently-not-fake startup Trash Day, which, all joking aside, wants to take garbage from inside your home to outside it, and into a trash can:
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The nature of the startup world is that not every idea is a winner, but Trash Day struck a nerve with people who feel the service is emblematic of trivial startups:
The Internet of Things Mom Doesn't Do For Me Anymore http://t.co/133TsZWbWx
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) May 31, 2015
The critique goes that you essentially have a bunch of disproportionately young, disproportionately male, disproportionately high-income people hanging around San Francisco trying to use their coding skills to rid themselves of banal errands. There's an app for grocery delivery, an app for restaurant delivery, an app for dry cleaning delivery, and now an app for garbage removal.
To be a little more generous to the founders of these companies, I would say one fact of the American economy is that to the extent that industries are involved with nontrivial issues, they tend to be entwined with a lot of regulations. If you want to do something useful related to health care, for example, you're going to need to hire some lawyers. It's much easier to get permission to take out someone's trash for money than to put a driverless car on the road or send people zipping from city to city through a hyperloop.
