Originally Posted by
prathmann
No, those things don't doom a business to failure - but they also don't magically rescue a business that was otherwise doomed to fail. Franchising generally works by first showing that you can run a nice profit at a few locations and then selling others the rights to use your brand and letting them establish their own stores taking advantage of the favorable name you've initially established. If the first store is a bust then you never get to the franchise stage. Likewise insurance works only when you initially get your risks under control so you can convince the insurance company that your reasonable premiums will cover their costs in the long run and give them a decent profit in addition. Insurance doesn't usually actually save the individual money over the long term - but it's useful in changing the possibility of a large, unexpected loss into a manageable series of monthly premium payments.
The idea of having large numbers of franchise owners in each town who are responsible for their own handful of bikes or scooters strikes me as terribly inefficient. If we're talking about the electric scooters then I'd have to go out each day and drive all over town finding my 10 scooters to recharge and/or service them. In the process I'd probably be driving right by large numbers of other people's scooters but couldn't touch them. Far better to have a single company that owns all the scooters so they can send a truck to each neighborhood and service all the scooters that happened to end up in that vicinity.
Yes, but what I'm saying is that the single company doesn't have to be the owner of the scooters. The scooters can be owned by independent franchises and the company can act as a dispatch service and insurer of the bike/scooter population as a whole. That way you as a franchise owner wouldn't have to be responsible for your own 10 or 20 bikes/scooters directly. You could perform your share of maintenance by servicing/charging whichever 10 or 20 bikes/scooters are nearest to you and that would give you credit, which would cover the people who took care of your 10 or 20 bikes/scooters.
Basically it would be a service co-op. You could even have owners who farmed out their service duties to others by paying them. That would basically just be like buying shares of a company. I.e. you buy 20 shares by buying 20 bikes/scooters at $100 each plus the same number of service plans at, say, $100 each. Now you've spent $4000 and your bikes/scooters are guaranteed and serviced for a certain period of time. In effect, it is the same thing as buying stock in a company, except you directly own a certain amount of the company hardware because you bought it from them, the way a franchise buys hardware from the mother company.
I think the first part of your post just gets bogged down in assumptions like the notion that a franchise has to start small and grow. Obviously these bike/scooter shares don't need to start small because their business edge is the fact they can produce a large run of bikes/scooters and then deploy them throughout an area to provide convenience of access at all the stops within a transit network. This is a solution of the last-mile problem where there are a lot of 'last miles' and to attract people to relying on transit exclusively, you need consistency throughout the service area. If you have share bikes/scooters at some transit stops and not others, people are going to have to figure out before taking transit that they can rely on a share bike/scooter at their destination. If, however, they can trust there will be a bike/scooter to use wherever transit takes them, it solves the last mile problem and makes transit more time-efficient and thus attractive.