A few years ago insurance companies decided to call locksmiths for car lockouts. For several years it was a profitable sideline for locksmiths. There were no overhead costs. A phone call from AAA was money in your pocket.
Insurance companies eventually decided that they could save money by having their own people do the emergency work and they stopped calling locksmiths. At least in most metropolitan areas today, you will notice pickup trucks with a small yellow light on the roof and a sign on the door stating "Emergency Service." I question whether these people are trained at all or simply know how to look at drawings in a car-opening manual.
A company called Uber was founded in 2009. The idea is to hire people off the street who use their own cars as taxi cabs. The public calls Uber and requests a cab ride. A Uber driver is contacted and provides the taxi service. Uber drivers do not have to accept a job unless they want to. The Uber benefit is that the cost of a Uber taxi ride is less than that charged by existing taxi cab companies. According to the internet, Uber now has 150,000 drivers around the world and the Uber company is valued at 40 billion dollars.
Similarities between insurance company emergency service drivers and Uber taxi drivers cannot be overlooked. In both cases someone took the opportunity to develop a needed service at a reasonable rate. In both cases people who perform the service required little or no extra training and can realize a steady income.
It is only a small step from having an Uber company for taxi drivers and having a Locs (Locksmith On Call System ) service for locksmiths. AAA proved long ago that a system like this could work.
In just seven short years from 2009 until 2016, Uber has spread worldwide and become a 40 billion dollar powerhouse. It would be interesting for some manufacturer, association or distributor to step up and develop a Uber-type experiment in some major metropolitan area and test the idea out for a year.
