Why the race to commodify everything destroyed value, in domains where human expertise and relationships actually matter
The sharing economy promised to democratize access to services previously limited by ownership requirements or geographic constraints. You could summon a ride without owning a car, stay in unique spaces without hotel overhead, access expertise without full-time employment relationships. The convenience proved undeniable and the efficiency gains substantial. Yet something crucial was lost in the rush to commoditize everything, to reduce all services to transactions optimized for volume and price, to strip away the relationships and expertise that made certain services valuable beyond their basic functional delivery.Table of Contents
What the Sharing Economy Achieved
Before critiquing its limitations, acknowledging what the sharing economy genuinely improved illuminates why its model succeeds brilliantly in some domains while failing catastrophically in others.
The Legitimate Innovations
The sharing economy succeeded by eliminating inefficiencies in markets where commoditization was appropriate. Taxi medallion systems created artificial scarcity driving prices well above service value while limiting access. Hotel chains maintained overhead disconnected from guest experience while offering limited variety. Traditional employment relationships prevented flexible access to skills for discrete tasks. In these contexts, technology-enabled platforms reduced transaction costs, increased access, and delivered genuine consumer benefit through efficiency and convenience.
The innovations proved particularly valuable where services involved standardized delivery requiring minimal expertise or relationship continuity. Getting from point A to point B involves relatively straightforward value proposition where driver quality matters less than reliability, safety, and price. Staying in room for night has clear success criteria where relationship with property owner proves largely irrelevant beyond functional adequacy. These commoditizable services benefited enormously from platforms optimizing for efficiency and volume.
Where the Model Shines
Sharing economy platforms excel when several conditions align: the service involves standardized outputs admitting clear quality assessment, expertise requirements remain modest allowing large supply pools, relationship continuity provides minimal value beyond single transaction, and price sensitivity dominates other considerations. Under these conditions, commodification through platforms optimizing for volume and efficiency delivers genuine improvements over previous models through reduced costs and increased convenience.
The model also succeeds where asymmetric information problems are minimal, where what you see closely approximates what you receive, and where service failures create limited consequences. The meal delivery that arrives late or cold proves disappointing but hardly catastrophic. The ride that takes suboptimal route costs some time and money but creates no lasting damage. The vacation rental that photographs somewhat oversold requires adjustment but rarely ruins entire trip. These modest stakes make trial-and-error acceptable and commoditization viable.
The Catastrophic Error
The fundamental mistake emerged when sharing economy principles were applied to domains where commodification destroys rather than creates value, where the assumptions enabling efficiency gains in transportation or simple logistics actively undermine what makes services valuable in domains requiring expertise, judgment, relationships, and sustained quality attention.
The Commodification of Expertise
Perhaps most damaging, the gig economy systematically devalues expertise by treating all service providers as interchangeable units to be selected primarily by availability and price. The platform assumes that adequate service delivery requires only basic competence plus incentive structures managing behavior through ratings and pricing. This assumption holds for simple standardized services but fails catastrophically where genuine expertise accumulated through years of focused development creates vast quality differences between practitioners.
The physician who has spent three decades developing diagnostic judgment cannot be replaced by urgent care rotation without substantial value loss. The attorney who deeply understands your complete business and legal situation provides different value than competent lawyer handling discrete transaction. The financial advisor who comprehends your complete circumstances and long-term objectives serves differently than algorithm selecting index funds. Yet sharing economy logic treats all providers within category as essentially equivalent apart from price and availability, systematically destroying the value that expertise and relationship continuity actually create.
The Race to the Bottom
Commoditization creates powerful incentives for price competition that inevitably degrade service quality in domains where quality requires sustained investment. When platforms optimize for transaction volume and extract percentage of each exchange, providers face pressure to reduce costs, minimize time per engagement, and maximize throughput. This works acceptably for simple services but devastates domains where quality requires substantial investment that volume cannot compensate for.
The race manifests through corner-cutting that consumers initially fail to recognize but that cumulatively destroys value. The professional who once invested in deep client understanding now handles transactions quickly to maximize volume. The service that maintained selective standards accepts marginal providers to expand supply. The organization that cultivated genuine expertise shifts toward minimum viable competence sufficient to avoid negative reviews. The cumulative effect is abundance of mediocre options delivering adequate but unremarkable service while excellence becomes increasingly rare and expensive relative to degraded alternatives.
The Relationship Destruction
Most fundamentally, commodification eliminates relationship continuity that creates compounding value across repeated engagements in domains where providers learning your specific needs and preferences substantially improves service quality. The sharing economy’s core insight that access matters more than ownership assumes that familiarity and relationship history provide minimal value. This holds for simple transactions but fails where accumulated understanding of client-specific needs transforms service from adequate to genuinely valuable.
The physician who knows your medical history, family background, and health patterns provides categorically different value than urgent care doctor seeing you once. The accountant who understands your complete financial situation delivers different service than tax preparer handling single year’s return. The companion who knows your preferences, communication style, and what actually creates genuine enjoyment for you specifically offers incomparably better experience than attractive stranger selected from browse-and-book platform. Yet sharing economy logic treats relationship continuity as inefficiency to be eliminated rather than as source of genuine value worth cultivating and protecting.
What Should Never Be Commoditized
Certain service domains possess characteristics making commodification fundamentally inappropriate despite sharing economy’s success in other contexts. Understanding these characteristics illuminates which services deserve premium treatment rather than gig-economy optimization.
Services Requiring Genuine Expertise
When expertise accumulated through years of focused development creates substantial quality differences, commodification destroys rather than creates value by treating all providers as interchangeable. The domains where mastery matters cannot be reduced to efficient transaction processing without eliminating precisely what makes excellent service valuable. Legal advice on complex matters, medical diagnosis beyond routine cases, strategic business counsel, architectural design, and numerous other expertise-dependent services fundamentally resist commoditization without degradation.
These domains share characteristics that make them inappropriate for sharing economy treatment: quality differences between practitioners prove substantial rather than marginal, excellence requires sustained investment that volume cannot compensate for, and selecting primarily by price or availability systematically produces poor outcomes. The sophisticated consumer in these domains understands that premium pricing often signals appropriate investment in expertise rather than representing inefficiency to be arbitraged away through platform optimization.
Services Where Relationships Compound Value
When accumulated understanding of client-specific needs and preferences substantially improves service quality across repeated engagements, relationship continuity creates genuine value that commodification destroys. The long-term physician, attorney, accountant, or advisor relationship becomes progressively more valuable as accumulated knowledge enables increasingly precise service calibration. The sharing economy assumption that each transaction should stand alone eliminates this compounding benefit, reducing all engagements to one-off interactions requiring restart of relationship building every time.
For sophisticated clients whose lives involve complexity that accumulated understanding helps navigate, this relationship destruction proves particularly costly. The provider who knows your complete situation delivers categorically different value than competent stranger handling discrete transaction without context. The loss proves difficult to quantify transaction-by-transaction but becomes obvious across time through accumulated inefficiency of constantly reestablishing basics rather than building on established foundations.
Services Requiring Absolute Discretion
When confidentiality and discretion prove essential rather than merely desirable, the sharing economy model’s volume orientation and platform mediation create unacceptable risks. Services involving sensitive personal information, reputational concerns, or simply preference for privacy require approaches fundamentally different from platforms optimizing for scale through data collection and standardized processing. The healthcare provider, attorney, financial advisor, and companion all handle information and interactions that clients reasonably expect to remain completely confidential.
Yet sharing economy platforms typically involve extensive data collection, algorithmic processing, and structural incentives toward transparency that conflict with absolute discretion requirements. The platform-mediated transaction creates additional parties with access to sensitive information, additional potential failure points for confidentiality breaches, and fundamental tension between platform’s business interests in data utilization and client’s interests in total privacy. For services where discretion proves non-negotiable, premium models maintaining true privacy through operational design rather than merely promising it serve far better than platforms treating privacy as feature rather than foundational requirement.
Understanding commodification’s limits clarifies what premium service models must provide to justify their positioning and what sophisticated clients should demand from services resisting race-to-bottom dynamics.
Selective Standards Versus Volume Optimization
Premium services maintain rigorous selection standards accepting that limiting supply serves quality better than maximizing volume. This fundamental orientation differs from sharing economy logic that treats larger provider pools as inherently better through increased availability and competition. Premium models recognize that in expertise-dependent and relationship-intensive domains, quality proves more important than quantity, that selectivity enables standards maintenance, and that attempting to serve everyone typically means serving no one excellently.
This selectivity manifests through acceptance rates that would horrify sharing economy platforms optimizing for maximum supply. The professional service accepting one applicant per twenty examined, the organization maintaining standards that exclude competent but not exceptional practitioners, the service turning away clients when appropriate matches cannot be made all demonstrate commitment to quality over volume that fundamentally distinguishes premium from commoditized alternatives. The sophisticated client recognizes these selective practices as signals of genuine quality commitment rather than artificial scarcity creating unjustified pricing.
Relationship Cultivation Versus Transaction Processing
Premium services invest substantially in relationship development and maintenance recognizing that accumulated understanding creates compounding value. This requires operational approaches fundamentally different from platforms optimizing for transaction efficiency. The consultation understanding client-specific needs deeply rather than processing standard intake forms. The matching based on genuine compatibility assessment rather than algorithmic sorting by basic criteria. The relationship management maintaining continuity and accumulated knowledge rather than treating each engagement as isolated transaction.
These relationship investments prove expensive and scale poorly, which explains why sharing economy platforms avoid them. Yet for clients whose circumstances involve complexity that accumulated understanding helps navigate, the investment delivers returns that efficient transaction processing cannot match. The provider who knows you completely serves categorically better than competent stranger despite similar technical capabilities, and premium services structure operations to enable rather than eliminate this relationship value.
True Discretion Versus Platform Mediation
Premium services treat discretion as operational imperative rather than marketing claim, structuring systems to genuinely protect privacy rather than merely promising confidentiality while collecting data for platform optimization. This requires infrastructure investments and operational choices that platforms treat as inefficient: minimal data collection rather than comprehensive tracking, manual processes rather than algorithmic optimization, true separation between client identity and service delivery rather than platform-mediated transactions creating data trails.
The sophisticated client understands that genuine discretion costs more than platform efficiency but proves non-negotiable in domains where privacy breaches create serious consequences. The premium service that actually protects confidentiality through operational design rather than merely claiming to value privacy delivers different value than platforms whose business models depend on data collection and utilization fundamentally at odds with absolute discretion requirements.
The Companion Service Application
The companion service industry exemplifies both the sharing economy’s destructive commodification and the premium alternative’s genuine value proposition with particular clarity.
The Gig-Economy Degradation
Browse-and-book companion platforms epitomize sharing economy logic applied to domain where commodification destroys value. The extensive databases presenting hundreds of options create illusion of abundance while reducing human beings to profile photographs and brief descriptions. The algorithmic sorting by availability and price treats complex compatibility as simple preference matching. The volume orientation prioritizes transaction throughput over relationship quality. The result is efficient marketplace for adequate company while genuine connection requiring compatibility and accumulated understanding becomes accidental rather than systematic outcome.
This commodification manifests through predictable degradations. The platforms accept marginal providers to expand supply, treating basic attractiveness and availability as sufficient qualifications. The transaction processing eliminates matching intelligence that genuine compatibility requires, assuming clients can self-select effectively despite lacking information or frameworks for wise evaluation. The pricing pressure drives race toward lowest costs that incentivizes volume over quality, making sustained investment in any client relationship economically irrational for providers. The cumulative effect is marketplace offering abundant mediocre options while excellence proves rare and difficult to access reliably.
What Genuine Quality Requires
Quality companion services require approaches fundamentally incompatible with sharing economy logic. Rigorous selection accepting perhaps one applicant per twenty examined ensures genuine quality rather than adequate availability. Substantive consultation understanding client needs deeply enables matching based on actual compatibility rather than superficial criteria. Relationship cultivation across repeated engagements allows accumulated understanding creating progressively better experiences rather than perpetual restart of unfamiliarity. Absolute discretion through operational design rather than platform mediation protects privacy that professional contexts demand.
These approaches prove expensive and scale poorly, which explains their rarity in age of platform optimization. Yet for sophisticated clients seeking genuine connection rather than merely presentable company, the premium investment delivers categorically superior outcomes. The companion matched thoughtfully based on complete compatibility assessment rather than selected from browse interface provides incomparably better experience. The established relationship with accumulated understanding serves far better than attractive stranger requiring complete restart of relationship building. The genuine discretion through operational commitment rather than platform promises enables engagement without privacy concerns that platform mediation creates.
The Economic Rationality
Sophisticated analysis reveals premium companion services often prove more economically rational than commoditized alternatives despite appearing more expensive per transaction. The browse-and-book approach requires extensive trial-and-error finding compatible companions, with each unsuccessful attempt consuming resources while delivering disappointing experiences. The cumulative cost of repeatedly selecting inadequate options easily exceeds premium service investment while delivering substantially inferior outcomes. The time wasted evaluating options, the emotional energy managing disappointment, the opportunity cost of mediocre experiences accumulated across time all represent real costs that efficient transaction processing hides but does not eliminate.
Conversely, premium service investment in matching and relationship cultivation creates reliable positive outcomes justifying costs through actual value delivered. The thoughtful match based on genuine compatibility assessment succeeds far more reliably than random selection from large pool. The accumulated understanding across established relationships creates progressively better experiences that trial-and-error with new companions never achieves. The peace of mind from genuine discretion proves valuable beyond calculation for professionals whose reputations and privacy matter substantially. The total value analysis favoring premium services becomes obvious once hidden costs of commoditized alternatives receive proper accounting.
Given marketing claims, sophisticated clients require frameworks for distinguishing genuine premium services from commoditized alternatives performing premium positioning. Several indicators reliably reveal actual operational philosophy.
Selection Standards and Supply Constraints
Genuine premium services maintain selective standards that limit supply, accepting that serving fewer clients excellently proves preferable to serving many adequately. The service with extensive available inventory operating primarily through browse-and-book interfaces reveals volume orientation fundamentally at odds with quality maintenance. Conversely, services acknowledging supply constraints, maintaining waitlists rather than expanding indiscriminately, and accepting that not all prospective clients can be served demonstrate commitment to standards over volume that premium positioning requires.
This selectivity should manifest in provider representation as well. The service accepting most applicants who meet minimal standards reveals different philosophy than one maintaining acceptance rates indicating genuine selectivity. The sophisticated client recognizes that limited availability often signals appropriate investment in quality rather than representing artificial scarcity, while abundant immediate availability typically indicates either low demand or compromised standards enabling volume orientation.
Consultation Depth and Matching Intelligence
Premium services invest substantially in understanding client needs and matching based on genuine compatibility rather than self-selection from browsable options. The extensive consultation exploring preferences, past experiences, communication styles, and what actually creates satisfaction reveals different operational philosophy than quick intake forms feeding algorithmic sorting. The curated recommendations based on matching expertise demonstrate different value proposition than database access presuming client capability for wise independent selection.
This matching investment proves expensive and scales poorly, which is precisely why it signals genuine premium commitment. The service that cannot afford this investment because volume orientation demands efficient processing reveals commoditization despite premium pricing. The one that structures operations around thoughtful matching despite costs demonstrates understanding that genuine compatibility creates value justifying investment in achieving it reliably rather than leaving it to chance.
Relationship Orientation Versus Transaction Focus
Premium services structure for relationship continuity recognizing that accumulated understanding creates compounding value, while commoditized services optimize for transaction efficiency treating each engagement as isolated event. This orientation manifests through numerous operational choices: communication patterns emphasizing relationship maintenance rather than just transaction logistics, systems preserving relationship continuity rather than randomizing assignments, pricing structures rewarding loyalty rather than treating all transactions equivalently.
The sophisticated client evaluates whether service operations actually enable relationship value or merely claim to value relationships while structuring everything for transaction throughput. The genuine relationship orientation requires investments that transaction optimization would eliminate as inefficient, making it relatively easy to distinguish through attention to how services actually operate rather than what marketing materials claim.
The Mynt Models Difference
Our operational philosophy represents explicit rejection of sharing economy commodification in favor of premium service model recognizing that companion services fundamentally resist gig-economy treatment without catastrophic value degradation.
Selectivity Over Volume
We maintain rigorous selection standards accepting approximately one applicant per twenty examined despite business pressure toward expanding supply for increased transaction volume. This selectivity proves expensive and limits growth but enables standards maintenance that volume orientation would destroy. We recognize that in domain where human connection and genuine compatibility create all value, quality proves infinitely more important than quantity, that attempting to serve everyone means serving no one excellently, and that selectivity signals appropriate commitment to standards rather than representing artificial scarcity justifying premium pricing.
This commitment extends to client relationships as well. We decline engagements when appropriate matches cannot be made rather than connecting clients with adequate but not genuinely compatible companions. We maintain relationships with companions whose limited availability constrains our capacity rather than prioritizing those with maximum availability enabling transaction throughput. These choices prove economically suboptimal from volume perspective but serve quality maintenance that premium positioning requires and sophisticated clients deserve.
Matching Intelligence Over Browse-and-Book
We invest substantially in consultation and matching rather than presuming client capability for wise selection from browsable database. The extensive conversations understanding what actually creates satisfaction for you specifically, the matching based on genuine compatibility assessment rather than superficial criteria, the curated recommendations drawing on accumulated expertise about who actually works well together all represent expensive investments that gig platforms eliminate as inefficient. Yet these investments create the reliable positive outcomes that justify premium positioning through actual superior results rather than merely higher prices for equivalent service.
This matching intelligence improves across time as we develop deeper understanding of what works for specific clients and which companions possess complete packages serving particular needs excellently. The accumulated expertise creates compounding value that transaction-optimized platforms cannot replicate through algorithmic sorting, making our recommendations progressively more valuable across continued relationship rather than providing equivalent service to new versus established clients.
Relationship Cultivation Over Transaction Processing
We structure operations to enable relationship continuity and accumulated understanding rather than optimizing for transaction efficiency. The established relationships between clients and specific compatible companions create progressively better experiences as familiarity eliminates startup costs and accumulated knowledge enables increasingly precise calibration. We recognize this relationship value proves fundamental to genuine quality rather than representing inefficiency to be eliminated through provider interchangeability and transaction standardization.
This relationship orientation requires operational choices that volume optimization would treat as irrational: maintaining relationships with companions whose limited availability constrains capacity, facilitating ongoing arrangements between specific clients and companions rather than maximizing provider utilization through assignment optimization, investing in relationship maintenance rather than treating each engagement as isolated transaction. These choices prove expensive but deliver the compounding value that makes premium service genuinely superior rather than merely more expensive.
Genuine Discretion Through Operational Design
We treat discretion as operational imperative structuring systems to genuinely protect privacy rather than merely promising confidentiality while operating through platform mediation creating data trails and breach risks. This requires infrastructure investments and process choices that efficient platforms eliminate: minimal data collection rather than comprehensive tracking, manual coordination rather than algorithmic optimization, true separation between client identity and service delivery rather than platform-mediated transactions.
These operational commitments to genuine discretion prove expensive and prevent scaling efficiencies that commoditized platforms achieve through data utilization and automated processing. Yet for clients whose professional positions and circumstances make privacy non-negotiable, the investment delivers value that platform efficiency cannot match. We understand that discretion proves binary rather than scalar, that breaches create consequences far exceeding any cost savings from efficient data processing, and that genuine privacy requires operational commitment rather than marketing claims.
The Limits of Commodification
The sharing economy achieved genuine innovations in domains where commodification proved appropriate, where services involved standardized outputs requiring modest expertise and where relationship continuity provided minimal value. Yet the rush to apply gig-economy logic universally created catastrophic value destruction in domains where expertise, relationships, and sustained quality attention matter more than transaction efficiency. The race to commodify everything destroyed precisely what makes certain services valuable beyond basic functional delivery.
Some services fundamentally resist commodification without degradation. Those requiring genuine expertise accumulated through sustained investment, those where relationship continuity creates compounding value through accumulated understanding, and those where absolute discretion proves essential rather than merely desirable all demand approaches fundamentally incompatible with sharing economy optimization. In these domains, premium services maintaining selective standards, investing in relationships, and genuinely protecting privacy deliver categorically superior value despite appearing more expensive than commoditized alternatives whose hidden costs exceed premium service investment when properly accounted.
Companion services exemplify these dynamics with particular clarity. Browse-and-book platforms epitomize sharing economy degradation through volume orientation, algorithmic matching presuming simple preferences, and transaction efficiency eliminating relationship value. Premium alternatives investing in selectivity, matching intelligence, relationship cultivation, and genuine discretion deliver incomparably superior outcomes justifying costs through reliable quality that trial-and-error with commoditized options rarely achieves efficiently.
At Mynt Models, we operate according to premium service philosophy explicitly rejecting gig-economy commodification. Our selectivity, matching intelligence, relationship orientation, and genuine discretion prove expensive and scale poorly but deliver the genuine quality that sophisticated clients deserve and that sharing economy alternatives cannot replicate through efficient transaction processing. We serve those who recognize that not everything should be Uberized, that some domains require fundamentally different approaches, and that premium investment in genuine quality proves more economically rational than false economy of commoditized mediocrity.
Because the sharing economy’s rush to commodify everything destroyed value, in domains where human expertise and relationships actually matter.