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Same. To get a gift certificate for a local taxi company I had to drive to their local office and use an atm to pay with cash

I forget the name of the company but four years ago, I was offered an interview at a taxi company to help make an app for hailing rides.

The job was in SF but they operated all over the US.

Flywheel?

I have seen similar things happening in a lot of countries outside of US. So maybe not as anomalous as you think

In various cities of Poland, the transformation was already halfway done before Uber. The main thing missing was an app, but arguably it would've happened without Uber.

There's an interesting market emerging providing solutions for mobile-first Uber-like services covering all three sides of the transaction: order taker/business, the agent, and the customer all get mobile apps to track in real time their service/good being delivered.

I came across it while talking with a bar fly at my neighborhood pub who owns and operates a freight brokerage, he's been getting sales calls from such companies and is about to make a switch to some platform that has fewer features than the one he uses now, but apparently has exactly the ones he needs (or as he put it "I can get by") and for cheaper.