Only the ones retired at relatively younger ages (or with relatively younger wives) were the ones that actually had school-age kids in the house for us few native kids to interact with.
It was easy to see as a preteen that there was good correlation between the early retirements and the ones that had started their own companies.
One of my buddy's dads had become an entrepreneur before he was able to finish college (who would have thought?) when he was transferring to an out-of-state university.
The problem was it should be possible for a student to physically move their meager belongings easily & cheaply if they are willing to do the labor themselves, especially since moving companies were very expensive/overpriced because they make most of their money providing the labor to begin with, and were designed for infrequent moves made by whole families.
What the students really could have used was a small cargo trailer that could be towed behind an ordinary car and be rented as needed for the one-way trip and dropped off at the destination. It was the only missing ingredient.
That's why they called their startup U-Haul.
There wasn't any competition at the time, not much disruption needed.
His dad was the one with the Rolls-Royce.
They are not ripe for disruption. The sector is flooded with competition, weak margins and high capital investment requirements. You better have something extraordinary, 10x better than what those giants can already deliver. Something that revolutionizes the industry.
I've personally had good luck with Penske. I had a weird experience with Ryder; for one they only rent to companies now, in theory; for two, inventory management was iffy, and I ended up with a (stinky) refrigerated truck instead of a regular truck, but I got it for the regular truck price, so hey. It was a busy time of year though, nobody else had box trucks like I needed either, apparently a local military base had rented most of them.
U-haul the storage company business? Probably Public Storage and a million other small operators.
Both pretty red markets, not sure how much capital you’d need to disrupt 1-2 cities, but that’s also U-hauls benefit of having a network of operators.
That doesn’t lead directly to “ripe for disruption.”
U-Haul and its several large and numerous small competitors is already highly optimized. It’s just not optimized the way tech nerds think about optimizing.
U-Haul is part of a larger company, Amerco. Compare their profits to a disruptor like Uber.
Since uber/lyft are more than that, tech isnt going to help much. Nobody buys vans to share. Maybe a pod designed for autonomous Tesla trucks, but people today do not own what will fit in one pod.
Perhaps permapod. You graduate frome college and are gifted a permapod that will always be available to store or move your stuff. Like in the old days when we stored all our files in email tarballs because the university did not enforce filesize limits on email.
There’s been a few things I almost bought if it weren’t for the fact it costs 10X more to ship than to to purchase the item, often for things I was shocked to hear were too big for parcel shipping. I even had people offering to let me use their docks and the shipping was way to much.
After that, there are other uber-like startups like Dolly that do the moving for you, and depend on destroying humans in the process (by literally injuring and killing and bankrupting them), and by extension democracy, humanity, etc.
Maybe a co-op model would be something cool because then, even if you end up failing, at least you tried.
the US government doesn't really lend to co-ops, but that's starting to change ever so slightly.
These little places are both one of the big advantages they have, and also the source of a disjointed, poor customer experience.
I still don't think you can disrupt them without their omnipresence. You could slowly build a competitor that focuses on the customer experience, but I don't see you unseating uhaul if that's your focus.
Their fleet is always newer though, but their boxes are higher up and less accessible as they are built atop a truck chassis instead of a van chassis.