My honest hope when I first heard of Uber was that it would give a huge wakeup call to the industry. Let's face it, America is a service industry and many of its services suck. The attitude is marginal at best, horrifying at worst. I hoped this level of customer scrutiny on performance would bring it up to the same level as in Japan.
I'm still hoping someone will make it happen. Or rather, perhaps an entire army of services will make it happen as we've seen, a de facto monopoly, yields terrible results.
Your point reminds me of that recent New Yorker article on learning [1]. In particular, the author points out how particularly niche industries (competitive sports, theatre, orchestras) have seen significant improvements in median performance over the past few decades. However, this has been limited mostly to fields where there are a small number of potential openings and a pool of candidates significantly larger than the number of openings. One of the big questions I think about sometimes is how America can push its citizens and employees to be a little more disciplined/dedicated (ahh not exactly clear how to phrase that..) purely through economic manipulation (and not cultural impetus a la Japan).
I'm still hoping someone will make it happen. Or rather, perhaps an entire army of services will make it happen as we've seen, a de facto monopoly, yields terrible results.