Marketplaces Vs. Middlemen

The NYT covered a company called cater2.me the other day under the headline “The Middleman is Thriving on the Internet.”  Throughout the article the author refers to the company as an example of middlemen, including in the following:

The middlemen have put the chefs front and center with their clients. “We never white label a product,” says Mr. Lorton [co-founder].

While this is clearly terrific coverage for cater2.me (I don’t know the company or the founders) I dislike the characterization as “middlemen.”  That word no longer seems value neutral to me as it seems profoundly associated with traditional wholesalers and resellers who tended to abhor transparency (e.g., how much they were paying for the goods).

Most of these new companies that are emerging on the Internet are much closer in spirit to marketplaces than to traditional middlemen.  They tend to embrace transparency as a core operating principle (where does the food come from? what does it cost? how did it taste?).  In all likelihood they will also add much less of a surcharge than traditional middlemen.  I don’t know about cater2.me but zerocater adds only a 7% fee.

So while these companies may not be pure marketplaces, I think we should refer to them as either “structured marketplaces” or maybe just “intermediaries” but leave behind the baggage of “middlemen.”