The whole process of hiring a car is a brutal business.
Even if you have booked online, you still have to queue for ages while various punitive small print gets ‘explained’ and mysterious extra charges are applied.
I watched the queues at an airport hire centre recently and so today’s invention is an open-call market for hire cars.
Customers in longer queues would listen for realtime announcements from desks with fewer potential customers. These would say ‘hire from us instead and we will give you an x% price cut and deal with all the paperwork’.
As you near a desk, your susceptibility to a rival company’s discount decreases and so I believe that swapping of positions after announcements would be limited, not perpetually chaotic.
The customers would benefit directly from this red-blooded capitalism, as opposed to the current practices of shady cartels which seem only to make an empty show of competitive customer service.