Seems like Uber Eats really did save the company. Not with the original plan (leveraging idle capacity in the existing driver network) but instead by just discovering that urban customers are willing to be insane premiums (50%ish) to get food brought to them and that restaurants are too desperate for business to say no. Covid was probably the best thing that ever happened to Uber here, that’s when most people I know got addicted to food delivery.
I really wonder if that will continue or if there will be a change in consumer attitudes towards food delivery.
Anecdote of 1, but with inflation, even though I could technically afford it, I just can't bring myself to pay it anymore - it's just too insane. With delivery fees, up charges, taxes and tips, it's easy to pay like $40 bucks for a pretty simple meal where I live.
Especially since all I need to do is the teeniest amount of planning ahead, e.g. I'll just call ahead for pickup somewhere and plan it around times when I'm driving anyway.
Myself and most of my social circle happily used UberEats heavily before and during the pandemic. It was great to pay a little extra for delivery.
The pricing dark patterns and inflation have put a sharp end to that. We now only use it when in a real pinch (late-night revelers getting hangry) and when we do, it's almost guaranteed that the order will be messed up and late. Delivery from our favorite local Chinese restaurant is more than double what it costs for takeout. It's absolutely not worth it anymore.
I just checked prices near me and a Big Mac meal is $13.59 before taxes and fees, $19.19 after taxes and fees, before tip.
Looking at the McDonald's app it's $10.69 after taxes. Which is frankly still too expensive for a fast food meal, but Uber nearly doubles the price. The meal itself is even 30% more expensive on UberEats before all their other fees.
> The meal itself is even 30% more expensive on UberEats before all their other fees.
Likely because Uber is taking a 30% cut of the restaurant's take, so they increase menu prices to compensate.
I wish these companies would stop requiring restaurants give up a portion of their revenue. Uber should just have a larger service/delivery fee that's added on top. But I'm sure that's where customers would balk, seeing the actual real cost of delivery would scare too many people away.
Spending more time ordering, waiting, getting with customer support when things go south? I can go get my food without the extra cost and headache and that's what happened to our house.
We stopped ordering food once it got to be more of an inconvenience than picking it up.
Add to that if you have food restrictions, the $40 meal might not even taste worth it but you have to order for some reason (like not being able to cook on that day, etc.)
I do easily pay a 30% markup for the restaurant deliver me the food. Actually, I do that all the time. Since I don't like spending, I think it's perfectly normal for somebody to pay 50%.
But I completely refuse to use Uber Eats, because of its service quality.
In practice I don't see this as any different: the tip I'd give to waitstaff just ends up going to the driver. Not sure what you mean about service charges; I don't know of many restaurants that add in anything aside from tax before you get the bill.
I find the cost off putting. But when engaged with a production incident then it’s worth it to me.
And there’s ways to make it more palatable. For example, consider that the cost of delivery compared to my hourly income is still more favorable than a minimum wage worker getting McD or TacoBell, which they do all the time. Shrug.
I remember reading plenty of thought pieces a few years ago saying this was impossible, and that Uber was a house of cards gaining market share by subsidizing rides with investor money. That there were no economies of scale to bring costs down, etc., etc. I would love to see a "what we got wrong, and what we still have right" post from one of these people, but I won't hold my breath.
So you have a profitable company but at what cost? These drivers are working at slave wages unable to pay into any retirement funds or have health insurance.
In countries where there was a reasonable taxi system uber gutted them and went around regulations taking away the few guarantees the people had like a retirement and sick leave.
In the end we the tax payer have to help these people down the road when they get sick or old and all of this for the profit of a few share holders.
In Switzerland Uber still owes drivers half a billion Swiss Francs in unpaid wages/retirement and sick leave. Where do people think this missing money will come from when these people need it later on in life?
Some are happy for now because they largely aren't accounting for the deferred costs that are being pushed down the road - once you account for wear & tear on the car and associated maintenance and eventual new car purchases, their earnings are much less than what it seems in the short-term. Uber relies on drivers not running all the numbers before signing up.
This argument is demeaning to the drivers. They are grown adults who do their taxes. A reasonable prior would be that people who do something for a living tend to know more about the job than people who don’t. You can surely find examples of unprofitable Uber drivers who are driving in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong car, but that doesn’t make it the norm.
There’s a lot of discussion among the driver community about how to operate to optimize earnings. People are leasing or buying cars specifically to use them to drive for Uber and depreciation, maintenance, and fuel economy are all part of the calculation.
I dont think it's demeaning. Uber (and others) are not very upfront about the longterm costs and risks, causing (often) desparate people to make serious decisions without critical information. This mostly affects people who drive for these companies as their full time job.
They make it seem like it's a job you can do at your own convenience, but you can't actually do it like that and expect to make consistent money. All of them start penalizing you (by giving you fewer jobs in the future) if you turn down jobs for any reason, driving down their profitibility. It also looks like youre making more money than you are because you have to do all your own taxes (which is mostly just a hassle, but did blindside my poor friend who didnt know anything about taxes and had to go into debt to pay his taxes since he was living paycheck to paycheck).
And its very easy to not make the connection that driving all day for Uber et al increases chances of getting in a car accident, which will increase monthly insurance costs, not to mention car repairs and car maintainance from driving 8-12 hours a day most days of the week. And if your car ever needs to go into the mechanic for repairs (a famously slow process often times) thats lost wages every day youre without your car. It's like being a truck driver; Uber et al just move all the costs of fleet maintainance to the drivers, which really eats into what looks like a decent wage on the surface level.
Of course, there are going to be some people who do all the research and are ok with these risks, or game the system someone. But most people who do these driving jobs full time do it because they dont have a lot of other options, and dont bother to do all the in-depth research because "it looks easy" and they didnt have another readily available choice anyway. This isnt Uber's fault per se, but they benefit from it and do nothing to inform drivers of these risks.
(cite: have a friend who worked for all the delivery and ride share apps before losing his car and being too poor to buy a new one.)
Every Uber driver I’ve had in US and Canada are happy with driving for Uber. One guy I had the other day drives under as his second job and He says it pays his rent, his car payment and gas and his primary job goes straight to savings. The idea that these Uber drivers are slaves is a lie.
“Uber drivers are slaves is a lie” is a bit oversimplification, but the children in mines analogy doesn’t make sense. The idea is to get rid of child labour, not labour in general. It’s not like we don’t have adults working in mines. I know in Northern Ontario there are people who enjoy the job since it pays fairly well. I understand it’s physically excruciating, but consenting adults sign up for it.
In Uber’s case, consenting adults sign up for the terms in employee unfriendly environments (e.g. US). From what I’ve heard from my drivers, it’s either that or some other minimum wage job they don’t wanna do.
Every Uber driver I’ve had in US and Canada are happy with driving for Uber. One guy I had the other day drives under as his second job and He says it pays his rent, his car payment and gas and his primary job goes straight to savings.
I wrote a comment using similar logic. Every child I've met working in mines was happy to be able to provide money for their family.
The logic is bad. It's poor reasoning to say, "Every person I've met doing X is happy. Therefore letting people do X is a good thing." I was pointing that out.
Why would they do that? If you automate the drivers then suddenly Uber needs to buy and maintain a fleet of thousands or millions of autonomous vehicles and their costs balloon astronomically. Kiss any profit out the window for another decade at least.
The current system is GREAT for Uber. No vehicles to purchase, maintenance is the burden of the driver and you only need to cut off a small slice of your profits for the driver in order to keep the whole thing going. If you need more profits you simply raise rates or lower driver pay.
They invested a tonne of money in self-driving vehicles. If they didn't intend to utilise them then what on earth were they doing, lighting money on fire for fun?
Weird, I remember a lot of talk around that time of self-driving cars being their future and the reason why they had such a sky-high valuation. Guess I missed this news mid-Covid
Those don't exist. No one is taking their self driving car to work and then lending it out to Uber. Not to mention if a company like GM gets their self-driving tech off the ground, why wouldn't they just spin up an app and beat Uber at their game?
> No one is taking their self driving car to work and then lending it out to Uber.
To the contrary, tons of people will be doing that.
There's going to be a big group of people who logistically need "their own car" for various reasons (live out in the suburbs, need stuff in a locked trunk, can't risk a delay in getting to work, etc.) but couldn't be happier to make money on it by lending it out as a taxi downtown during business hours. Or when they're traveling for a week, or whenever.
Especially when you don't even need to worry about messes/damage because internal cameras will catch and bill whoever was responsible, and the car will drive itself to the nearest garage for cleaning/repair.
Just as we now have hotels and AirBNB, I totally foresee different self-driving taxi services that are either fleet-owned or consumer-shared. I can't imagine why this wouldn't happen.
> To the contrary, tons of people will be doing that.
Yeah, until they get their car back and there's puke in the backseat, which requires more than a basic cleaning to get the smell out (Yes, uber charges a fee for puking, but no it doesn't cover a proper detailing that'll get the smell out). Or they find a bunch of little dings on their car from slamming the door into an unretracted seat belt. There's also the vegan pleather that'll rapidly start to deteriorate from passenger traffic that's 20x more than intended etc.
Some may still do it of course, but I don't believe most will want to destroy their car's value from the depreciation that uber will cause.
The Uber's I take, the cars seem in perfectly fine condition. I've never smelled puke in a backseat ever, so whatever cleaning is happening, is working fine.
> but I don't believe most will want to destroy their car's value from the depreciation
It's simple math. If you're making much more money from renting it out than depreciation is causing, then it's an economic no-brainer.
This shifted from owning to riding. As a rider, I agree, most of the Ubers I've taken have been just fine, though not particularly clean, but fine nonetheless. Still, the cars are in far worse condition than a similarly aged car, and not something I'd personally accept as an owner for a few bucks. Again it's not just puke, but the tons of wear and tear that happens during ride sharing.
Uber churns through 96% of their drivers per year, so it's clearly not a no-brainer for the vast majority of them [1].
Self driving cars may help uber and its ilk lower their fleet costs if and when they get them, but a relatively insignificant portion of people will be willing to loan out their personal vehicle to them.
> and not something I'd personally accept as an owner for a few bucks.
Fine, that's you. But it's not a few bucks, it's probably going to add up to thousands of dollars if you do it regularly.
> Uber churns through 96% of their drivers per year
That has nothing to do with car condition and everything to do with people changing income sources.
> but a relatively insignificant portion of people will be willing to loan out their personal vehicle
You have no basis for saying it will be relatively insignificant. People tend to be incentivized by money, that's the whole basis of microeconomics. If people can make back a decent portion of the cost of their car by renting it out when they're not using it, of course it's going to become a significant proportion of people.
I don't see how you can argue against something that's such a no-brainer. You seem to have the luxury of allowing a fear of small amounts of wear-and-tear to override any monetary concerns; but for many people, the additional income is going to take priority because they need the money end-of-story.
> You have no basis for saying it will be relatively insignificant.
People can already make a few bucks by letting strangers use their car on services like Turo, and it is relatively insignificant. That self driving capabilities will change that is a baseless assumption.
No, it's a realistic assumption because currently there's enormous friction in both getting the car to the person who needs it, as well as installing systems for electronic access.
Self-driving capabilities will get rid of the friction, and so the market will take off.
If we followed your logic, then AirBNB would never have happened because short-term rentals of people's homes and rooms were "relatively insignificant" in the 1990's. But of course it did, because AirBNB removed friction and provided a platform for reputation management and dispute resolution.
You don't want to rent out your personal car, I get that. But tons of other people prefer to make money instead.
I know multiple people that drive uber and go to late night drunk spots then drive crazy with the explicit goal of getting the passenger to puke for the fee uber gives. You'd be surprised by what people will put up with for some quick cash I guess.
I use GM's cars all the time. Pretty good in SF. They're slower but sometimes when you're not time sensitive, it's nice to grab the ride since they don't cancel or anything.
The first ride was novel. Everything after felt so routine I didn't even look at the road. As far as my girlfriend and I were concerned, we got in and then talked for a while and hung out and then got out elsewhere.
Perhaps some day we will live in a society that does not allow exploitation because we can’t think of what those who are exploited would do if not for the exploitation.
Well goal of any company is to increase profits, not to increase the wellbeing of its employees. So I’m sure they’re not worried about making people miserable or being a public burden.
It was subsidising rides, just look at the steady increase in prices, reduction in quality, while the drivers are still paid peanuts. Is this a sustainable model? We don't know, it's the first time ever a profit has been posted, what was the cost of acquiring this profit? Will it drive ridership down (due to aforementioned quality and price issues)?
You are expecting that because a profitable quarter happened, that it will continue to happen. It might as well not if the changes to bring this profit create a lot of churn, anecdotally I've been seeing this churn happen in real time around my social circle in different countries. I think we all need to wait and see what's the trend instead of jumping into "you naysayers were all wrong, haha"-rhetorics.
Maybe wait and see if it really is a sustainable business first. Making a profit for 1 quarter after 50 quarters of loses whilst having over $9 billion of debt isn't strong proof that it will be profitable from now on. The numbers are positive though, it doesn't seem to be just a bookkeeping profit as they have a good rise in revenue & use. Personally I think if they keep running a tighter ship than they did pre-pandemic they might make a sustainable profit. Using profits for buybacks and dividends will be more attractive to shareholders than paying off debts as that's what most have been waiting for.
Is a profit of $394m one quarter sufficient indication that this kind of criticism was wrong? As far as I recall, Uber lost quite a bit more money than this each year since 2016 so they'd have to repeat this a few times if we're to believe this is them hitting long-term profitability.
Also my memory of Uber critiques weren't that they'd never be profitable, but that as a business they aren't quite as unique and untouchable as their valuation suggested (which, given the number of competing companies that operate in my city, is correct).
I don't think the claim would be about quarterly profits. It has had profitable quaters before.
Consider, eg,
>Uber on Tuesday posted a profit of $394 million during the second quarter, compared with a loss of $2.60 billion a year earlier
This really doesn't answer or refute any questions around their business model.
The final question is: what's the moat?
It's trivial to create these "automate contract labour" apps, and many now exist. It seems an industry designed to reach, at its height, tiny profit margins.
I suspect regulation is heading in the direction of making it easier for people to move their data between apps too -- if that happens, the "social-data" moats of these bizes will disappear.
They'll be left with IP that teens could compete with
I mean, it's a 2-sided market. That's inherently a moat.
There's a reason why it took Amazon to displace Ebay, and Facebook to displace Craigslist. It's a very expensive and difficult market to get into.
> It seems an industry designed to reach, at its height, tiny profit margins.
There are plenty of industries like that. Grocery, for example. That doesn't mean that the business is a bad one by itself.
> I suspect regulation is heading in the direction of making it easier for people to move their data between apps too -- if that happens, the "social-data" moats of these bizes will disappear.
IMO, that wouldn't change anything.
If I could export all of my Facebook data (maybe I can, I haven't checked), it wouldn't cause me to abandon the platform - I'm there because of the other people on the platform.
Riders use Uber because it has the drivers. And the drivers use Uber because it has the riders. The ability to export ride history or reputation isn't going to change that fact.
You're not on Uber because of all the other users. Heck, you're not really there because of most the drivers, you're only there because there are enough drivers such that requesting a ride won't be a hassle. It's quite different from Facebook (I think WhatsApp in Europe is a better example these days) where you just expect everyone, including somebody you just met, to be.
> And the drivers use Uber because it has the riders.
You make it sound exclusive, but I've seen many drivers use a few different apps at the same time, often with different phones. You just need some temporary incentives and you've bootstrapped your network, because as explained above, the problem is only the initial bootstrapping.
Concrete example: two months ago I hadn't heard of "Free Now". I've now used it twice in two different European countries, last time because Uber was exactly four times as expensive (maybe that explains their new profits? They just raised their prices, hoping users won't notice?). I'm not often in a taxi so this is just anecdotal, but there's very little friction when switching to another service.
There's no foundational IP at uber that prevents a competitor from copying them (and many do), but the network effect is a non-trivial moat in itself, particularly for a two-sided market like that. Ebay has no foundational IP either, but it has been the marketplace for online auctions for a long time because of that network effect.
It's so easy that there's like 5 or 6 of them that I know of in Romania alone and drivers will swap between 2-3 of them every day. So yeah, it's pretty trivial. While there's no reason to start one if you can't undercut Uber or whoever's already cutrate prices, that doesn't mean Uber has a lot of room to increase prices/profits.
It is pretty peak HN to assume the world is only the US. Outside the US there are plenty of taxi apps. So, yes, we know from evidence that they are easy to build. The trick is getting customers and drivers for your app.
Do this exercise. Pick any country. See how many taxi apps available. They may not be called Uber and Lyft, but I bet there are only a handful at best, anywhere you pick (see Careem). That's the nature of the business.
It's not easy if you want one app that deals with a market containing many different legal jurisdictions with widely varying tax and safety and labor and consumer protection requirements. Plus different countries might need different payment system and need localization to different languages.
But if the market you want to deal with is just one city or metro area or similar then it is not a difficult app.
> Just another HN Tuesday I see. It’s so easy that it’s still duopoly in US since the inception of the market.
I'd suggest that this is not necessarily related to how hard the tech side is. Both major incumbents have (until now!) been throwing away VC money without any clear path to profitability, so there hasn't exactly been much of an incentive to build yet another money pit.
>> that Uber was a house of cards gaining market share by subsidizing rides with investor money
> they were
They no longer are, and they don't lose customers. So no house of cards, because they didn't collapse when subsidy disappeared.
> the criticism I heard was, at then-current prices, _profits_ wouldn't come
Turn out users don't seem to mind. Bookings is back to the pre-pandemic level. Food delivery is at the record.
> turns out they had to severely jack up prices to profit, proving such criticism correct
They are not more expensive compared to the competition. So no, the criticism isn't correct, unless you're saying consumers are stupid. If anything they were able to control cost and increase booking. People come to them despite the increased price. Keep in mind also that they didn't have major layoff like other tech companies.
> > turns out they had to severely jack up prices to profit, proving such criticism correct
> They are not more expensive compared to the competition. So no, the criticism isn't correct
They are more expensive than they were. So yes, the criticism is correct.
Price vs. competition is a red herring, we're discussing if the prices they initially had could be sustained in the long term while still generating a profit.
Turns out, they couldn't, hence why they were jacked way up
How much Uber took in from the IP isn't relevant - the point is the investors could sell on the open market at the current valuation, which was a higher (in some cases much higher) valuation than what they invested at.
I think I see it's last pre IPO valuation was 62 billion? It IPOed at 82 billion valuation, currently sitting at 95 billion. Late round investors maybe could have done better investing elsewhere but this is a success story. I'm sure many investors have divested some shares post IPO at a profit.
If the investors have turned bearish on Uber they have give or take 10 years to sell that "funny money" at a profit. I'm sure many have and again, my primary point is that for our industry, for the large range of possible outcomes, Uber is a success. Once you understand that, a lot of decisions VCs make and certainly did make in the low interest rate environment from 2010-2022 make a lot more sense.
Funny money != cash, once you understand that, the demise of a lot of these "successful" companies like Uber will make a lot more sense.
Uber is not profitable until money out > money in, period (and we are forgiving them interest + inflation).
Even if a couple investors were able to flip the stock and made some money out of what seems to be a scam with extra steps, that still doesn't make Uber profitable, and they're still far from being a success, IMO.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Waymo/google decide they just want to remain on the tech side, and avoid all of the headaches that the operations side brings.
Waymo and Uber have a partnership. Soon in Phoenix, when you call an Uber, you might get a waymo car.
We might see a three group market:
Waymo, Cruise, etc provide the driver. Uber, Lyft provide the platform. Hertz, Avis, Enterprise manage the physical cars/cleaning/etc.
I still think this is true and this result is basically random noise. If they do this for another 20 years and erase the $30 billion of operating losses they've incurred up to this point, maybe I'll change my mind and do a lengthy postmortem on why I was wrong.
Wow, I've been a consistent Uber-bear since 2016, so am pretty surprised by this. Only another 30 years or so of profits like this to repay their accumulated loss!
it's proof they subsidized, past-test, 7 years ago.
its really weird to point to what uber did more than 7 years ago as non public company with no public reporting requirements, and try to use that to refute publicly reported numbers from today.
They have lost $31.5B since 2014 and turned a profit just now. Where did that money go? That one Beyonce party, or it still might have had something to do with their main thing, the rides?
What exactly would "subsidize" mean in this context? If they're charging way less than they need to break even isn't that technically a subsidized ride?
Don't forget it also has to repay not just the cash losses but the opportunity cost from the money you could've made by just parking it in an index fund instead of investing in Uber. When you factor that in, it's probably more like 50 years before Uber actually becomes "a good investment".
Uber was a good investment for all of their private investors until SoftBank. For many of those investors, it was the best investment they ever made (see Benchmark, for example). For very late stage private investors who entered when the company was valued around $50B, it's more complicated and depends on the entry and exit timing. But rest assured that the returns to all investors who bought their stake before 2015 greatly exceeded their opportunity cost.
The one annoying part about the Uber quarterly report is that there is a huge amount of variability coming from the "other income" part, which is basically where it accounts for it's investments in Didi, Zomato, Grab and other ride hailers.
I really hate this trend of divesting operations by taking an equity stake(remember the Shopify logistics sale to flexport for equity ?Many other examples) in the buyer. You haven't gotten rid of the unprofitable operation, you have just given it to another company for an ownershipstake instead of cold hard cash, so now the variability/loss from operations gets moved to other income, and instead of loosing actual money you are holding unrealized losses on your stock investments.
These equity stakes also present potential upside. For Uber, the equity stakes in Didi, Zomato, Grab and others provide them with exposure to these markets without bearing the operational risks and costs. If these companies thrive, Uber will profit from the increase in value of its stake. Strategic partnerships can bring in additional benefits.
Still, I agree that this trend does complicate the analysis of reports. It also raises questions about the transparency and predictability of future earnings, as these are tied to the performance of other companies that investors may not fully understand or have visibility into. As always, it's a delicate balance between potential upside and added complexity.
No matter what, I say go Uber! Uber-like services are desperately needed in countries like Turkey. Taxi monopoly has an impossible to break grip on the state. Many state officials own medallions that were granted more than 30 years ago and owners still obtaining substantial money from taxi drivers. They block Uber like systems immediately. They are above law. It is so ridiculous you have to live there to comprehend the scale of this utter BS.
In Mexico there are areas where taxi drivers are violent towards Uber cars and their passengers.
It's a very common occurence in Cancún for example where taxi drivers are a mafia (literally, they are known to work with the narcos). It's so common, that in some cases taxi drivers have attacked non Uber cars by mistake. This is from a couple of days ago (in Spanish):
Pretty much just an accounting trick. From their prepared statement:
> During Q2, we recognized a $386 million unrealized pre-tax gain related to the
revaluation of our equity investments. Our GAAP net income may continue to see swings from
quarter-to-quarter due to the large size of equity stakes on our balance sheet
Take out the swing in equity valuation and their net income for the quarter was <$10 million.
I exclusively use Bolt now, since Uber has become a total shitshow with drivers constantly cancelling or driving in circles and waiting for you to cancel.
Im more happy to pay a few euros more to get a reliable and decent service.
Uber was good in the beginning but since 2-3 yrs its a disaster. I cant see how it can survive here in Europe in the long run unless they fix a lot of issues.
At least it has made the taxi companies wake up and embrace app based rides.
Despite operating for 14 years (1) and $51,488,000,000 of effective capital investment (2) Uber STILL loses money. The quarterly operating profit they reported is not GAAP net income.
(1) Founded in 2009
(2) $40,550,000,000 of paid-in capital and $10,938,000,000 of long-term debt, from 12/31/2022 balance sheet
Look at the balance sheet 10K and 10Q filings. Additional Paid-In Capital is basically all the accumulated equity investment. Add in the current long-term debt. That gives you an approximate number for the investment capital to date (though it doesn't include any long-term debt that was repaid).
I'm curious where this goes long term. Right now, in many areas, the money earned as an Uber driver is low. Consequently, the notion of being an Uber driver has shifted from "viable full time job with lots of flexibility" to "something you can do for extra money but cannot rely on to pay bills". As customers I'd expect us to continue to see the prices and quality of ride share to down - and many of us will revert back to traditional taxis.
Because I can jump in one right as I exit the airport and get to my hotel cheaper than it costs to get an Uber that I have to wait X minutes for - and in LAX' case take a bus to get to. Just as an example.
Airports and taxis here have agreements where the airport gives them a fixed ___location in front of the exit. Just makes my point about the taxi mafia.
But then, does that happen anywhere else but airports and maybe some places downtown where the taxi mafia colluded with city officials as well?
I despise Uber Eats, but almost exclusively use Uber when traveling. I have noticed a major degradation in service in every city I've been to since the pandemic, but I continue using Uber because it's the only service available that provides a similar user experience in every city I go to, even internationally, with the ability to integrate with the expense system at my company on business trips. That said, it's /very/ obvious that drivers are being squeezed and in return are becoming hostile towards riders/customers.
I never put up with it, because among other things my company will not re-imburse me for paying extra cash to a driver for them to do their job out of the app. In the US, I have Lyft as a backup, but local options are so fragmented globally that I am often stuck w/ Uber, or I just order a taxi. Europe is getting doable with taxis, but outside the US/Europe, I just have to wait them out. It's really disappointing how many drivers essentially try to extort drivers through Uber now, when this was unheard of in the past. The reason I started using Uber in the first place is that it was less likely to result in driver extortion like local taxis.
It's commonplace for drivers to text you /through the app/ demanding you cancel if they don't want to take the ride after they accepted it (they get penalized if they don't accept riders when they're set to accept rides). Outside the US, they act like they don't understand English and if you start writing in the local language they curse at you. If they do show up, they demand extra money in cash or they won't drive off. Once they get marked in app as having arrived, /you/ as a rider get penalized if you take too long to get in the car and start the ride.
Inside the US, drivers will just tell you to cancel and they'll stay parked in the cell phone lot at the airport until you cancel. They often actively enjoy /not/ taking the ride, because as long as the app thinks they're in transit and you as a rider cancel, they don't get penalized and don't have to do more work. Had one driver literally call me and tell me they were on their lunch break and would come get me in an hour and if I didn't want to wait I needed to cancel. Uber changed their policies and app and now a rider cancellation automatically charges a $5 fee /as soon/ as the ride is accepted, regardless of circumstances, and the fee is partially paid to the driver. So drivers literally get paid to fuck with you. Uber support is also useless, because when you get credited in the app, the credits don't get automatically used and there's no clear way to apply them when scheduling the ride. I have ~$200 in credits that continue to build until they eventually expire and have never been able to successfully use them.
Since I mostly travel for work and Uber is tied into our company expense system, at some level I don't care. I'll use what the company tells me to and what they pay for, but if I travel personally I have stopped using Uber in favor of Lyft in the US, and local options/taxis elsewhere.
Oh, if the ride is cancelled by either party, you can't rate the driver. So good luck 0-starring all the extorters.
My son had this (accept, then try to get him to cancel by never communicating nor picking him up) happen to him before a flight out of SD. He almost missed the flight. I just deleted the Uber app from my phone.
I've never used Uber, so I'm curious: Don't you have a "contact support for this ride" option somewhere? If they can't mediate a two-sided market, they're no better than having a phonebook of recommended drivers in each city
Yes, there is a support option in app w/ chat support. It's generally unhelpful, and you have to be extremely demanding to get them to take any action at all. The "support" for Uber is basically designed to tell you to f-off as politely as possible.
A few years ago it seemed everyone in London used Uber the whole time to get around. It was pretty cheap and convenient.
Nowadays very few people I know seem to use Uber (and the equivalents) on even an occasional basis. It's a lot more expensive than it used to be and you just can't rely on it any more.
I tried to get one last month for the first time in ages (from a not particularly out-of-way ___location) and no driver was around to accept my booking. It took over an hour of trying and I eventually managed to get a Bolt. It was a painful experience.
In a way it's a good thing - I don't think it's sustainable to have everyone be driven around in private. vehicles in European cities, especially when there's often very good public transit available. There was a point when Uber usage was simply a lazy habit for people. Although I accept that for some people and situations it is the best option (disabled, lots of luggage etc)
> In a way it's a good thing - I don't think it's sustainable to have everyone be driven around in private
I know people who haven't bought a car because they just use Uber. It was an incredible advancement, but all these services will regress to the mean. In London, TfL, their regulator and competitor, is definitely not a fan, which must be expensive, and having to provide essentially full time jobs to their drivers (who signed up with no such guarantees) is always going to raise internal expenses through the roof.
The person who suffers is the customer, who has to look elsewhere. The one positive is that at least Uber has forced local competition to join the 21st century with app payments, driver photos, ___location tracking, app payments, etc.
I would argue it’s not regression, that it’s normalization. ZIRP is on pause and things need to be profitable right now, I don’t see this as a bad thing in any way.
If the business model doesn’t work, it shouldn’t have money thrown at it.
How is it to societies benefit if someone doesn't buy a car? It could be if someone drives less, but if they replace a car with a car driven by another person, it seems to be even worse.
Society doesn't have that car taking up space on the side of a public road all day, for one thing. Less parking, narrower roads, smaller parking lots, things are closer together, things are more walkable, we burn less fossil fuel, people get more exercise, people are healthier, people are happier/more productive.
I think the main benefit is that someone who doesn't own a car isn't particularly inclined to fight for more spending on car-dependent infrastructure. They'll probably be more likely to support more public transit, because using a car feels expensive.
Yeah, definitely. Right now most are still in the "can't imagine not having a car, and want to make sure that that car can take them everywhere" state of mind. If more people walked/could walk, maybe we'd prioritize making places actually nice to walk, instead of super uncomfortable, right next to loud speeding cars.
I was looking at our local zoning laws, and it doesn't look like you're allowed to make a non-car-dependent mixed-use development, thanks to density restrictions and parking requirements. Hopefully as sentiment changes, we can change more of those zoning laws.
That's how a society set up for mostly taxis could be better. But if we get to include the benefits of walkable societies and redoing all existing infrastructure in our arguments, surely going to mass transit is better still? And, unlike repaving all the roads to be narrower, it's something that can be added on top of existing infrastructure.
Yeah, no argument, I'd love more light rail/streetcars. If people are less dependent on personal cars, they'll be more willing to develop toward that pattern with mass transit/small bike/pedestrian roads/etc.
If you don't buy a car you don't need parking space and more likely to use public transport (most beneficial), allows better urban planning. And if everyone buys cars manufacturing is more damaging to the environment
If the same number of car miles are being taken then it is a wash on the manufacturing side, but you are totally correct that car parking is a terrible waste of space. Of course the biggest blight is the roads themselves and car sharing does little to help that. In fact it may be even worse as the drivers have to make the trip between the fares that wouldn’t exist with privately owned and parked vehicles.
> Of course the biggest blight is the roads themselves and car sharing does little to help that
I did not mention car sharing. I can understand taxis but totally don't get people using car sharing, seems like the worst of public transport and cars. You don't own it, who knows who used it and how (in privacy) and you still have to, well, do the driving yourself?
Taxis are better than carsh also because they help offboard people from being used to having to drive so they are more OK using public transport too generally leading to better urban planning
> If the same number of car miles are being taken then it is a wash on the manufacturing side
Not if some cars do 90% of total miles and others do 10% but still have to be manufactured due to higher demand
Car sharing is great. Sometimes you need to go somewhere for a couple hours and hiring a driver becomes very expensive. Or you need to transport something.
And I hate to break it to you but whatever you are imagining happened in these shared cars, the city bus has seen worse. Far worse. And you still get on those so, maybe not a big deal at all.
Idk where you live but all buses I have seen have no expectation of privacy, a bunch of people sitting inside, a driver and usually cameras. If you do... things... you must be insane and also cops meet you at the next stop.
If you live in suburban wasteland with crappy transportation then sure you need a car and I am sorry if you have to share one. But here in the city carsh is pointless. Taxi/bus/rail is for people who can do something better with their time than operate machinery.
It is interesting to me that you think that stops some people, or that an overly adventurous encounter is the worst thing to happen to a seat.
You may also genuinely be near a nicer and better maintained metro. Car sharing tends to be be much cleaner than the buses I've been on and biking about the same speed.
Also, here in the city, what bus is going to take you to your door the one time a year you need to move a piece of furniture? I've got some electronics to recycle - you're going to suggest the bus?
Oh but maybe thats the piece you are missing; car sharing is great because I can use a car the few times a year I need one without a hassle. Its not for just getting around, got feet for that.
In the city public transport gets me within 2-3 minutes of walking to the destination... if you need to minimize "walking" at all costs sure you'd hate transport but if I don't see why you would do that, unless you are disabled
Regarding car sharing: The whole the point is that I don’t have to own, maintain and insure it myself. For some people it just doesn’t make sense given how little they drive and car sharing enables them to do that once every blue moon trip without everything else that comes with a car.
The things you mention are not the reason people prefer cars over transit. I think people prefer cars because of the point-to-point transport, the lack of stops unrelated to them, and the lack of a set schedule. All those apply to both private and shared cars.
How is it to society's benefit if someone doesn't buy a [MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING MACHINE]? It could be if someone [IMAGES MAGNETIC RESONANCE] less, but if they replace a [MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING MACHINE] with a [MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING MACHINE] [OPERATED] by another person, it seems to be even worse.
I didn't know people needed an MRI twice a day to be able to work, or to use an MRI to enjoy a concert or a dinner out. If people need that many MRIs, maybe everyone should get their own!
Taxis are generally more efficient vehicles for town driving; e.g. a Prius. When people own their own car they have to make it work for everything they need it for, so it might be a diesel or petrol car, or larger, or anything else. Replacing that multi-use car with a Prius that's running on electric for half the journey is a good idea.
Having a car means you travel more. If enough people don't have cars, it strengthens local economies and smaller businesses instead of everyone driving to Walmart at the edge of town.
I can imagine this working fine in a world of families where one person works and the other stays at home, as there's time to walk to the shops once a day for different things, to avoid carrying a week's worth of shopping by hand.
In a world where both have to have full-time jobs, it's harder to see how this would work. And I grew up in a time where we still had a local butcher and baker (candlesticks were sadly out of fashion), and the way we did it was a) live really close to them, and b) not get everything for the week on the same shop.
It doesn't have to be specialist shops like butchers and bakers. I have three grocery stores within a 10-minute walk that all manage to sell everything I need, from shampoo to fresh produce.
Buying a week's worth of groceries of any kind is very weird to me. The only place where I have ever bought that much is at Costco, and only because they force you to buy in huge quantities (except for electronics and standard sized individual bottles of wine and liquor). I cancelled my membership when I realized how much of a hassle it is to spend my weekend time going out there and waiting in long checkout lines vs just stopping by my local grocery store on the way back from work twice a week.
I had the same experience. It used to be quite convenient, but not anymore. A few weeks ago I tried to get from Shoreditch to Canary Wharf during a normal workday. Used both Bolt and Uber, took half an hour to get a car while both promised pickup within 3 minutes...
I was never a huge Uber fan but would use them occasionally, especially when I needed to take a trip that did not start or end in zone 1. These days? I ended up nuking the app from my phone because the service had become useless. Back to black cabs (and tube/bus) for me.
Last time I was in London I had the worst time with Uber--I could always get a car, but they could never find me then they'd call me and it was always a mess trying to find one another. I eventually just switched to using the black cabs and that worked a lot better
edit: you should leave it alone, though. People only move from mad because they misunderstood the joke to even madder for you not making the joke easier to get. They won't relax if you keep digging.
Once again, please stop insinuating things that are a. untrue and b. you cannot possibly verify (were you in the uber rides with me?) just because of your preconceived notions and biases that you'd like to be true.
Looking at rest of his comments in this thread, I think it's pretty clear that while he's half-joking, he does seriously believe that I'm somehow turning people into "racists".
I'm not sure why you're so keen on "proving" that I'm "turning" people into racists. You have a fixed conclusion that you have already made, and are grasping at straws to reach that conclusion. Really bringing down the conversation for everybody here.
For what it's worth, I mostly just stare out the window in taxis/uber drives.
Your words could be misinterpreted as meaning that the journey with you talking to the driver is what makes them racist, and so I made a joke referring to that.
I don't understand the dichotomy between Uber/app and Taxis, why not have both and get the worst of both!
In my country, Gojek (duopoly with Grab) partners with a taxi company. Until recently, when you order Gojek, they always try to match you with a taxi first.
The problem is, the taxi drivers don't feel like they care about the rating system, so most of the time they reject you or ignore you. I can go through a dozen(!!!) rejections before getting one (non-taxi).
As a long time and heavy Uber user, I don't find this surprising.
The service has gone completely down hill for me the last few months. The app is the buggiest it has ever been. I've been overcharged more time than I can count, and customer service is practically impossible to actually get in touch with. Even when I do get in touch with customer service, I can usually only extract an automatic token refund. The quality of rides, both vehicles and drivers, has drastically declined in my area. I frequently speak with drivers and they seem, anecdotally, the least happy with Uber that I've observed thus far.
With UberEATS, hidden fees and markup have gotten so big that most orders are > 2x the cost at the actual restaurant (for example a pickup order) and this is constant with order size. For example, a $25 order ends up costing over $50 on UberEATS, and this is before any tip. A dark pattern I frequently encounter is a "buy one get one free" or other promotion that adds extra stuff to your cart, and does indeed discount the item, but still charges you fees on the cost of that item. For example, a "free" $10 item can easily add more than $10 to the bill (especially if you tip). This is obviously better than a $10 item costing you $20, but it's a dark pattern nonetheless. And of course, the tips and fees are always calculated "before discounts" which makes the default tip bananas, especially when I'm redeeming credit from customer service.
The priority delivery fee is basically mandatory if you want warm food, otherwise your order always gets delayed until another order can be delivered alongside it. Delivery drivers frequently drive for multiple apps at the same time, meaning delivery estimates are frequently missed due to the driver going way out of their way to do some other task, before or after picking up your food.
All in all, I can feel where the corners are being cut, where the customers and drivers and restaurants are being squeezed, and so I'm not surprised to see them post a profit.
Is this sustainable? I sincerely doubt it. It's a race to the bottom. It always was.
Last time I used Uber Eats they had a 2 for 1 burger like deal. The order total was X, but after checking out, the coupon wasn’t applied and my credit card was over charged. I was basically charged double what the invoice said
Impossible to reach customer service, I just issued a charge back. (It wasn’t about the money really, it was the principle.) Then customer service did reach out to me, and asked me to undo the charge back in exchange for a gift card. I said no, I just want a refund of the difference of what I was supposed to be charged. They wouldn’t do it for some reason.
From what I can tell, this kind of gaslighting mistreatment has become common in this market. The delivery app race to the bottom has nearly brought us to that final destination.
We've used the "Caviar" delivery app since moving to SF, since the deliveries are always direct so the food shows up fresh and hot. Caviar was bought by DoorDash a while ago, and DoorDash heavily promotes the "direct delivery" feature, specifically upcharges all Caviar orders for the direct delivery, and will even notify you that fee is being increased because a restaurant is more than 15ish minutes away.
At some point in the last few months DoorDash simply stopped upholding that claim despite billing for it. If they are sufficiently busy, your order will be merged with a regular DoorDash order and go to one or more other addresses. It's a remarkably brash example of corporate gaslighting to see a delivery screen proudly advertising that "your order is going directly to you" literally directly underneath text that says "your dasher is completing another order nearby first."[0]
Each time this happens I open a chat with support and they explain ah yes, direct delivery is guaranteed on caviar, but sometimes your delivery will be batched instead. Then they give me a credit. For some funny reason DoorDash does not automate the process of refunding the fee specifically advertised for direct delivery when they opt to just not deliver directly anyway.
That's not even "weird" behavior, it's just blatantly false advertising. How come they can get away with this?
I think you are misunderstanding the screenshot you shared. What the screenshot shows is that your driver has accepted the order you placed but is currently in the process of finishing a previous delivery, similar to an Uber driver accepting a ride while they are driving someone else to their destination. It doesn’t mean your order is being “merged”, once your driver gets to your order they will go directly from the restaurant to you.
I am not misunderstanding the screenshot I shared. When I took that screenshot the driver had already visited the restaurant and picked up my order, and then gotten off the highway a couple stops early for this delivery. Hence why I had reopened the app, I had seen them picking up the order 20+ minutes earlier and was wondering where it was.
This has happened to me multiple times, and when I posted that elsewhere online I confirmed it happens to other people.
Like I said in the comment, I’ve brought this up to support each time it happens and they’ve described it as standard practice for DoorDash to violate its promises and then refunded me the delivery fee. I am truly confused how you read that comment and came away with this theory - do you work with DoorDash? Can you ask someone there to stop doing this?
That sounds like a future class action lawsuit where everyone gets a $5 coupon, and the initial complainant and the lawyers get millions. Maybe if you get a law firm to go after them, you'll get more than $5?
Are these services really needed in SF? I live in a smaller city than SF and have plenty of restaurants that either I live close enough to where I can pick up my food without a problem or handle their own delivery with an advertised flat fee and sometimes a minimum. I can't imagine it being much different in SF.
I got a doordash gift card for Christmas, so I had to try it out. The whole pricing scheme seemed silly and the price was considerably cheaper ordering direct from the restaurant. I mean it sucks, yeah, but this is probably an easy service to skip on.
I live in an area of Bayview where the only restaurants open after 5pm are a 30m walk across a risky pedestrian intersection. There’s something to be said for the cost of rent vs these other addon expenses with living in such an area I’m sure. We try to cook at home a lot. But, the only grocery stores are the outlet bargain mart or getting on the highway.
Our company doesn't ban after the first chargeback. If you keep making chargebacks though eventually you will be downranked in our risk model until you cannot buy from us, but you will never be manually banned unless you are a credit card fraudster doing something annoying. I would be surprised if Uber, a company that has put a lot of effort into standard credit card anti-fraud procedure would ban after the first chargeback. Doing so is an explicitly hostile, anti-consumer, and petty action that doesn't improve your business.
Which is sensible. Bu I have heard anecdotes from other services of 1-event termination polices, for example ad words fraud resulting in termination of all Google services.
It's been a predictable playbook since they started. Burn cash, win the market, then increase prices and decrease their own costs.
The problem is, they seem to have failed to drive out the competition. It's still quite easy to find a public taxi in most big cities, and there are a bunch of competitors ready to step in as Uber declines. In London for instance, they seem to be totally out of the game and people have gone back to taxis and to competitors such as Bolt in the blink of an eyelid.
Thank god the taxis haven't all been driven out of business. I still find it much easier to grab a taxi out of most decently sized airports and train stations than to futz around on my phone, worry about battery, type in my destination, etc. In Manhattan it's still very possible to just grab a taxi without any kind of advance planning, and again it's way easier than having to mess around on my phone.
That said, Uber/Lyft have made it impossible to get taxis at smaller airports and train stations in mid-sized cities, which I find super frustrating. There are never any taxis waiting at the Providence Amtrak station, for example.
A comment similar to this one made me try a taxi from the airport a few weeks ago, instead of my usual Uber.
They went miles out of their way, the taxi had no seat belts, and at my destination they told me their credit card machine was out of order and they could only take cash ("I can drive you to an ATM"). I said no, and suddenly the credit card machine worked again - but they insisted on a 30% "card fee".
I did a chargeback.
This sort of thing has always been my experience with taxis.
I also tried a taxi riding home from SFO recently. I did not encounter any shenanigans - the taxi was in good shape, took me right home, and would accept card - but it was significantly more expensive than a rideshare! Even without traffic.
Yes exactly. If Uber did this sort of thing as a matter of course, people would be up in arms about it.
This is one advantage to there being 1-2 huge brands (Uber and Lyft, Amazon and Walmart, etc.) vs a smattering of tiny businesses (e.g. taxis). Misdeeds by huge brands give people something to point at, and complain about, and hold accountable. Whereas systemic misdeeds by individuals who are part of a smattering of tiny companies results in people saying, "Eh this is just how it is, learn to live with it."
Yes. The reputations risk on a company level from a local taxi company is much lower than Uber.
Have you ever had to worry about paying a penny more than you were quoted by the Uber app? Have you ever had to worry about whether you could use your credit card?
And anti competitive how? The taxi companies were horrible and they deserved to die
And how were you ripped off by Uber? I take Uber on average 15-20 times a month. The amount shown has always been the amount I paid and I definitely didn’t have to worry about them running up the miles or getting dropped off and them holding my luggage hostage and saying they don’t take credit cards or demanding a tip.
But Uber does scam you as a matter of course, they've just hidden it in such a way that you're willing to accept it because it's a slight inconvenience that extracts extra money from you, rather than making you go out of your way to do something.
But I agree with your second sentence. I would much rather pay a few extra pennies/dollars than have to go out of my way. It's a better world where there's a reliable company that's accountable, then having to argue and negotiate with every single driver about whether they're credit card machine actually works, or how much extra I have to pay with a CC, or whether they're taking the right route, etc., because there are no standards or accountability, and every driver is unrelated to the previous drivers I've had and communicated my preferences to.
Geez, this was just basic street smarts when I was growing up. Ask some questions upfront.
Have cash on hand when dealing with taxis. Don't assume card terminals will work, or even that they won't skim your card.
You may say, 'That's why I hate taxis cos they scam you,' yet this thread has contains many examples of Uber(Eats)* scamming people too.
Why is that better? Cos it's accessed via smartphone for some reason?
Conjecture/Rant: There is a growing cohort of people who want everything to become 'frictionless'. They are even afraid to just talk to people, talk to girls, everything has to be through text or through an app. If they get their way humans will start to interact with each other more like machines than like people, hey, maybe even through APIs! Meanwhile, what makes life interesting 'is' friction between people and cultures.
Yea - And those darn kids play music too loud too!
I grew up in the suburb where there were no taxis. I live in SF, and we can’t call a taxi without an app. I visit NYC once a year. Plenty of people (esp immigrants from other cultures) don’t have “street smarts” that match what some urbanite 30 years ago would have. I tried taking a taxi from JFK last time I was in NYC. The driver claimed he didn’t know where my hotel was, or even the neighborhood (“Chelsea”). They stopped in the left side of the highway to spit out the door. They pretended not to take cards, they added on fees not in the original agreement, etc. If I’m gunna be scammed either way, at least let me use google maps to put in an exact address and pay by card.
Wanting frictionless commerce is not a character flaw geez. An app is way more convenient. I can talk to people “IRL” but some things are easier with an app. Getting a taxi to pick me up is easier with an app that knows my current ___location - that’s a good product development not an indictment on the next generation.
> Yea - And those darn kids play music too loud too!
I sure hope so.
> I visit NYC once a year. Plenty of people (esp immigrants from other cultures) don’t have “street smarts” that match what some urbanite 30 years ago would have.
Ironically, the immigrants probably have more street smarts.
> The driver claimed he didn’t know where my hotel was, or even the neighborhood (“Chelsea”).
And you rode with him anyway? Why would you do that?
Reliance on Apps to intermediate everything is bullshit in my opinion. Plus I personally specifically don't want to share my ___location with some app written by people I've never met who are 100% likely to either misuse it themselves or to sell it to someone who will.
When they want to take your freedom away, they won't come jackbooting in with rifles, they will do it by offering you convenience.
I can navigate around my city effortlessly, but I’m not someone-else’s-street smart. Don’t expect me to know the rules in Tokyo, NYC or Rio. I don’t expect a Japanese person to know the NYC, Rio, or SF rules and I don’t expect a Brazilian to know them either.
I rode with him anyways because all this people on hacker news told me using an app instead of a Taxi would mean I would lose my freedom. I have him an address… which he put in an app that surely is the exception and doesn’t misuse it. Realistically, this taxi driver just didn’t want to drive to Manhattan during rush hour, and knew damn well where Chelsea is. We all knew this was the reality. But at the airport there’s a queue for taxis and he was next in line and had to take me.
I actually took a taxi instead of Uber because in NY they use regulatory capture to ensure they have better airport placement than Uber and I chose that “convenience”. I think Uber is way more freeing than a taxi because I can go to almost any metro in the US and get a ride without having to learn the local system. It’s a tap away. It’s way more freeing and has emboldened me to explore more than I might otherwise. That is freedom.
> Reliance on Apps to intermediate everything is bullshit in my opinion. Plus I personally specifically don't want to share my ___location with some app written by people I've never met who are 100% likely to either misuse it themselves or to sell it to someone who will.
Have you tried taking a taxi in a country where you didn’t know the language?
How many different countries and phrase books only takes you so far. I know barely enough Spanish to almost get by. But I wouldn’t have wanted to depend on it when I was in Los Cabos for three weeks staying in a hotel and I definitely wouldn’t have been as comfortable going around Mexico hailing a cab and giving directions as I was with Uber - and also needing cash.
Giving them an address for pickup works as well as a ___location based tracking and allows you to tell them to meet you 5 blocks away if you are on the move when you call.
The driver didn't know the neighbourhood nickname you gave..did you give them an address? You have to searching the map on Uber anyways, did you search your google map for the address?
Taxis will go down the streets you tell them while you drive. Turn left or right next lights work. It's more flexible than ubers pre determined route.
Immigrants have more street smarts than you give them credit for. They literally uprooted their lives from places who generally scam more than the places they move to. They have taken a scammier cab ride before they even left their home country.
> The driver didn't know the neighbourhood nickname you gave..did you give them an address?
They asked for the neighborhood not the address because that’s how pricing is determined. When you’re a taxi driver… you learn the neighborhoods. Especially one of the most well known neighborhoods on manhattan.
> Immigrants have more street smarts than you give them credit for.
I mean no ill towards immigrants. Immigration is scary and hard. But being “street smart” in a different city doesn’t always translate directly. They’re not expected to know that they’re about to be scammed! They shouldn’t be getting scammed!
> Giving them an address for pickup works as well as a ___location based tracking and allows you to tell them to meet you 5 blocks away if you are on the move when you call.
Or you can just put a note in the app when you order and send messages. They can also call you.
If you don’t speak their language, the Uber app does translations.
> Immigrants have more street smarts than you give them credit for
When I spent 3 weeks in Los Cabos, Mexico. I had no street smarts, I didn’t know the language and when we were stuck in traffic, Uber automatically sent calls because it noticed we weren’t moving.
No. It's 2023. You're expected to take credit cards like it says on the little logo on the window. If your credit card machine is broken, your Taxi is broken and you can't pick up fares unless YOU tell them ahead of time that it's cash only.
If this happens to me I simply tell the driver I don't have any cash and exit the vehicle. Now if you have luggage in the trunk this of course gets a little more complicated. Somehow the credit card machine amazingly comes back to life as I'm getting out.
> Why is that better? Cos it's accessed via smartphone for some reason?
No, at least the ideal is there's a functional reputation system for drivers and riders. Of course, if corporate is going to scam you, too, and if they're going to make less than 5 stars a death penalty for a driver, and if the app and payments are always buggy, then /shrug it all stinks.
Cab drivers are the real ones getting scammed, unfortunately, and rarely have any way of recourse. When paying with card, they are rarely paid in a timely manner, if they get the proper amount at all. This is even before uber made medallions worthless. When I was growing up, it was a matter of common courtesy to use cash in situations like that, where you know the employer is going to play games with the employee when you pay with card, like a cabbie's fare or a waitress' tip. As we got older, most of us who worked in service industries & survived on tips knew this the hard way because we were also a victim of wage theft via skimming tips, etc.
I'm glad my city isn't allowing certain businesses to go completely cash free for this reason. The push to force credit card payments everywhere just hurts a class of people that are already vulnerable.
This incredible scope creep in the customer's responsibilities (not just price, but I somehow have to adjust for a vague sense of the employer-employee relationship, for ethical/ESG considerations, etc. etc.) is just... overwhelming. I shouldn't be responsible for your employment relationship, that is between you, your employer, and the relevant regulatory authority.
Yes I totally agree. When businesses push for going cashless, they are often doing it to claw back the tips customers are giving their workers.
Tips that have become customary because it's become accepted that a waiter mustn't be paid a living wage. Why has it become accepted, because we have a hidden caste system.
But the customers get to feel cool to frequent a place that 'gets it' because cash is or old people.
The so-called 'hidden caste system' that has tipped employees at the top of the F&B food chain, earning significantly more than back-of-house staff like bussers and chefs?
Yeah, exactly the same caste system. I didn't say only waiters were in a lower caste. This kind of bullshit is everywhere.
Some establishments pool the tips (cash ones) and use to distribute it to the bussers (don't know about the cooking staff). Obviously this was not a universal practice.
> I'm glad my city isn't allowing certain businesses to go completely cash free for this reason. The push to force credit card payments everywhere just hurts a class of people that are already vulnerable.
And forget about the vulnerability of the merchants who have to worry about being robbed.
I don't believe this. I think that the real reason that cab drivers don't want to accept credit cards is because they don't want to pay taxes on the money like everyone else has to. Sorry buddy, your inability to evade taxes is not my problem.
I refuse to believe that not cheating people by default, and not expecting others to cheat me by default, is synonymous with acting "more like machines than people". What a cynical, depressing world view.
That comment wasn't about cheating it was about the communication medium. I.e. communicating via text or app vs. face to face. I.e. talking to each other like we're computers instead of face to face like people.
I regularly get Uber/Lyfts from JFK and Newark without hassle. I don't know why I'd want to ride with a regular taxi.
Taxis still suffer from all the things that created the impetus for ride sharing platforms:
- Lack of price transparency. Will tourists landing in JFK know that $100 is an acceptable price for a trip into the city? Or that $150 is a scam?
- Lack of driver rating (or passenger rating)
- Maligned incentives. The taxi driver has incentives to extend the trip as long as possible via traffic or a long route. This is not the case in ride sharing apps.
- Accountability. Doesn't happen in NY, but seedier parts of the world taxis have abducted and robbed/raped their customers. Ride sharing provides centralised ride records and GPS data for passenger and driver.
It's always better to take a taxi from JFK--if it's feasible and assuming you take a real taxi and don't get scammed by the dudes who try to hustle you when you're walking out of the airport with luggage.
As mentioned, they have pretty much set rates to go into Manhattan, and it's cheaper to go to other areas as well. I used to live in Williamsburg until very recently, and had to take Ubers from JFK occasionally when I landed at a terminal that had a bad taxi situation. The Ubers were expensive AF; over $100 total. Taxis were always sub-100, even when I used to live in Manhattan.
My main issue with taking Ubers from the airport, though, is that waiting for them takes forever and the designation pickup locations are clusterfucks. In contrast, the taxi stands have orderly lines. This is heavily terminal dependent, though; when landing at the American Airlines terminal, the taxi situation is great. The line is never too long and moves quickly. But, as mentioned, sometimes one lands at a terminal with a massive taxi line that moves like a snail. At that point, maybe one opts for an Uber--for which the wait is 10+ minutes, and may increase as time goes on and drivers are switched (!!), and the cost is extortionate.
In non-airport situations in NYC, taxis are always cheaper. Not always feasible outside of Manhattan (there aren't enough driving around in most parts of the other boroughs), but for any intra-Manhattan trip, taxis should be preferred.
I’m sure your experience was true at some point, but in my most recent experience with taxis at JFK, I would never go back to ordering Ubers or Lyfts. There’s a long line of taxis waiting, so there’s never a need to wait for a driver. They all have ample space for luggage, something I’ve had trouble with when using ride-share apps before. They had a flat price to go into Manhattan—around $70 if i recall correctly, whereas an Uber or Lyft at that time was $100+ for an XL. Surge pricing goes crazy.
Indeed, every single taxi I have ever seen has more transparent and simple pricing than uber. An initial price and then a per mile price. I can calculate it in my head, I don't have to trust that Uber's "algorithm" doesn't play price games.
JFK doesnt't do enough to inform passengers that the city caps trips to Manhattan at around 60 dollars. Meanwhile Uber happily milks surge rates up to 150
That’s great but as someone that doesn’t travel in Manhattan or major airports it used to be impossible to get a taxi. Uber is a vast improvement over the previous status of calling the dispatcher, having to wait 30 min, and knowing it’s 50/50 if they will even show up.
I grew up in shithole tiny town rural state. Our town of 7000 people had a few sketchy seeming taxis that I always wondered how they could possibly work.
Then I became a cashier at the local grocery store and noticed basically the entire underclass of that town used those taxis daily. Their service was so reliable that our front end manager would call the taxis for these people while they were still checking out as a courtesy.
Yet when my girlfriend tries to get an Uber in the city of 60k that I live in now, it's a crapshoot whether there is one AT ALL, or whether it shows up when it says, or whether your driver will even know where you are going (it's not a complicated city). So maybe if taxis sucked where you used them, maybe you could have fixed that instead of fucking over perfectly working taxis for the rest of us by supporting an industry player who explicitly was trying to kill taxis as a small business.
My local taxi company didn't have to support 2k Silicon Valley priced software engineers, didn't spend some of that effort building tools to identify and blackball cops trying to stop people from using an illegal service, and didn't force their drivers to sleep in their cars to make their normal wage.
In Europe (at least the UK and Germany) it seems to be the opposite. Outside of a big-city Uber is non-existent and you are relying on local taxi-firms.
I've taken taxis to from places the last couple times and they were a little slower, but predictable. I think there are still laws taxis have to abide by.
Meanwhile was stranded and we took an uber, and they did some shenanigans with pricing in the evening and it was > $100.
I think it is pretty easy to figure out if someone is in a bind and charge more. consider: on side of freeway. In front of car dealer. in front of hospital. In business parking lot hours after closing. when it is dark where it is lonely. etc.
I live near a smaller airport - the worst problem is that you can’t get service off hours.
In the taxi days, they had a contractual obligation to provide service to the airport. Now, getting an early morning Uber/Lyft for a first flight is difficult… prebooking doesn’t work, and you’re stuck driving and parking, hiring a black car, etc.
It seems easy enough to start a Taxi business, so even if all had been driven out of business, new ones would quickly pop up if demand for taxis returned.
> The problem is, they seem to have failed to drive out the competition.
How could it be otherwise? Their product is, and always has been, a commodity.
* Average customer does not care whether they are getting a ride via Uber/Lyft/$XYZ
* Average driver doesn't care whether they're driving for Uber/Lyft/$XYZ
* The technology required to implement this service (software, mostly), while not trivial, is also not that difficult
* The capital requirements are not that high (compared to, say, building a fab).. Unless of course you burn investor capital for years to undercut competition. That is the closest thing they ever had to a moat, which was obviously not sustainable long term.
Uber as a company started making a lot less sense when it became clear they wouldn't crack self driving cars (remember when they did self driving?). The current moat is far less defensible.
at least here in India, Uber's service has become downright hostile. Drivers will cancel if the destination isn't to their liking. At airports, they refuse to even arrive if you don't pay them extra in cash. The only people who still use Uber are the ones who have no options or don't know about the options available.
The worst part is that they've driven out all the existing private cab operators from many airports through their earlier aggressive pricing. So now you literally have no option but to take an Uber from some airports, except that the Uber driver will be hostile and charge extra in cash.
I really want this company to crash and burn. From drivers to customers, no one has a good thing to say about them here.
In the US, drivers are telling customers to cancel rides (so that Uber doesn't take action against the driver for canceling) when they don't like the destination or don't think the trip is worth it. If you don't cancel, drivers will simply park and wait for you to cancel and Uber's help doesn't seem to want to help.
I think a big thing is simply that Uber is trying to turn a profit in an industry where the margins just aren't that good. In order to make that profit, they've had to pivot to being this "hostile" company. They're putting pressure on drivers to find ways to lower their costs there. They're no longer helping customers in ways that would lose them money.
In the early days, Uber was cheap and support would do anything to make you happy. Now Uber is expensive and support is working to make investors happy.
> If you don't cancel, drivers will simply park and wait for you to cancel
If I realized this was happening I'd be inclined to simply order a Lyft/Uber and off I go, and the driver will eventually have to cancel to get their next fare.
Because they have driven some competition out of the market so alternatives can be hard to find, compared to pre-Uber days. So a person might say “See? If it’s easier to use Uber then they are providing more value.” Except the alternatives may have been better pre-Uber, therefore Uber only provides relative value now because they have downgraded the overall quality.
This will vary quite a bit by ___location though. In areas where it had been difficult or highly inconvenient to get a cab pre-Uber then Uber may still provide actual value over prior status quo. I’ve experienced both situations.
I'm calling BS. If there was really a demand for it, the taxis would be back in no time. Operating a taxi is not rocket science nor does it require a huge capital investment.
Call BS all you want, but it takes time for markets to adjust. How long has Uber been around, and for how long has the current status quo in their decreased quality prevailed? It takes time for the market to respond, even when capital barriers are low things don’t turn on a dime. There’s enough risk involved that people aren’t sitting at their computers eagerly refreshing their browser for the merest hint that Uber customers are dissatisfied. But if you’re looking for evidence of people having enough dissatisfaction to look elsewhere you can find it. As I said, competition was driven out of the market, it just may not come back on the time scale that you think it should.
For example, Lyft is inching upwards a few points in market share[1] albeit at the cost to their own bottom line. This is evidence I may be right, and as a result Lyft is attempting to take advantage of the situation I describe. While you, also correct that competitors would try to swoop in, are simply incorrect about the time scale. The dust hasn’t settled yet. “No time” as far as macroscopic market shifts go often starts very slowly, and then all at once.
Of course I could be wrong, but I’m not sure you’ve demonstrated a compelling reason why I must or likely am wrong. My assessment stands, for the current state of affairs, but in a year or two the market could have shifted against Uber. Or maybe Uber will be agile enough to respond before things go to far.
Things get bad slowly and it can be hard to notice at first. When companies slightly shrink their products or change to cheaper ingredients, most people don't immediately notice. To an extent, it's like the boiling frog analogy. You slowly raise the prices and lower the service expectations and people don't notice as easily.
People also become dependent on things. Even when there are alternatives, people have habits and those habits are powerful.
Uber doesn't have a monopoly, but they are usually a duopoly (with Lyft). It isn't easy to compare prices and services between. I hate saying that because if you are trolling, you're going to say "it's easy, you just open both apps", but it's not easy since the pricing is always shifting and with drivers canceling or pushing you to cancel it becomes problematic.
Uber's brand and one's history with the service can leave one hesitant to believe it is now bad. Maybe a few times you think "oh, it's just a couple bad experiences." Historically, you have more positive experiences to balance it out. Many people will want to write off these bad experiences because they've talked up Uber a lot in the past. They don't want the cognitive dissonance of thinking "wow, I was an idiot to buy into their bait-and-switch and get all my friends to buy into it!" They'd rather believe that the service hasn't gotten that much worse and that they still like it.
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We see this kind of thing in a lot of areas. If Google Search is so bad, why are so many people using it so much that it's so profitable? Again, many of the same things: it becomes bad slowly over time and people don't notice it so much; people become dependent on things and use Google as a habit without even thinking about available alternatives - it's the default search in their browser just as Uber is the app they have installed; while Google doesn't have a monopoly, there aren't many alternatives and yea you could just run your search twice in two search engines, but people aren't going to do even seemingly "easy" things to compare or get better results; and Google has a brand associated with search quality that people have pushed forward over a couple decades and people don't like changing their beliefs around that.
We can't make truly free decisions. We don't have a situation where one could say, "If Uber isn't serving you well, you could just make your own transportation network that treated you better and use that." That's not so possible. We're often left without truly free choices because we live in a society where certain things exist and other things don't and we can't rebuild things overnight when something isn't great.
Lots of companies make lots of money while providing bad service because they're using their market position to gain leverage. If your logic is "so many people are using it, therefore it must be good," that really ignores how companies use their market position to leverage more profits because people don't really have choice.
I'm not sure Google is a great example - although they've got worse there's no obvious competitor which is better at search itself. There's various other reasons why you might not wish to use Google but in terms of quality of core text searches I've seldom found anyone consistently better. With Uber I think they've declined (in some places) to the point where they're below the quality of their competitors (even ignoring the ethical/whatever arguments against using Uber).
I think for most people, they won't have even thought about trying a competitor - whether that's Google or Uber. They won't even know whether Uber has declined relative to their competition.
Personally, I don't even know how to get a taxi in most places anymore. At the airport, sure. I live in one of the densest places in the US that isn't NYC, but there aren't taxis going around through most areas. I'd basically be walking to the kind of place that already has public transit to find a taxi (and even then they aren't that common).
There's Lyft, but is that actually any better? I typically find their prices to be higher, but maybe that's changed. A lack of information on actual quality can be a big thing.
I'm not arguing Uber hasn't declined to the point where they're below the quality of competitors. I guess I'm more questioning: how would you communicate to me a competitor that is better? I think that's what is missing in a lot of ways: how do you prove to yourself and others that a competitor is better? Maybe you'll say "Lyft is often $1-3 more expensive, but the drivers don't cancel quite as much and support is better." That's hard to really get a feel for - just as it's hard to really quantify the quality of search results.
Maybe you live in NYC and taxis are plentiful and there are even NYC-specific app-based services. Maybe you live in a part of Europe where there are apps that work with the taxi system. Maybe you're in another part of the world where there's lots of ride-app competition that doesn't exist in the US.
But I'd love to be sold on a competitor. If we were friends having lunch, what would you say? "Oh, you've got to try XYZ because... They're better than Uber because..." But I think most people aren't having that conversation. We had those conversations talking about how Uber was better than taxis. You can see when they're coming, it just charges your credit card, support is great about bad rides, you don't have to call a service, it's all GPS based, you know when you'll get to your destination... That's how we sold our friends on Uber. How do we now argue that something else is better quality? Maybe the issue is that Uber is hitting 90% of the quality of competitors which makes it hard to discern if they're actually worse.
Yes this is very true, and I am speaking from experience. Here's something I've seen financial people say: "We are currently spending x and we want to spend y. How much do we need to adjust each year to get there without losing customers?"
Oh man I hate it when I schedule a ride days ahead of time to JFK airport but the rider shows up and thought that I wanted to go to Newark. Since i'm closer to Newark and they dont bother even reading the destination correctly, I'm told that I have to cancel. Its been so frustrating.
You mean local taxis which were ultra ultra corrupt.
Like seriously, I understand some of the participants on HN are too young to have personally experienced that industry first hand, but it was baaaaaad.
If you think Uber right now is bad, you would have hated cabs.
Interesting. If I realized this was happening I'd be inclined to simply order a Lyft/Uber and off I go, and the driver will eventually have to cancel to get their next fare.
If you do that, the driver might show up and then mark you as not at the pickup spot. Then you'll get charged the cancelation fee. It's really crappy, but a lot of drivers are figuring out how to work the system - as Uber figures out how to work them.
> Drivers will cancel if the destination isn't to their liking.
Lyft does this, too. A few months ago, I was in the Bay Area without a car and had to go approx. 50 miles from Mountain View to Livermore. Kind of a long-ish ride, but not absurdly huge. I stood there for 30-40 minutes watching driver after driver accept, and then cancel my ride. Totally useless. Finally a driver actually picked me up. Thankfully I didn't have to be there at any particular time.
> The worst part is that they've driven out all the existing private cab operators from many airports through their earlier aggressive pricing.
Basically, Uber’s strategy has worked and their goal has been achieved. They infused massive amounts of cash so they would kill the smaller players and now that they dominate they are just taking the piss.
Amazon and Google did the same.
Their products have become what we would have run away from a decade ago.
Amazon sucks. Every single search on Amazon now gives entire pages of identical white-label Chinese junk with randomly-generated brand names, which are designed to go out of business and reappear under a different name as soon as you file a complaint. For most things I've gone back to either Alibaba-- since it's the same stuff as Amazon usually for way less money-- or just shopping at physical retail stores since they have at least some brand and quality assurance that Amazon completely lacks.
How are they “amazing”? Amazon is full of counterfeit or cheap products. Granted amazon’s delivery is amazing their marketplace is a cesspit. Google’s search is horrible. Cant find anything in my inbox or google drive even if i double quote the search terms. Not to mention search result spamming with sites that have been seo’d to death.
The alternatives have always been there and still are but struggling to compete due to amazon and google sheer budgets where they simply sell services and products at a dumping price.
Google search on mobile is so bad now I am increasingly reluctant to bother searching for things rather than just going straight to Wikipedia or somewhere else to find information. 80% of the page is "knowledge graph" junk, trending junk, boxes with "short videos" and "visual stories", and now if you scroll to the bottom and miss the button for "more search results", they just start showing you results for completely different searches!
Also very pissed off about their decision to replace the search categories (images, videos, news, etc) with yet more "smart" suggestions. It makes it completely unpredictable where I need to click to get to images, which is what I'm looking for 99% of the time. E.g. searching "radiohead" now shows buttons for "songs", "members", "albums", "videos", "merchandise", and finally--after scrolling the list to the side--"images". Terrible!
Just the other day I did a search for “filename” (filename was not the actual input string) in my google drive and it found no results.
I did a search for “tar.gz” the extension the file i searched, and guess what? It was found.
I dont know what they are doing but this doesnt sound like a tech issue - it worked fine in the past. Now everything seems to have gotten broken. Google is sleepwalking into an altavista scenario. We need an alternative asap.
> Amazon is full of counterfeit or cheap products.
It's trivial to select who you want to buy from on Amazon.
I've been using their retail service for 25 years and have had only a few orders out of hundreds be messed up. And they always correct mistakes and make it right.
Stop selecting terrible sellers to buy from. Buy from Amazon. It takes seconds to switch over to them as the seller. That nearly entirely eliminates the problem you're describing with minimal hassle.
It is good for Amazon’s owners that they moved out of the sub 5% profit margin retail business, and maintained their 15%+ profit margin platform and logistics business.
> Drivers will cancel if the destination isn't to their liking.
This is very common in the UK too. I was in a small town and wanted to get a taxi home at midnight and there was many, many taxis about but since we wanted to go from one house to another rather than into the town centre they kept declining us. Must have gone through about 10 different drivers, even after the price was significantly raised. Had to try multiple different apps before I found one who accepted
I had 5 Uber drivers cancel on me in a row last month when I arrived to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport and wouldn’t take anything less than a tip that was 100% of the fare.
Very frustrating, considering they put Taxis out of business. Sat there on the side of the airport “ride hailing” pickup for a hour wondering if I was even going to get home.
This doesn't make any sense. You stood outside of an airport for an hour instead of walking over the the taxi stand where the taxis that you're so worried about were idling waiting for passengers?
That was always the Uber VC fueled Unicorn end goal.
Destroy the regulated taxi business to the point where you form a monopoly.
As a bonus, they’re extracting X% of dollars of every fare for providing little to no additional service relative to the past (local govts could very well have created apps to allow for hailing cabs like some already have). Money which would earlier have gone to the local economy or remained in your pocket is now going to Uber’s investors.
I don’t understand why economists don’t talk about how this is contributing to inflation and/or destruction of businesses. If in the past I ordered delivery from my local Chinese restaurant, I gave them $100 and the entire $100 went to them. They would use that to employ 1-2 delivery guys who would probably at the end of the year cost them about 5-10% of their delivery food revenue.
But today, I pay the Chinese restaurant $100, Uber Eats/Doorsash/Grubhub an additional $5-$10 and the restaurant will pay them about 30-40% additionally for receiving the order and delivering it. The 5-10% delivery cost has ballooned to over 30-40% (some cities had capped the fee but even that was about 15-20% and I don’t know if those caps have persisted past the pandemic).
Until recently restaurants are the cost, but now they can’t anymore and we’re seeing significant inflation.
That’s a 30-40% jump in costs to the restaurant + customer almost immediately.
> If in the past I ordered delivery from my local Chinese restaurant, I gave them $100 and the entire $100 went to them
Well, back then there were very few restaurants that offered delivery at all and their employees would have to use their own car, worry about maintenance and made very little for deliveries and were dependent on tips.
Also almost none of the drivers got a commercial rider on their insurance for doing delivery.
DoorDash and Uber Eats are also economic disasters of incomprehensible proportions. They not only charge over double your total order, but many times they also have restaurants losing money on delivery orders too.
Just 5 years ago I used to be able to get lunch delivered by a Chinese food restaurant for under $10 in Brooklyn. Can't speak for today as I Escaped from New York, but good luck getting that very same order below $30 by DoorDash.
It’s especially surprising leaving an airport. I’ve taken an Uber out of 16 different airports in the last year in the US and one in Mexico.
The only issue I’ve had with Uber is that LAX is a shit show trying to get an Uber. But that’s the fault of the airport authority that forced you to take a 10 minute bus ride to get to the Uber pickup
I never take Uber leaving the airport in Vegas, the taxi stand is just so much more convenient. Most other cities, where there are trains I take the train. I'd rather the predictability of schedule and not having to worry about traffic.
So they pick you up first and then if you don’t tip them up front they don’t let you in the car?
This doesn’t sound a little suspicious that this supposedly happens on a regular basis? Picking you up from a major airport where there are plenty of other drivers?
But but but I was told drivers did this only in shitty taxi companies! And Uber is a tech company, they couldn't possibly create a system that drives their employees (IDGAF about what they claim they are) to do desperate and hostile things to keep earning enough to put food on the table.
Sounds like free market is working. The drivers get to pick the gigs they want. Now solution for Uber would be to allow drivers to negotiate higher price. Be it double or 10x. Allowing riders to get service and drivers to act as free agents.
Sure, as long as the price gets negotiated in advance. The problem is the sudden change in terms. This is the free market in the same way that a NY real estate developer telling a sub "I'll pay you 40% of what we agreed, if you don't like it contact my legal department" is the free market. The taxi driver has your luggage; they've eroded the time you thought you had and made you desperate; they now change the terms.
Don’t know why this is getting downvoted. Clearly the problem is that some people want rides for which the fare is too low. With a higher fare, some of these people could get rides rather than getting rejected time and again.
Why shouldn't it work like it does in any other industry. Riders request quotas for work and drivers offer them one. At prevailing market rate they seem sensible. Just like it works for plumbers, electricians, software consultants and so on. Why should taxi be any different from those?
Unskilled labor is at a deep disadvantage to skilled labor, why do you think those industries are generally better paid? The more unbalanced the power dynamic the more one side is able to control pricing.
One interesting asymmetry is time - sellers on the labor market typically need to make a deal within weeks or months. Buyers tend to be able to wait months or years. Its hard to say that the market is doing the truest 'price discovery' in that situation.
The problem is in an industry like resturaunts that are low margins is that food ordering apps introduce a "too many cooks in the kitchen" problem. The restaurants add markup to the food to make a profit, this they split amongst themselves internally though there is usually very little to spare. Food delivery apps not only introduce a delivery driver into this mix that has to get paid but also a cash hungry VC startup that is burning R&D costs like there's no tomorrow.
Suddenly what you end up with is no one is making enough money to cover their costs with the current food price so each party starts adding their own fees to cover the losses and cut on other costs to save money. And then what you end up with is very expensive food and maybe one or two parties in the "kitchen" actually turn a profit.
What I find strange is that food delivery worked for at least some foods via phone before there were apps. Shouldn't the apps make things more efficient?
Most restaurants didn't offer delivery so there was less competition and the ones that did could keep in-house drivers busy. This meant only half the trip (restaurant->customer) had to be completed after the order was made. It also meant the driver-ready-vs-food-ready problem didn't exist.
The cuisines that offered delivery were also those optimized for delivery. Pizza and American Chinese travels much better than burgers and fries. Not only do they stand up better to sitting between being made and consumed but it's easier to count how many pizza boxes there are than make sure the burger also got its fries and side salad.
I'm starting to think of capitalism as rule by "winner's curse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner's_curse). The winners in VC-funded tech spend far too much to win the market, and now have to squeeze whatever value they can out by abusing their customers, their employees, and their reputations. Meanwhile, management socks away money by writing themselves checks, and original VC investment cashes out through the greater fools and co-conspirators of managed funds and the public.
At best we're left with a company that goes belly-up and a destroyed industry that has to recreate itself, at worse we're left with a zombie exploitation machine of a awful company that limps on with enough reach that it still suppresses all competition in marginal markets.
This seems like more of a tech thing than a capitalism thing. Other industries don’t have this issue. Part of the problem is people are used to getting some level of tech “for free” so it’s hard to introduce something new without subsidies.
What Uber is doing is more similar to predatory pricing (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp) rather than enshittification. Their plan seems to have always been to survive on VC money to drive out competition, and then raise prices, rather than carefully degrading the platform experience to extract more money per user.
As I just mentioned in a peer comment though, did the strategy succeed? It's still as easy as it ever was to find a public taxi in big cities, and Uber never really got a choke hold in the second cities that I'm familiar with. There are also a bunch of competitors waiting in the wings. Brand loyalty and switching costs between all of these are low.
I'm not sure there has been any bigger research done about it, but there are a few anecdotes in this submission about it. Here is one comment as an example:
> at least here in India, Uber's service has become downright hostile. Drivers will cancel if the destination isn't to their liking. [...] The worst part is that they've driven out all the existing private cab operators from many airports through their earlier aggressive pricing. So now you literally have no option but to take an Uber from some airports [...]
I haven't used DoorDash/UberEats/etc. since early in the pandemic, but what you describe isn't unlike what I experienced then, either. It has always been significantly cheaper, the food warmer, and the arrival of food shorter, to go and pick the food myself via direct interaction with the restaurant (either by me calling in, or using their online ordering system). These services may have felt convenient to an extent, but that convenience also came with the feeling that - pardon my French - I was being fucked.
Obviously the point is to save time by not going there. It’s not like it’s a big secret that it’s cheaper to get it yourself. It’s also huge if you have kids since loading them in the car and making them wait at a restaurant is a pain.
>Obviously the point is to save time by not going there.
A benefit that was, in my experience, significantly outweighed by all of the other negatives with the experience (higher prices, mismatched or missing items from menu, dogshit customer service, cold food upon arrival, items missing from order upon arrival, etc.). In point of fact, that it would take 90+ minutes to have to wait for my food when I'm hungry (I had the unique experience of watching my driver on DoorDash's app and saw him drive by my house with my food to go to other stops further away from me one time, and he didn't make it back to me for another 45 minutes) didn't actually feel like it saved time - the more time passes, the hungrier I get, which only encourages frustration with the process.
Directly contacting a restaurant and picking up from them, in my experience, almost always results in a 10-25 minute block of time for the food to be ready depending on the restaurant, in my experience. With these apps, it's far, far longer and never consistent, and to your point about kids, if my kids are hungry, waiting for some driver to futz around for an hour only to show up without the one thing my oldest wanted most is only going to make the situation worse.
>It’s also huge if you have kids since loading them in the car and making them wait at a restaurant is a pain.
Anecdotally, I'm also a parent (3yo and 1yo) and don't really experience this issue. I time my restaurant pickups accordingly, and I've never had to wait around with my kids for our takeout - it's always ready to go as soon as we arrive, and I can check the order either right in the restaurant or in the parking lot in order to rectify any errors with it immediately. My kiddos (again, anecdotally) also enjoy going to restaurants to eat out and usually do well waiting when we're there, or if we're in a long line for fast food, or whatever - but at least in those instances I can usually guesstimate with decent accuracy how long the wait will take relative to how patient or impatient my kids seem at the time, and decide whether or not to proceed accordingly - delivery apps don't give you that flexibility, they're just an overpriced coin toss in that regard.
But I do recognize that our experience here is our own and likely doesn't match what other parents experience.
For me, it was usually still cheaper to go pick it up myself even after I factored in the cost of my time (and I don't price myself cheap.) Doordash would regularly double the cost of an order for two people.
My wife and I “nomad” 7 months of the year and I travel for work occasionally. We don’t own cars. We spend around $900 a month on Uber and we have been to 18 different cities in the US over the past year.
So...like 6 rides a month? I only joke a little. The last time I checked, the average cost for an uber ride from Oakland to San Jose was like $70. SFO to San Jose was usually about $150.
About 20 per month for the last two months. I have a separate card that is just used for Uber - the Capital One SavorOne. It gives you 10% cash back for Uber and UberEats and free UberOne through 9/24.
Out of curiosity, how far are these trips? I think a far more salient comparison would be around the $/mile cost of Uber rather than the individual rides.
Mostly short trips during the week. My wife is a part time fitness instructor and we try to stay near a gym where she knows someone in her organization. On the weekend when we got out, it might be a longer ride.
To and from the airport is usually the longest one.
But the comparison is how much we spent per month on cars before we got rid of them. My wife’s car was $670/month (the median price of a new car in the US was $35K when we bought it) and mine was an old paid for car.
We spent at least an average of $1100+ for car notes, car insurance, gas and maintenance.
And the quality and convenience of Uber is much better than a taxi ever was. You know your price up front and you always just get your card charged
My partner and I opted not to purchase a car for much the same reason, it just turned out that hiring a driver or renting a car would cost us less than the monthly costs of ownership.
I assume you mean this was the payment on the loan for the car? Should this not be amortized out to the full lifetime of the car for this sort of calculation though?
> We spent at least an average of $1100+ for car notes, car insurance, gas and maintenance.
Per month?? That seems very high to me. Even if I double my monthly costs, I'm still well under that amount.
All that said, if you did the math and Uber is cheaper for you than owning a car then..not really much to argue with is there?
I’ve completely stopped using Uber eats and door dash. There is zero customer support, I’ve had completely different orders show up and was only refunded the minimum amount of the order while still taking the money for the driver. For groceries these apps are useless if you want what you actually order. I’ve ordered chocolate ice cream and received instead pop tarts as a “replacement item” and customer support basically told me tough luck. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every single time I place a grocery order through these apps I get different items than I selected. If I say I don’t want replacements I get 1-2 out of 10 items from my order (never the things I placed the order needing.)
All of this seems blatantly illegal, advertising and charging for items you can’t deliver. Yet I’m powerless to do anything about it.
The two times I have tried that (one for Uber eats, one for a tea delivery place) I have not won the investigation. Both times I did not receive the item I ordered and for the tea place I didn’t receive any item at all. Charge backs are not the recourse people online claim they are, in my experience they do not give customers the preference.
The priority delivery fee is a hot mess for me. Every time I use it, the food actually takes more time to get to me cause they wait longer for a driver to come pick it up.
Drivers can do all of that and restaurants can't fire them. Users can't just order from places that do better delivery.
And drivers simply don't give a fuck. There's only profit in quantity. They know quality is so bad that the only way they can get a tip is if they hold service hostage. So they do. And they do all the dumb shit like sitting on food for tens of minutes so they can "optimize" their deliveries.
The services don't give a fuck either. They don't make the food or deliver the food. If you don't like the food or the delivery, that's other people's problems, not theirs. The service worked as advertised. You were able to order food from a place that doesn't do delivery, pay for it, and get it delivered.
And at the end of the day, the one who gets fucked the most is the customer. They get tepid food over an hour after they order for prices two to three times what they would pay if they were at the restaurant.
The one time I tried it, it routed a burger from a A&W five miles away instead of the one just down the block from the hotel (both were open 24 hours) and it arrived cold and lifeless (and the order was wrong, anyway).
edit - I tipped normally and reviewed high, I don't complain to UberEATS I just will never use it again, or at least not in the cities. Local door dash out here in the sticks has been fine the few times I've needed to get emergency food to home when I'm a thousand miles away.
The restaurant is chosen by you, not them. Now you could argue that they should suggest a closer ___location, sure, but it does tell you where it’s coming from.
Sure, and when you're in a foreign city you should remember to cross-check what they're providing with Google, et al.
I'm sure it's entirely my fault, but I won't bother using them again.
I'd've been more understanding if I had refused ___location privileges, but I had even entered my exact address, and the nearer spots (which I checked later after getting the 1+ hour delivery estimate thing once you order) were UberEats enabled. So I don't know what went wrong, and this comment is more time than I've ever spent on it.
I'm not sure when, but at some point they switched so that you don't pick a ___location for chains. E.g. you just order from "Wendy's" and Uber picks which ___location it comes from. That's why you don't see a dozen McDonald's in the list anymore.
It does tell you how far the ___location they're using is if you keep an eye on that. I've also been bitten because I forgot to check and Uber decided to try to deliver from a Wendy's 15 miles away instead of the one a quarter mile away.
If I just click the fast-food button, it only shows 1 McDonald's. But it's because it's a sponsored listing and I can still see the address of the store when I tap on it. It says it's 0.9 miles away.
> The service has gone completely down hill for me the last few months. The app is the buggiest it has ever been. I've been overcharged more time than I can count, and customer service is practically impossible to actually get in touch with.
I've ordered via UberEATS a few times in the past couple years and always just resort to the pickup in store option.
I'm not entirely sure if theres a markup from the restaurant or not but I know that it always ends up saving so much on fees that its basically useless to order delivery. Just changing between the two options you see the price skyrocket without adding a tip.
I don't really know how people still justify delivery via apps when nowadays all of them basically double your cost by default. And all of them use predatory methods/don't tell you the cost up front. Only when you get to the final screen do you see the enormous markup.
With UberEATS, hidden fees and markup have gotten so big that most orders are > 2x the cost at the actual restaurant
Even without the hidden fees, it can be crazy expensive. But there doesn't seem to be a shortage of people who don't care about the fees.
I ran into an Uber Eats guy in the elevator a couple of weeks ago. He was delivering a single cup of McDonald's coffee. I can't imagine what that might have cost.
Ona side note, I've also recently seen Uber Eats being delivered on Segways in my neighborhood. They have Uber Eats-branded panniers and the delivery guys have Uber Eats-branded insulated backpacks.
Priority delivery fee is a scam on all services. If your order is sitting a while, it's generally because the $ to mile ratio is too low. A $2/mi order is considered a base line for most drivers. Orders will start with a low base pay of $2-$2.75 + tip. If drivers keep declining to pick up your order, it'll get batched with another order. Priority delivery fee goes to the delivery service, so you might as well put that towards the tip instead to get it picked up faster by a driver.
My weird view of the race to the bottom was a couple years back that I was a happy, paying user of Postmates and received within minutes of each other the emails that Postmates was switching to Uber accounts and that my Uber account was being deleted due to inactivity. I took that as a sure sign that Uber's left-hand wasn't talking to its right-hand, made sure to unsubscribe from my Postmates membership, let their system auto-delete my account, and moved to different apps.
I think about these companies destroying their goodwill in pursuit of a profit and am reminded:
employees -> 0, profit -> ∞
The remaining employees are the ones that will do anything in this existential crisis.
Will we ever be able to get a hotel, airfare, food delivery, a tow truck, an emergency plumber or anything urgent or convenient without profit being maximized?
All that crap they make you deal with and you're still a heavy user? Why?! Is it still that much better than the alternatives (taxis, Door Dash, eBike, picking up your own food?)
> And of course, the tips and fees are always calculated "before discounts" which makes the default tip bananas
I agree Uber is employing a ton of dark patterns and their fees are absurd, but for tips at least I think this is appropriate and ethical and is how I tip in person if I have a coupon or something. Tipping is about compensating workers for the value of their labor when their base compensation doesn’t appropriately do that, as it generally doesn’t for restaurant workers in the US. If you get a sandwich for half off or whatever, the cook & the delivery person still had the same amount of work to do, and the tip should reflect that.
In practice tipping is mostly a question of tippers subsidizing non tippers. It’s just another form of price discrimination designed to extract maximum value for a business as employees would change jobs if they didn’t receive sufficient tips just as they would when underpaid doing anything else.
The difference in effort delivering 2 vs 10 items isn’t anything close to linear with their cost. I would suggest a fixed minimum + low percentage of the total order is vastly more reasonable than assuming you need to tip some silly multiple of the total bill. But even butter is to simply avoiding all businesses that use tipping, it’s both less mental effort and generally cheaper.
>Tipping is about compensating workers for the value of their labor when their base compensation doesn’t appropriately do that
Is it really? Genuine question! I'm from the UK, and here a tip is generally seen as something which is given for exceptional service, rather than subsidising an employer's lack of remuneration for the job at hand.
In the UK that's correct because those kinds of positions pay a reasonable wage. In the US, restaurant workers can easily be making less than minimum wage without tips. (The legality is weird and varies by state, but my understanding is that "traditionally tipped" jobs like waitstaff are exempt from minimum wage regulations on the assumption the tips will make up the gap. The restaurant owner is required to make up the gap if tips don't, so in theory you could just not tip and implicitly force the restaurant owner to raise wages that way, but in practice restaurants are the kind of low-legal-enforcement business in the US where owners already frequently try to under-pay staff so this strategy would probably mostly just hurt workers.)
So my personal approach to tipping in the US is that it starts at a base level as appropriate compensation, and goes up from there for quality of service (or very rarely goes down if service is atrocious).
Wasn't that always the point of vc funded big tech apps? Lure in users while burning through enough cash to power a steam locomotive, kill most competition and then take their money? At least in India I am seeing alternatives emerge already in the form of indrive, which I have been using a lot more
Uber keeps defying expectations and media media predictions of its demise, as far back as 2010. uber pivoted successfully to food delivery, and has survived anything thrown at it, including lawsuits, regulation and no shortage of bad media coverage.
You can roll losses forward for 3 years I think. So they could not pay any taxes for the next 3 years depending on how much they make in profit. It is why Amazon wasn’t paying any taxes for a few years after they decided to start taking profits.
I'm not here to defend UE at all but some of the comments about its use are kind of going in the direction of how any discussion of UE/Doordash/etc on reddit goes where people may seem to forget that something easy for them isn't as easy as it might be for someone else.
Most of the convos turn into "I can't believe anyone is stupid enough and so lazy as to waste their money on these apps when you can just drive to the place and pick it up and save $5-15+. Why are people so stupid? Make these apps run out of business!! Stop supporting them! Go get it yourself!" hundreds of times over and people are just absolutely bewildered that they're used vs someone picking up orders themselves.
Sometimes you'll see a comment or three about people who genuinely need the service, like the disabled, those without transportation, etc.
I use UE a LOT. 5-10+ times a week maybe. I live in the middle of downtown in a major city (USA) and all of my UE deliveries are 10-25 minute drop-offs. I won't order anything that takes 30+ unless I'm having a serious craving. I do NOT live in a part of town with a good selection of restaurants, it's about a 5-20 block walk in either direction.
Now a lot of people would go "10-25 minutes? how lazy are you?" That's 10-25 minutes for someone who is ALREADY out cruising around and near the restaurant to pick up and drop off my order. If I were to drive to get it it'd take me ~5+ just to pull out of my garage and head that direction. Then I'm crossing through downtown traffic and probably have to find some parallel parking and often pay a meter. It'll easily take me 40-1hr to get back with food and I just had the displeasure of dealing with a lot more stress than backing my car out of a suburban driveway. Just as an example that I deal with all the time, I'm in a food/pharmacy desert. The nearest Pharmacy is 3 miles away. That sounds pretty close but this being downtown that's a 20-25 minute drive minimum not including getting to the car, parking, etc. It takes me about 1 hour every month of just driving back and forth to get medications I can't get shipped. I take a 2 hour lunch break to deal with it. If you're driving 30 mph it would take about 6 minutes to go 3 miles with no interruptions. It takes me ~25.
If I walked it would be a 10 minute walk to the rail, a 5-15 minute ride on the train, a 5-10+ minute walk to the restaurant then reverse everything.
I'm uncomfortable biking around this city so while that would be the perfect method I just won't do it. Bike theft is absolutely rampant and the infra just isn't great. I won't leave my bike outside for a second unattended.
I'm 100% paying for convenience and a stress-free experience (99% of the time). It's not cheap and sometimes an order is messed up or missing something but that's honestly pretty rare in my experience. I will happily add the price of a beer or two onto my order to not deal with everything I mentioned above. I hate having to do my pharmacy trip and I'm lucky enough to own a vehicle. I feel so bad for my neighbors who don't and have to spend hours bussing around.
I am very glad that Uber was deemed illegal in Germany from the get go. All these gig-economy startups are running the same scam: Skip on employer costs such as taxes, health insurance and social security payments by not officially employing people put solely "brokering a deal between two individuals". In Germany, every employee gets paid sick leave. Uber/Foodora/Flink? Not so much. I'll gladly pay a bit extra for an actual cab driver that is properly insured and employed :)
I used to think the exact same, however have a more mixed attitude towards gig economy nowadays.
- I have talked to many workers who are die-hard fans of their jobs. They highly appreciated the easy non-bureaucratic way of earning as much money as they wanted to.
- Uber et all are also about disrupting antiquated oligopolies of old businesses. Esp in Germany you see a lot of gatekeeper business models who are managing their comfort zone lobbying for bureaucracy in their favor. Those are often not in favor of workers or customers.
With those services in Germany, all Uber, Bolt and others are doing are connecting you to a driver at a German company, a driver who is paid a living wage and has all of those benefits AFAIK. Those services notify you of this arrangement with every booking.
