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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

My "Uber sucks" story is that I left a jacket in the back seat of a car. I immediately tried to figure out how to call the driver but Uber decided they needed to make money off my misfortune. Not only did they charge me $15 to connect with the driver but they refused to let me message the driver directly, so what could have been a few minutes of time turned into a week long saga. Once I finally got a hold of the driver several days later she had the same story as me where she had immediately tried to contact me and return my item but Uber didn't let her contact me.

That permanently cost Uber a customer because now I know that they'll try to use dark patterns to screw me over any chance they get.

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You were not charged to connect to anyone. That is a Returned Item Fee for drivers to give the item back to you: https://help.uber.com/riders/article/lost-item-return-fee-?n...

Whether or not the driver wants it? Pull the other one.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. The fee is only charged if the driver returns the item, so if they cant or dont want to then there's no fee.

I lost a phone in a taxi once (didn't realize it, it was a burner). A week later I had the same taxi driver and he goes "Glad I finally picked you up again, here is your phone". Sometimes people are good.

What's with the moral judgements? Uber is a service. You forgot your item. Most people are good, but still want to be paid.

Expecting everyone else should be generous of their time for your mistake is definitely not good.

Would you have preferred it if parent wrote that sometimes people are nice? I didn't read into parent's statement as much as you did. Sometimes communication is messy.

I have no preference on other's comments. Changing that word doesn't change the implication that some people are good/nice because they did it for free, in the context of a discussion about fees.

Can you describe what other meaning there would be in that statement?

The word nice doesn't have as much a moral implication as the word good, which is why I asked.

As for the original sentence, I didn't think it was saying that some people are good/nice because they did it for free. I thought it was saying that some people dit it for free because they are good. That has no implication on whether a person is good based on whether they do it for free. But even if it did, the logic doesn't fall apart if you do an If A Then B analysis. I see no problem with someone doing something for free being a signal that someone is good, especially because I do not say it's an if and only if situation either.

What if the driver doesn't want to charge a fee and is happy to just circle the block and drop the item off to a thankful customer, as described in this episode? Maybe things won't be as convenient for some drivers, in which case a fee is appropriate. But imposing a fee without asking the driver or allowing the driver an easy way to notify the customer of the lost item is dishonest; Uber is not doing it on the driver's behalf but acting in loco parentis of the driver and deciding on their behalf, thus robbing the driver of autonomy.

The driver chooses to return the item in the first place (and they know the fee), and they can notify riders about lost items via their app.

Uber avoids price negotiation, and considering that it takes time and effort to resolve your mistake, it's likely much better to just charge a standard fee instead of planning for every single case.

It feels like you're only acknowledging the part of the story which is comparatively easy to argue against.

If my driver is a block away but can't contact me until ops gets back to them and they're miles away, that's an indisputable failure.

Failure in what exactly? It's a standard process with a standard fee.

This comment thread shows just how much contention there would be otherwise, which is probably what encouraged these changes.

Failure in turning a process that could have taken two minutes into one that took a week.

Isn't that just some narrow condition?

The lost items were returned, so the return process is actually successful. It's designed to work for many people under various conditions, not just you. Whether it was as quick as possible is irrelevant to the original claim of being charged for the wrong reason.

Perhaps try and remember your items if you don't want to worry about recovering them later. There are plenty of drivers who also immediately check for and return items before they set off. Saying a system has failed because it doesn't perfectly suit your exact life situation/mistake is disingenuous and unproductive.

The fact that you made a mistake doesn't absolve another party of all duty to act like a reasonable person. Is capital punishment for stealing a loaf of bread okay, because perhaps you should try to remember not to steal things?

I also question the assertion that this process is designed to be as effective as possible for anyone, unless you mean Uber. As stated in the original post, both parties were trying to resolve this, while a busybody middleman stopped them.

This is what I mean by disingenuous. Nobody is getting punished. Uber is being reasonable, which is why the user got their items back, using a standardized process.

Why do you keep saying they failed under some arbitrary scenario?

Again, just because it could've been faster does not mean that it didn't work. That specific scenario is not the majority nor the only one that matters.

What arbitrary scenario? I'm literally discussing the scenario which kicked off this discussion.

The problem is not that it _could_ have been faster, the problem is that it _would_ have been faster if they'd done nothing at all. They injected themselves unnecessarily to slow down something which would have worked fine without interference.

If I find someone's wallet in the back of my car and I call them two years later to give it back, am I being reasonable? I mean, they got their items back. Or is it specifically a week which is acceptable? What's the maximum amount of time that it's reasonable to delay a by-default two-minute interaction?

I don't understand your comment but I'll try one last time:

The problem is helping riders get back lost items. The solution, taking into account potential abuse with open communication and all other scenarios in millions of rides, is to have a "report" button that then notifies the driver to find and return the items on their own, and get rewarded with a standard fee.

In any arbitrary scenario (meaning not representative of all of them), this process may not be the fastest or most effective, but it does solve the problem.

Sometimes a 2 minute situation might be stretched out, and sometimes it might mean things are lost forever, but vast majority of the time it works fine, and that's the trade-off. You are focusing on 0.1% scenario while ignoring everything else.

Look, you haven't addressed my response, you've just reiterated your point, which I already understood.

We're obviously not going to come to agreement on this, so let's leave it be.

No it isn't. Thank heavens I don't work with anyone like you.

> Perhaps try and remember your items if you don't want to worry about recovering them later

You sound like a really nice and understanding person :)

Non-responsive.

I can imagine there are very solid reasons related to stalking that result in Uber wanting to make it hard to contact past riders or drivers in either direction.

That is pretty shitty. It use to be that drivers had to return stuff on their own dime, I think the fee is supposed to pay them for that time.

Paying for the drivers to return something that you forgot is fair.

Unless of course they don't want to be paid for it, and the service gets in the way of them returning it to you immediately for free just so they can charge $15 that they get a cut of ;)

If you read the posted link, you would see that the fee is entirely sent to the driver.

And if you read the other comments, you would see that direct communications can be abused so this current process is likely the best compromise to help both riders and drivers.

And as stated before, many drivers return items immediately for free while many others probably don't find items until days after the original rider reports it, so there are vastly different scenarios under which you need a process to work.

Is the tiny detail of whether the driver can set the exact fee really that important?

What I showed up to Uber headquaets to pick something up that was left in an Uber they wanted to me stand in line behind all drivers.

I was told, "we are all customers here."

I left, but found out later that they tried to do the same thing to the driver dropping it off. He left too.

Can you elaborate on how they charged you $15 to call the driver? I don't use the app.

I didn't have the driver's phone number so I had to use the Uber app to contact the driver, that's when they charged me the $15.

Well, not having the driver's phone number is good. Can you imagine passengers calling drivers and harassing them for whatever reason? It will happen.

Should the driver drive for free to return your jacket?

What if the driver is already en route to another passenger and they told the passenger 5 minutes, and your cost will be additional 10 minutes. Do you think another passenger will understand and be forgiving that their ride is 10 minutes late because of your situation?

If you really think about all the reasons and complexity involved in just returning your jacket, it's not as simple. But then, what if you were traveling and forgot your luggage?

I dunno what the right answer is, what do you think?

Why are you inventing new facts to rationalize this practice? The other poster told you that the driver noticed the forgotten jacket and immediately attempted to contact the rider, but couldn't. Uber is choosing to interpose itself between the two and collect a fee that neither of them wanted to pay.

> Why are you inventing new facts to rationalize this practice?

The driver being nice and wanting to contact the driver is cool at a small scale but at a large scale with millions(?) of trips per day, that sort of casual niceness doesn't scale at all. At scale, you run into all the questions asked by the parent. You have to address the "oh shit, I need to get/give something back" issue in a more systemic, scalable way that accounts for all the ways drivers and passengers might try to screw each other.

Whether the fee is the right way to make this happen, I cannot answer. But what I can say is the questions asked by the parent are the kinds of questions you absolutely have to answer when creating a feature allowing "call backs" that might get used by thousands or tens of thousands of people per day.

You ignored the rest of my comment, which was not in any case addressed to you.

This is a public forum. Anybody can reply to you. In fact, that’s the whole point.

> Well, not having the driver's phone number is good.

There is no need to actually give out the drivers phone number, Uber could easily have an 800 number that when called would prompt you for a case or ticket number generated by the app and then would provide you with options for anonymously connecting to your driver or a customer support agent.

> Should the driver drive for free to return your jacket?

When I drove cabs, we would take lost items back to the shop. If they were called for we might deliver them to you for free if it was really slow, but we would usually just charge you a regular fare from the shop to where you wanted it. Otherwise, you could come down to the shop and claim it in person.

> Do you think another passenger will understand and be forgiving that their ride is 10 minutes late because of your situation?

If you lost the item, I think the primary concern is that you actually get it back not how timely it is. Clearly you'll just have to wait until the driver is free and pay the fare to get the item back to where you are currently.

> Well, not having the driver's phone number is good. Can you imagine passengers calling drivers and harassing them for whatever reason? It will happen.

I'm pretty sure you can get their number if you call them via the app during the drive.

Uber has started implementing their own exchange board so you're actually contacting them through a virtual number.

That's pretty misleading. You are not charged to contact the driver in the app, you are charged once the item is returned. I've been through this process myself, and it's even stated on their FAQ:

> A $15 fee is charged to you once your lost item is returned.[0]

[0] https://help.uber.com/riders/article/lost-item-return-fee-?n...

Does the driver get all of that fee? Or does Uber take a cut?

Uber has to do all kinds of things that a taxi company wouldn't need to do. For example they have an entire department related to resolving sexual assault/harassment issues between customers and drivers. A taxi company would just send the the matter to the police and be done with it.

They also must have a large "compliance" department as each city, state and country seems to be enacting a different set of rules around how the company can operate.

All these different departments need software to support them (no point in having compliance if the app forgets to charge the right tax somewhere!), which means they need more accountants, more HR people, etc.

It seems like Uber could trim some fat (I had an interview with them that was laughably easy), but who knows if the CEO thinks he can do that without causing low morale and a stampede of the actual talent.

From the link: "The entire fee is passed on to the driver."

It's free to contact the driver. You only get charged to pay the driver to bring you your lost item.

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