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Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

No one talks about the cars.

200k drivers. $25k for the kit (car, phone, misc). That's $5,000,000,000 of costs Uber & Lyft ducked.

What other employment requires you to front the boss $25k for the privilege of earning starvation wages?

For years, both Lyft and Uber have said that if they are forced to reclassify gig workers as employees that such a change would have an adverse effect on their profitability...

No doubt.

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For the first few weeks after high school, I delivered fast food--pizza and chicken mostly. This was probably ten years before the pizza outlets noticed that you could get a kid to use the family car to deliver pizza. I am very grateful that the thought hadn't occurred to them yet. I am also confident that if I had come home and told the folks that I found this summer job, I just need one of the cars, they would have said, Keep looking.

How does it work with taxi drivers? Don't they front the cost of the vehicle + medallion?

Commonly they rent the car. If you own the car and medallion, you’re sort of a business unto yourself.

Sort of. Lots of Uber drivers already had a car, phone, and commute that they could make and extra $20 each day on if they drove an extra 15min out of their way. This isn’t too much but over a month would add up.

Of course now that COVID is a thing much of this has stopped.

Is that really a realistic driver scenario or was that the nice story told by Uber? From my (limited) experience with Uber drivers, none of them only "drove an extra 15min out of their way" on their normal commute, nothing even close to it. It was a job like any other for them.

I do believe it, it was really bad traffic that day too from Renton to the udistrict. Dudes wife was a pharmacist (trained at UW), we talked about some random biotech stuff so I’m 99% sure he wasn’t lying.

This is not that common but some people do. Now if it is a Prius with tinted windows on the other hand that’s someone doing it as a job.

> What other employment requires you to front the boss $25k for the privilege of earning starvation wages?

Well, traditional taxi driver, for one.

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