UberEats could be underpaying delivery drivers on 21% of trips
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
It's like Uber are trying to shoot themselves in the foot with all the cost squeezing and profit seeking at the same time they're in a fundamental legal fight defining what they are.
You would think they would go in the opposite direction and pay people such good rates during this controversy, you could hold that up and say, "see? People are clearly much better under this system". But I guess not.
On a separate note, I will say that this is pretty expected in terms of how software errors go. Of course programmers at a company will be checking quite diligently that they're not overpaying through their algorithms. But underpaying? Only those who can't easily check your code are harmed by that one. It is a rare company that spends money and resources on verifying from their users' point of view that they're being delivered what was promised -- unless that company actively cares about the user.
I don't think they have a choice. UberEats is fundamentally unprofitable. If it was run profitably, the high(er) prices would drive a large portion of their customers away and into the arms of other "startups" willing to run at a loss or towards picking up the food themselves. Plus Uber can't pretend to be an early-stage startup anymore and their constant quarterly losses are starting to add up.
I'm still not convinced this new food delivery industry is viable without constant cash injections.
If I'm at home I'll look at the menu of my favourite indian/chineese/whatever place, phone them up, and they deliver it as they have done for decades.
I've spent two nights in a hotel since March, normally it's 70 a year. One night I ordered a dominos as I got back to the hotel just before 2300. The other night I ate out with a supplier.
Likewise with Uber, if I'm at home and not flying off somewhere, I'm not going to be ordering a taxi, either to get to the airport, or when I'm in a strange city on the other side of the planet.
I can see this is the golden age of takeaways and home-delivery (which basically means amazon or groceries), but I don't see it for takeaways.
So many times, I will be super busy with the kids, or work, or housework, and I will just pull up DoorDash with one hand (while the other is feeding a hangry 1 year old) and hit ‘reorder’ on one of my past meals. Literally 15 seconds and food is on the way.
Compare this to having to call someone, wait on hold, give my phone number/address, tell them my order, correct the mistakes, find my wallet, get out my credit card, give them the number, confirm the number and expiration and security code, then sign a paper copy with the tip when the driver drops it off.
Can I do the old style of delivery? Sure, but man it is a lot easier now.
Most fast food place either use JustEat or Hungry to accept your order and take your credit card information, if they don't have their own website or app. They will have their own drivers, employed and paid directly by the restaurant and they don't expect a tip.
That's what I compare any "startup" food delivery service to. So they will always be worse and more expensive, because a third party is now involved.
Tastier the food, stronger the accent.
Several places we flat out can’t communicate with.
The worse is a local pizza joint with the thickest Indian accent I’ve every heard. I work with Indians, and I still can’t understand them. Really good pizza.
Ask the whole kid angle. Kids screaming, work screaming, wife screaming...
Why isn't this a thing? Is it that few/no restaurants have delivery drivers?
I can't imagine many restaurants benefit that much from the discovery features in UE/DD/etc.
As for discovery, I don’t have data, but I know personally that about half of my regular order spots are places I found by scrolling through door dash.
Your argument (that it is not much of a barrier to use the old way) can be made for so many of the quality of life improvements we have made over the course of human history. Not every advancement is an entire new category of things we can accomplish; so much is just slight improvements that save time and make things a bit easier.
I feel like there has been a backlash against time saving tech, where people wax nostalgic about how much better the older/slower systems were. I don't understand it. I am so happy for all the timesaving advancements we have made over the years. Now, if we don't use that saved time wisely, that is a whole other issue. However, I don't think going back to slower systems is the solution to not using our free time well.
It isn't a luddite backlash. It's just that in many cases the value-add for customers doesn't justify the price difference.
There are certain benefits to apps that exist, don't get me wrong. Discoverability, flexible pricing, direct-to-consumer-marketing, etc. But most of those don't apply to me at the consumer level. Do I want to pay 20% more for the convenience of browsing menus? Not really. I'm on the app to buy food and get it delivered. Insofar as some places now offer delivery where before they didn't, I benefit. Insofar as the same places I used to frequent now apply a markup to cover the cut the app gets, I lose out.
The UX improvement of being able to press 'reorder' has never eclipsed calling into my favourite local spot, asking for the regular, wishing the owner well, then discovering he put extra dumplings in the bag for me.
Hold on, why does your opinion about the value-add get to determine whether I should be allowed to pay for that convenience?
Let the market decide that.
I view it as an unstable equilibrium -- something's gotta give sooner or later, these businesses are barely sustainable. Is the convenience ultimately worth it in the aggregate, if Uber needs to embrace tactics like these just to survive?
(I admit I have a bias here, I think the gig economy sucks.)
You're also enabling a parasitic corporation to generate more revenue, when it should be shuttered with nearly a billion in losses every quarter.
Some restaurants in Australia have higher menu prices for delivery services.
I would happily pay more for this service. I don’t want to take advantage of anyone, so please charge me enough to get me this kind of service and pay everyone a fair wage.
I can also try a ton of new restaurants without having to re-enter my details, and there is a consistent interface. In addition, I get some sort of guarantee that the place is legit... if I don’t get my food, I can get a refund.
What about a new restuarant?
.... from somewhere new
There's a maximum amount of time someone will wait (1 hour) and the product degrades after it's created (cools off)
It's very hard to do that when you're aggregating restaurants and drivers.
Uber can just write off the loss as more and more money is shoveled into it like coal was shoveled into an engine on a trail.
It's not hard to imagine them choosing to pursue Amazon-style vertical integration where they own the "restaurants" themselves. I put "restaurants" in quotes, because it'll almost certainly just be warehouse-style kitchens, where drivers skid up out front and grab food from heated tables, and you won't be able to dine-in at all. It would fill the same role for aspiring restaurateurs as food trucks do today: a startup cost, low-barrier to entry way to build out a brand, rapidly iterate menu-items, and begin building revenue to eventually secure a business loan to open a proper restaurant.
If UberEats can really squeeze both the drivers AND the restaurants, there's no fundamental reason that food delivery can't be done profitably - pizza companies have been doing it in almost all markets for decades.
Brick and mortar retail stores got eaten by Amazon warehouses, and it seems inevitable that many brick and mortar restaurants will eventually get eaten by a massive tech company as well.
Pizza delivery is profitable because they sell cardboard and depend on teenager drivers relying on their parent's auto insurance.
Anyone who's actually looked at the person delivering their food would have thought twice about the margins in food delivery. To spell it out: food delivery is often performed by immigrants with few choices for under-the-table work. The margins are thin-to-none. The current system has worked because no one's investigating the thousands of independent restaurants.
Now tech companies are trying to do the same thing, but multimillion dollar corporations have a harder time hiding their labor exploitation from the public.
Going back to ryan's point, I agree that with full vertical integration (dirt cheap ingredients and centralised factory kitchens), food delivery could be profitable, but at what point is one just selling frozen food from a microwave/oven in the back of a car?
The term for this is dark kitchens.
I always wondered something about those meals that are available on airplanes:
in the past I liked quite a lot most of them (e.g. a small piece of meat/fish/other, some vegetables and/or rice, a slice of bread, a small dessert) => wouldn't it be quite profitable to have a similar delivery service for "kits/menus" like those ones (just e.g. ~4 different "kits" available to be ordered daily), cold (but pre-cooked if needed) that only need to be warmed up at home? (if 3 stewards/esses, on a moving tube, managed to warm that up for 300 people then I guess that I'll manage to do the same for myself at home)?
I admit that on one hand the "delivery"-part of the service would be related only to getting fresh (uncooked or "freshly pre-cooked") stuff (not ready for consumption), but on the other hand that way the delivery could be spread over a longer timespan (multiple deliveries per trip, better delivery organization, therefore less costs) and could be left in the mailbox (assuming at least a mediocre insulation of the package).
Here in Switzerland/Zurich I am aware of some similar services, but they deliver only the ingredients (then I would still have to actively cook). Supermarkets do have some similar pre-cooked stuff, but most (not all, but most) is quite terrible (probably because there the stuff has to be able to lie there for days/weeks - definitely not similar to what I used to eat on airplanes) and especially it never changes.
(I used to fly only in Europe using "Swiss", "Air Berlin", "Lufthansa", maybe as well "KLM"/"Air France", always to/from Zurich - your experience with other airlines / in other location might be different)
Woudln't it be nice to get back home and find in the mailbox a ready-to-be-warmed-up (maybe actually "cooked", but in an extremely simple way) menu?
The delivery, being all sourced from the same place and being spread over many hours would not be as expensive as it is currently done for hot stuff coming from multiple restaurants, and the small amount of different menus (4 as mentioned above or slightly more) would allow to buy more source material for less $.
EDIT: I admit of not having any clue how the companies that prepare meals/menus for airlines operate => there might therefore be some important details that make the whole concept crumble... :)
There are meal-delivery services here that are basically what you describe, but they usually deliver food weekly and they're kind of pricey. They're mainly targeting time-strapped single people who are trying to eat healthier and don't want to do all the mental work that goes into grocery shopping, meal prepping, cooking, etc.
In any of the major urban areas in the states, a $5 budget would limit you to various street foods (a couple of tacos, a banh mi, maybe a slice of pizza) or a couple of items from the dollar menu at the various fast food chains. Frankly, your typical airline meal is more filling and nutritious (but not as tasty, unless you're flying a middle eastern or flagship asian airline, of course).
A decent McDonald's meal for example, would blow up your $5 budget pretty easily.
On one hand you are absolutely correct stating that swiss restaurants are in general more expensive than anywhere (subjective - e.g. a 30$ small menu might be ok here, but we do have as well a higher income and going to the restaurant is not something that people do often), but on the other hand I did like airline food (which you basically describe as being "the worst" while for me was on par with one offered by restaurants), therefore we have a mismatch of our experiences.
(talking about restaurants, I must mention that Stockholm was for me a lot more expensive than Zurich)
Personally, I would have all kind of doubts about a $5 meal (in most parts of the world, if it's not something extremely simple).
> There are meal-delivery services here that are basically what you describe, but they usually deliver food weekly and they're kind of pricey. They're mainly targeting time-strapped single people who are trying to eat healthier and don't want to do all the mental work that goes into grocery shopping, meal prepping, cooking, etc.
I'm not currently aware of something like that in my area , but my profile is very similar (and I did try to cook different stuff, but the failure rate is quite high and the overall quality quite low). Still, I think that the concept that I described was a bit different than that?
I'm from southern California. I worked in Wellington, New Zealand for a stint, and I found that restaurants were priced about the same as back home. That is to say, an average sit-down restaurant meal of equivalent quality was roughly the same price in USD.
However, in America, there's an entirely different class of much cheaper food (takeout food), and younger people in metropolitan areas eat this food very often. These were usually powered by cheap immigrant labor, often paid under the table to skirt taxes and mandatory benefits.
Labor protections in New Zealand are much higher, of course, and without an easily exploitable underclass, this food simply can't exist there. There weren't really regular kiwis who ate out 1 - 2x per day - virtually all of them cooked most of their meals at home themselves.
This is the environment in which these food delivery companies are operating. These restaurants already have extremely thin margins, consumers are price-sensitive, and as long as the delivery company is just a middle-man, they'll struggle to do this thing profitably. If they lose access to their cheap labor by having to re-classify drivers as actual employees, it might be impossible.
The food tastes pretty good. It's better than frozen food, but still a far cry from a freshly cooked meal. It's not terribly cheap either. If I did all 3 meals from them 5 days week, it cost somewhere around $8 a meal. I ended up quitting because of the price. It's too expensive to use for many meals, and has to short of a shelf life to keep around as a backup if I don't want to cook.
Uber's burned 10s of billions in the hopes of becoming a few hundred billion dollar company. Would Uber 2.0 need to burn hundreds of billions in the hope of becoming a hundred billion dollar company?
So I think the difficulty is less around investors being more savvy to the economics of ride sharing and delivery services, but that they're more savvy to the realities of how far off those technologies are. And that the entrenched firms like Waymo will be far, far better positioned to offer an autonomous taxi service on day 1 than some plucky startup will be.
Pizza chains and others who own their delivery process can at least set where they will deliver and tend to encourage bigger purchases to avoid delivery charges and hopes of fresher food.
I am going to assume the only type of agreement would be tighter integration with restaurants to the point the service name is hidden, as in contracting out drivers to particular restaurants but the difficulty there is guaranteeing a driver is always available. Basically an outsourcing for drivers. Restaurants get some filtering of drivers and drivers have a set number of stores with instant familiarity.
at Uber scale, they can get VC funding for $500-800 million, to hire the thousands of chefs that were laid off during the covid shutdowns. You can also imagine going international, so Uber Chef is actually thousands of chefs around the world. (hiring chefs without the overhead of restaurants - that's the play)
The scenario proposed by the grandparent poster adds so much waste and slack and overhead in the system that the family-owned-and-operated Thai kitchen on Main St. will eat Uber's lunch, and the Dominos franchise two doors down from it will pick through its bones.
Uber Chef ignores all of that and bypasses all overhead - you don't need a restaurant or even the physical location of a building to employ chefs to cook food. No need for health inspections or expensive fire suppression equipment. (you use people who want to rent their home kitchens out for cooking)
That's Uber's raison-d'etre - to bypass all legal restrictions and externalize all overhead in the way of getting the items to you.
This isn't a joke, this is what Uber did with their taxi service at the beginning as MVP so why not do it to food services as well?
They allowed individuals to sell food / operate as a pop-up restaurant.
IIRC, it got closed down because of health and food-safety related regulations.
A more sustainable version of this business model is basically a food truck / cart.
It’s also a high liability business, especially when dealing with animal products.
Not to mention prepared food is barely affordable for the vast majority even with the tiny margins that exist today, so the only people who would be able to afford such an on demand personalized chef service surely could just afford their own chef?
I found most of clients fell into two categories.
Poor and really should not be using the service. Middle of the day was to a lot of businesses/schools. Lunch tips were crap so I avoided that time frame.
How does this not stop this whole conversation in its tracks immediately? There's so much grandstanding about this, you and every other politician or upper middle class tech worker has their takes on how these poor drivers are being tricked into bad deals they can't understand and need the protection of full-time employment. But it's not a very good protection! There are a lot of downsides, and drivers simply don't want it, but for some reason a lot of people feel the need to force this change through anyway.
Our current labor system, and its default assumption that tying yourself to a full-time job with a large company is the only way you deserve to have stability, is just very clearly showing its flaws here. It's not compatible with gig economy work, why can't we look for solutions that drivers would actually want, and that would help every other independent contractor? Things like improving overall safety nets, so that everyone has health coverage and is covered in the case of things like disabilities even if they don't work for a large company.
Almost every take I read on the pro-AB5 side of this argument seems more focused on punishing Uber the corporation for some perceived moral failing, than on actually helping the drivers. It's quite bizarre.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2020/08/19/wil...
But that's the wrong question.
The better question is: What percentage would want to be either full-time or part-time employees?
I would imagine the percentage would be much higher.
When classified as part-time employees, they'd have much of the same flexibility they currently enjoy, but they would at least be covered under minimum-wage laws, same as part-time workers who work at McDonald's or the grocery store.
If Uber/Lyft don't think it's financially viable to offer its workers the same bare-minimum protections that a McDonald's worker gets, then I don't see how it can claim to be a non-exploitative business.
It was commissioned by Uber but conducted by an independent research firm, and the methodology is documented, so it's up to you how reliable of a source you find that.
Since these are major lawsuits and it's also becoming a pretty big story in California, I imagine if there are significant flaws here or if there are other reputable surveys that have found the opposite, that those will start to surface. So far I haven't seen anything to that effect.
[0] https://www.cadriversurvey.com/
Edit: I missed in the irony in your comment as well on first read. There's an entire side industry devoted to helping workers maximize their profit, and many seem to have success doing so. That seems like a good thing, at least for those who want it? Compare that to other industries like Amazon warehouse workers, where many are full-time employees. It doesn't seem to have helped their working conditions much as there are a lot of complaints about the job, and if certain employees are more productive the company pockets the savings rather than the employees being able to make more money.
Because that doesn't include the number of people who would want to be ride-share/delivery drivers but don't because they can't be employees.
That pool could have 99% people who want to be employees, but only a small number them (17% of current drivers) keep driving despite their preferences.
Too bad they didn't ask questions like "do you want to deal with independent contractor taxes" and "do you want to set your own hours" and so on, to drill down into why they liked the independent contractor status.
Maybe the solution is to force ride share companies to truly act as matchmakers, where they show passengers and drivers the book and collect a small fee for completed transactions rather than using opaque pricing to maximize their take from both sides of the transaction.
The main case here is about requiring employee status or employee-like basic standards of workers rights for the drivers, even if they don't work full time for a single company but (for example) five hours for Uber followed by three hours for Lyft on the same day.
Workforce moving to the 'gig economy' does not by itself justify abandoning the basic standards and protections from exploitation that our society has decided long ago to afford for even the poorest and most vulnerable workers. There currently are legal loopholes that enable the 'gig employers' to skip these standards. That's a bug, not a feature - it should be fixed.
I wouldn't say it's rare. Companies that do this are very open to lawsuits but also bad press, and that's the thing all companies hate - having to make public statements and ultimately fix the issue, isn't worth it to any business at scale. The DoorDash tipgate was hugely embarrassing for them, and Uber has also been very publicly ridiculed in the past that the the last thing Dara wants is anymore bad press.
I have gotten a check from the CA Treasurer on a few occasions because I didn’t check some box and take a tax deduction that I was entitled to. Not a company, and certainly if I underpaid the state would come after me to be made whole. But some organizations do work both ways.
Uber's argument that they are not employees is based on the concept that they only a platform facilitating a connection between drivers people who need rides or in this case deliveries. But if the contractors are truly separate entities, then Uber by controlling the cost of the ride/delivery, is fixing prices.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/legal-problem-could-crash-ube...
I am not aware what the current status of legal rulings for or against Uber in this regard, but I believe my point still stands.
Under or overpaying on trips is more of an interest to those engineers trying to optimize marketplace efficiency. Meal delivery businesses have as much of an interest in not underpaying as doing so reduces supply availability and therefore reliability and they have also an interest in not overpaying as that reduces profitability. The ultimate goal is optimal pricing in a three sided market to maximize liquidity as the business model does best when you optimize for volume of transactions. Maximizing liquidity amortizes fixed costs over more transactions. This applies as much to the meal delivery companies as to the restaurants involved.
At the end of the day, distance driven is very imperfect as you have issues like poor GPS signal and in cities you have the dilemma of urban canyons and tunnels. Also, drivers don't always take the suggested route. At vehicle speeds, it's hard problem to solve due to time between GPS pings. Another issue besides GPS inaccuracy is clock inaccuracy, especially with round-trip times between server and client and client and server aren't always symmetrical, especially on cellular networks, and this messes up all sorts of clock synchronization strategies. The peanut gallery on HN is seriously underestimating the complexity of measuring distance using GPS. It's pretty darn good when conditions are ideal, but when they aren't, good luck.
Another question is the magnitude of the underpayment in the 21% of trips. Are we talking about 1-2%, 5-10%, some other deviation? If it was something like 1-2%, we should all be amazed. Gage repeatability and reproducibility matters.
If they can snare people into driving for them, there are material switching costs for workers, and 'underpaying' on some level is actually something they can get away with.
At the 'low end of labour' workers generally have zero power, much less during covid, so it's not a 'marketplace' in the more broad sense. If it was, we wouldn't even need minimum wage laws, or Medicare for employed people etc..
If the technical challenge is 'insurmountable' then they need to figure something out: minimum guarnatees etc. , even over the aggregate, as you say.
This could also be an "unintentional-intentional" bug, meaning its presence was just an accident -- but that the company has chosen to prioritize its engineering resources addressing issues that improve its revenue, rather than decreasing it.
There's way more money to be made in having accurate measurements than having inaccurate measurements that optimization engineers can't rely on. The more accurate the measurements, the more confidence you have that your marketplace optimization algorithms are producing the desired marketplace dynamics.
2. I could see a company with various ethical lapses like Uber not prioritizing an unintentional bug for a speedy fix.
3. In the intentional scenario, it'd be a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing (popularized by Superman 3 / Office Space). Easier to get away with than a public rate cut, with the downside of bad PR if you get caught.
The interview seems to indicate it's an aggregate underpayment across all trips. The tool is available for examination if you are truly skeptical.
edit: also, you seem to have made your account just to comment on this thread. what's up?
For example, this makes no sense:
"I had this one delivery that was an hour-and-a-half long and I got paid $16 and I thought, 'There is no way that's right,'" Armin Samii, an unemployed computer scientist who has been working Uber Eats on the side, told Salon. "I looked into it and found out that Uber paid me for a one mile delivery instead of a four mile delivery. Of course it's all made worse because I'm on a bike and they don't account for that, but that's a separate issue."
A 11 mile hill climb of Mount Hamilton with 2700 of elevation gain takes me about 1.5 to 2 hours to do. A straight hill climb which you would only find in cities like Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro is like the worst case scenario. A 4 mile trip in pretty much any major city should be maybe 20-25 minutes with stop signs and traffic lights. Not saying there wasn't an issue with that trip, but this makes no sense.
I have worked a lot with this stuff in my career, so I'm inclined to want to see the data myself so I can try and reverse engineer what may have happened.
Furthermore Armin Samii appears to have worked for a direct competitor of the company he's criticizing while developing this.
(a) I thought the whole point of these apps was to simplify things for the user. I just want to know how much I pay in total, upfront, as I'm selecting food. Include taxes and delivery fees in a big fat "this is what you will pay" display on the screen and I'll be a 10X happier user. Delivery apps were a great opportunity to axe the complexities of tipping culture and they screwed it up IMO.
(b) They ask you for tips before they even dispatch your food, which makes zero sense to me. Tips are supposed to be "extra" based on the quality of service, so how are you supposed to blindly give 10% or 15% without even having received service? (I always put 0% when ordering and up it to 10-15% on delivery OR give cash tips, which is how things have always worked before the age of apps, but it's cumbersome to do that.)
Just like in a restaurant: maybe your default tip is 25%, but great service bumps that up, and bad service bumps it down. You go in expecting to pay 25%.
My expectation of apps is to get rid of these artifacts of the past. In most other parts of the world prices are given to you upfront, no tips necessary.
Not only that, but Uber asks you before you even check out if you want to give 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, or a custom amount. Considering I haven't gotten my food or service yet, how the hell am I supposed to know? I don't want to deal with this decision. You tell me how much I'm supposed to pay and just present me one number. I'll hit "buy" if it fits my budget.
Uber got rid of cab driver run-arounds, they can get rid of tips in the same way and just ask for a fair price upfront. As a customer I would find up-front, no-tip pricing a MUCH better UX.
So I immediately tipped the person on the phone £45
How ridiculous does that seem?
US culture of tipping is so ridiculous that I think people actually derive enjoyment from tipping by giving themselves an ego boost when they do, as some sort of charity or having role played as an extremely rich person being benevolent with their wealth.
Great putdown when the father comes back, sees the tip, rips up the credit card receipt and tells Ross to pay the whole bill if he wants to be the 'big man'
You're comparing apples and oranges. Tipping is just the way portions of the food service industry works.
A number of industries (but which industries - how do I tip the person who takes my order at a mcdonalds drivethrough. Do I tip my builder who put in a new window? How about the binman?), in a small number of countries (do I tip in Mexico City? Quito? Brazzerville?)
The U.S. seems to have built an expectation of tipping into its economy and tries to export that expectation around the world.
https://www.salon.com/2020/08/20/programmers-say-uber-eats-i...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ubercheats/pkdblhe...
Overpayments are much less frequent than underpayments, and regardless: when someone accepts a trip, who knows if they did it because they thought "that amount sounds fair" or thought "that amount given the distance shown sounds fair." The only fair thing for Uber to do here is to rectify all underpayments, and let the overpayments stand.
Further: just because Uber couldn't find a route as efficiently as the extension could doesn't mean it was an overpayment. The extension uses Google Maps. If the driver used Uber Navigation to navigate, and Uber navigation was twice as long as Google's - is that really an overpayment?
For the second part I agree, but without seeing outlier, maybe in some cases google couldn’t find the best route, compared to the app.
PS: all this stats used Google Maps shortest path or best path?
I was paid 1 mile, actual distance 3.5-4.0 miles.
Previous versions of the app would use the first result returned by Google Directions API, which could have been best not shortest (I'm not sure, anyone know?). Newer version (pending app store review) does shortest always.
Yeah google can show longer but faster route depending on traffic etc.
Also one more thing can be, gps location point and address can point to different locations. Not sure how Uber is showing, or calculating from which one.
I’d say that Uber’s wide reach is valuable, the fact that they likely exist in the city you’re visiting, the fact that they likely have enough cars to pick you up in under 5 minutes. These are valuable things that don’t come from individual drivers or small taxi companies, but rather from big aggregators.
For uber is good that wide reach, for the end user not so much.
Costco is valuable to me because it saves me time from having to research products and supply chains. I could go to aliexpress.com, but I don’t because I’d rather spend my time in other ways.
If I land in a foreign country, I could spend time researching taxi companies, or I can save time and pay Uber/Lyft a premium if I already trust them.
As a seller, a middleman (or broker) can save me time by discriminating against buyers I don’t want to waste time entertaining.
Anyway, interesting to see that that wasn't an isolated incident when it comes to Uber the company.
The only mileage tracker that matters is the vehicle odometer on a stock vehicle with stock diameter tires with most of its tread. You'd need a device connected to the vehicle via ODB2 where you can press a bunch at the start and end of each trip.
They're no worse than your run of the mill tech company, so I suspect something odd is going on. I dislike corporations in general and want to see them play fair, but Uber changed the way I live life, and I'm constantly worried bureaucrats and angry business/tech nerds are going to regress us back to the taxi stone ages. We're just one law away from having to go back to hailing a cab with our thumbs and trusting their internal GPS.
In short, they are all of the evils of a short-sighted "tech" company in one package.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-d...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/29/labor...
What shows the "hate" more clearly is when there is "good" news or just an neutral announcement from/about these companies, where you will see most of the comments being negative to a point they are often irrelevant to the article itself.
So media should stop reporting on possible bad actions by Uber?
Excess coverage or not, the media exposed discrimination and harassments at Uber that led to the company changing for the better.
Seems like the current CEO is good, but the company gets the good and the bad from it's history. The good part is that they got a ton of money, like inconceivable amounts of money.