There are people who want to make a positive return on their time + vehicle depreciation. But they are on the open market competing against people who are in a cash crunch and happy to have a net negative return on the same, as long as it temporarily allows them to convert depreciation into cash.
This is why drivers will always lose in the long term. They are racing against each other to the bottom.
I've also had Uber drivers who don't need the money at all - they just like talking to new people and are bored on a Saturday night. This of course drives the price down further. These are often the ones with a very nice car.
As other sibling comments have mentioned, many Uber drivers have no idea that this is what their gig is doing - converting depreciation into cash flow in a net-negative way. Maybe Uber's marketing style to drivers needs to be amended by law?
Taking advantage of people who don’t work it out for themselves is despicable at best, highly immoral at worst.
But given the housing shortage, how expensive everything is, and how many people are raising children paycheck to paycheck, I just don't see how we'd be arriving at such an equilibrium in the US.
Maybe in some rich Northern European country.
People act as if the fact that some people who are bored on a Saturday night are ready to give a cheap ride is a problem. It seems like it an absolute good and totally not a problem and should not be “fixed”.
It's like special offers in shops; for someone like me who has spare money and plenty of storage space they are great, but for someone genuinely poor they are often unusable either because they don't have the cash at that moment or because they have nowhere to store it.
It's expensive to be poor. See https://wiki.lspace.org/Vimes_Boots_Index
You are right of course that fixing the poverty is the right thing to do.
For perspective, try imagining that some well off retired ex-$your_job walks up to your boss and offers to replace you for free, working the same hours because they're bored.
I’m saying the marketing to drivers needs to change. Uber pretend it’s some great paying gig and markets hard like this. It deceives people who have no idea how to do depreciation calculations
Also whats worse about the taxi model is you often are paying on a monthly basis to rent the car, so every month you are something like $3000 in the hole and you have to keep on grinding hard before you could break even and then start making money for yourself. It's hard to take a vacation unless you want to take a month long one with no pay, which for most people who are doing the taxi gig, is not financially tenable.
Being a taxi driver SUCKS. At least Uber is an improvement because the fee system is done as you make money and you have way more flexibility as a result.
Everyone is upset that low end relatively unskilled labor pay & life sucks in general, and being upset with Uber is just one facet of it. Amazon warehouse workers & some restaurant workers are another group. In the past the media obsession was walmart workers and immigrant farm workers, which you don't hear about that much anymore but life still sucks for them.
Activists try to shove the responsibility of making the low-end labor life better onto the company that hires them, while ignoring what the real problem is the low-end labor life sucks in general, and if you made amazon and walmart and everyone else that is visible disappear, it's still gonna suck, because the problem isn't those companies per say, it's the entire global situation of being a low end laborer, and it's a situation that is properly covered by government than any specific company.
Governments don't want to pay for it although, especially in America, which is why you see this kind of focus especially in the USA, where they make employers create something approximating universal healthcare, benefits, etc vs collecting it through an equivalent tax and making it a universally provided benefit set. If it was truly a government responsibility, it could go multiple ways, such as reducing the cost of living by not making housing an investment asset and more a consumer good / capital business cost like in Japan and changing food regulations to heavily tax obesogenic & carcinogenic products, so the total national healthcare expenditure of the nation goes down and so on.
That’s how exploitation works! You take someone who has few/no other options and leverage that fact to get them to agree to an unfair deal.
I would be curious to hear stories of former cab drivers who chose to drive for Uber instead because they found it an improvement. I don't feel like I've heard any stories like that, but it must be a thing a lot of people have done if you are right it's an improvement, right? I feel like I've only heard stories of cab drivers complaining that Uber has destroyed their business, which is nevertheless still preferable to driving for uber.
Yes, I know some people are locked into driving a cab because of previous locked in investment etc. But some people aren't, if uber is really an improvement we should be able to find lots of people who chose to move from driving a cab to driving for uber?
If they were the typical taxi driver, they would say job.
And WSJ's survey (above) indicates that many Uber drivers are not actually aware that this is where the money is effectively coming from.
Which is another way of saying that they don’t understand the economics enough to know they’re accepting a bad deal?
Additionally, there likely exists a framing bias along with a false dichotomy, if they were asked whether they’d rather Uber or take a “normal job”. There are of course plenty of alternatives that are not “normal jobs” (whatever that is exactly).
Anyways, anecdotally, I’ve had drivers who were not happy with Uber and continued only out of lack of current options or plain inertia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Now if I could somehow know whether I have any biases I should be aware of, I’d greatly appreciate that information, Steve.
They are driving for Uber because they can't find/get/keep such a job. Of course everyone driving for uber is doing so because it's the best thing they can find, they wouldn't prefer a job that pays them even less. But the people I know doing it don't love it or prefer it to a "normal" job, they just do it cause it's available and they need to pay the rent.
I doubt most Uber drivers are whipping out a spreadsheet and pondering for 3 hours before they commit to the job. That is how much time I spend before I build a new base and lots of those were canceled before they got build.