Uber posts first quarterly net profit
wsj.com
wsj.com
I really wonder if that will continue or if there will be a change in consumer attitudes towards food delivery.
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.
We stopped ordering food once it got to be more of an inconvenience than picking it up.
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.
Every item on Uber eats is a dollar or two more than if you were there in person, instead of making it up with a higher delivery fee. boo.
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.
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.
But I completely refuse to use Uber Eats, because of its service quality.
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.
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).
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
Just another HN Tuesday I see. It’s so easy that it’s still duopoly in US since the inception of the market.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
IIRC they got about 8B from the IPO? Still a long way to 32B.
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.
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?
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.
Sounds like a business opportunity
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.
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.
Super-strict reputation scoring solves this. Also, if you're paranoid, burgers don't puke.
> 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.
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.
[1] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/how-uber-makes-mo....
No, it's just sampling.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The speed is the only constraint right now.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/uber-sells-self-driving...
Not quite. More like they're partnering with others and staying internally focused on their core competencies, like any good company does.
Section "Get to know our autonomous partners" https://www.uber.com/us/en/autonomous/
Drivers were generally very happy about their Uber earnings. When I realized it I bought shares and they are now at +60% over the buying price.
Let’s just be careful with pre-digested narratives. I am not saying that every driver is happy. But many are certainly quite happy!
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.
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.)
I'm not sure many actually said that
> that Uber was a house of cards gaining market share by subsidizing rides with investor money
they were
> That there were no economies of scale to bring costs down
the criticism I heard was, at then-current prices, _profits_ wouldn't come
turns out they had to severely jack up prices to profit, proving such criticism correct
> I would love to see a "what we got wrong, and what we still have right" post
see above
> 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.
> 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
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.
At least in my country, the business is dead already.
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.
https://waymo.com/blog/2023/05/waymo-and-uber-partner-to-bri...
given that they have full control and zero transparency over price of every trip, how can you be so certain?
IIRC Uber lost $2B on the Chinese marketing simply because of subsidies.
uber pulled out of china in 2016 ...
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.
> recognized a $386 million unrealized pre-tax gain related to the revaluation of our equity investments
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.
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.
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):
https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2023/07/28/terminaron-detenid...
> 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.
Bolt subsidizes rides with up to 40% promos all the time during weekdays. I just opened the app now (I'm in Berlin) and I have a 30% promo.
I.e. they are so much cheaper than Uber that you have no sane choice.
And on weekends you then choose Bolt out of habit.
Also drivers seem to prefer Bolt, from the few conversations I had.
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.
(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
When hell freezes maybe?
Why would I do business with the local taxi mafia when these are the same cars, same drivers, poor or nonexistent app and terrible customer service?
Sorry, they screwed this too much.
But then, does that happen anywhere else but airports and maybe some places downtown where the taxi mafia colluded with city officials as well?
Uber has taken a big bite out of the yellow cab industry, thankfully. Not the subway system to any appreciable degree.
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.
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.
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)
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.
If the business model doesn’t work, it shouldn’t have money thrown at it.
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
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.
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.
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.
But not in US so yes idk how clean your metro is.
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.
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.
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 must have used it for 1000 rides before 2020. You would usually be picked up in less than 5 minutes around zone 1.
When I started using it again in late 2021, it became almost impossible to get anyone to accept the order and then not cancel.
It's strange how dramatically it seemed to crash and burn. From ubiquitous to basically useless.
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).
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.
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.
Upwards of 70% of rides get cancelled. Usually after waiting for 10-15 min.
There is absolutely no certainty around when you will reach your destination if you decide to go by Uber.
Its a complete shitshow.
Ola is slightly better I guess but not by much.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Now they are extracting their monopoly rents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
We paid $12.27 from the Hilton Polo Towers on the strip to the airport at 6:50 in the morning.
I can’t find our trip from the airport
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?
How would a driver insist on a specific tip before even accepting? This makes no sense to me.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lyft-i...
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.
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?"
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.
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 it was a hostile company from the start. It's basically destroyed any local alternatives by dumping prices, but that doesn't make profit.
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.
You missed the point, I never said Uber was/is good, I said what Uber aggressively dumped the market to overtake it and...
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.
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.
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
Maybe the problem wasn't the taxi companies
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cold poutine is ... a thing.
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.
Welcome to the future!
> 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 [...]
The article mentions Uber too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
NYC taxi pricing is more transparent and more predictable than Uber. Until recently the fares were printed on the cars.
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.
Ride sharing platforms weren't created to make things better for the drivers or for the customers, they were created to 'take over' an industry.
At first they will subsidize your rides to more effectively squeeze the old guys out by unfair competition.
Just you wait, if they ever do squeeze them out, and see if they don't become worse than taxis ever were.
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.
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."
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.
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 yes it’s happened to me too it’s super common.
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.
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.
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.
Have you tried taking a taxi in a country where you didn’t know the language?
Yes, lots of times.
It helps to know the rudiments of the language, but mostly we communicated in a kind of pidgin.
Travel books used to have lists of phrases at the very back for this kind of thing. People figured it out.
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.
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.
Chelsea is a large, well-known neighborhood in Manhattan. It's had the same name since the 1700s. It is not an obscure nickname.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's the difference between being a consumer and being a citizen.
Just put the whole price upfront and thats it, let the market forces find equilibrium
> 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.
Why would I ever go through this in every city I go to instead of using Uber?
Have you ever tried having to call a taxi outside of a city. You have to call and if they even answer they are like "what u want".
.. umm is this the taxi?
Yeah why didnt you say you needed a taxi?
What ? So are you able to pick me up?
Hold on and ill call you back.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.
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.
Meanwhile was stranded and we took an uber, and they did some shenanigans with pricing in the evening and it was > $100.
I think it is pretty easy to figure out if someone is in a bind and charge more. consider: on side of freeway. In front of car dealer. in front of hospital. In business parking lot hours after closing. when it is dark where it is lonely. etc.
In the taxi days, they had a contractual obligation to provide service to the airport. Now, getting an early morning Uber/Lyft for a first flight is difficult… prebooking doesn’t work, and you’re stuck driving and parking, hiring a black car, etc.
How could it be otherwise? Their product is, and always has been, a commodity.
* Average customer does not care whether they are getting a ride via Uber/Lyft/$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.
I have never had a problem with Uber.
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.
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 wife’s car was $670/month
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?
- $150 car insurance
- $150 gas
That doesn’t include maintenance.
You also have to take into account our lifestyle really doesn’t allow us to own a car:
I suppose they succeeded then. You keep on using it despite the problems. There must be a huge audience of people like this.
It's faster if I pick it up myself or use the rare restaurants that have their own delivery service.
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.
Is it strange they can afford to do this with DoorDash
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.
Strange company. Strange practices.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
All of this seems blatantly illegal, advertising and charging for items you can’t deliver. Yet I’m powerless to do anything about it.
it's called a chargeback. the worst they can do is ban you from their platform
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.
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.
Who knew that this could actually be profitable, other than everyone?
It was kind of repeated ad-nauseum that VC cash was just being burned to prop up this infeasible business model.
1. Sales Taxes 2. Payroll Taxes 3. Property Taxes etc
Uber creates major consumer surplus for both riders and drivers.
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 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.