FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
I'm able to see this in my Uber app today (set a destination, then at the bottom of the screen is a row for payment options, clicking that will show you Uber balances (uber cash), payment methods, and vouchers) and am located in the US.
If you are not seeing this, I'm thinking you need to reach out to support via email and have a long (probably frustrating) conversation.
1: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/09/05/fascinating-revelations-...
Thus being blacklisted by them seems like a non issue, unless there’s local monopolies somewhere.
Cabs, busses, bikes, trains...
I live in a small city. When I travel, I generally have to be at the airport or train station between 4 and 530 AM. Uber put the taxis out of business, so the choice is Uber, Lyft, wasting a half hour and alot of money parking, or trying to find a black car service.
I was in Rome for business. The choice is Uber or the local cab hailing app, which the cabs don’t always respond to, and the cabbie frequently tries to ripoff a dopey foreigner.
Once upon a time (around 2005-2006) I had a colleague whose father was a taxi driver. He (the colleague) was openly telling us that every cabbie cheats. Once in a blue moon you find an honest one, or one whose cheating-meter-subsystem is broken.
I have, the commenter I replied to hasn’t :)
Like you said I can’t think of a single place we’re not having access to Uber means that you are functionally stuck. I’m sure those locations exist, but they must be quite rare. There are a lot of places with the others that don’t have Uber, however.
Not really. You can say this about smaller US cities, but NYC is absolutely a city where the >90% percentile of people can live without the daily use of a car.
(The simplest reason for this has nothing do to with car ownership or desirability per se: it's because of NYC's food delivery happens by bike or moped.)
Many times, if I want to go from arbitrary point A to point B in NYC within 30 minutes due to time constraints, the only choice is taxi/Lyft/Uber. Subway/bus combined with walking easily take 1 hour.
Or when it's very late in the evening.
Of course, we are talking about NYC, which means that you can arrive at your destination, eventually. That doesn't mean you want to do that in many situations.
I’ve checked this side by side with colleagues at the airport getting ride quotes to the same hotel. When you have Uber Cash they will quote you more. You can find numerous Reddit threads on the topic as well.
This feels very illegal to me, but not a lawyer.
Bay Area traveler says Uber gift cards boosted fare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43751945
The less they know about you the better. Good reason to not have Gift Cards inside of the applications.
Basically any possible pitch for it is worse in every way than simple downward wealth redistribution.
Dynamic pricing makes it possible for both riders and drivers to respond to changes in supply and demand. If prices were static, many drivers would prefer to go to a New Year's Eve celebration themselves than work, but when it becomes their biggest paying shift of the year, they're a lot more willing to do it. Riders have to pay a bigger price if they want a ride at peak times, but it's still possible to get one when they really have a strong preference to.
If you take your idea to the logical extreme then you're essentially arguing for permanently fixed prices. This is one reason why it's sometimes impossible to get a taxi in places where the rates are fixed by government edict.
Still, wildly volatile pricing is also an excellent reason to avoid taxi apps. Why politicians have no desire to rein them in is baffling. I guess the stock market is really all that matters at the end of the day....
Dynamic pricing could technically fall into the category of price discrimination if the discrimination is temporal (e.g. people who need a taxi at 8:00 AM pay more than people who need a taxi at 8:00 PM), but generally price discrimination refers to changes in price based upon anticipated demand, whereas dynamic pricing refers to changes in price based on actual demand.
That is price discrimination, not dynamic pricing. Price discrimination involves charging more or less based on the buyer’s perceived willingness and ability to pay. Dynamic pricing is based on fluctuations in consumer demand. A taxi ride at midnight is not the same as a taxi ride at noon; if there are proportionally fewer drivers available at midnight, fares will be higher at midnight.
The same principle may be applied in the restaurant industry; kitchen throughput has limits. If these limits are reached during peak hours, the restaurant can either raise prices during these hours or reduce prices outside of these hours to spread out the consumer demand, maximizing earnings during peak times while reducing kitchen idle time during off-peak hours.
If you could bid up the price, you would be more likely to incentivize any idle drivers to pick up your fare. A driver might not be willing to get out of bed for a $10 fare, but the same driver might be willing to get out of bed for a $30 fare.
And then the many times that Lyft violated the triangle inequality in pricing: Ride from A->B followed by a ride from B->C was often cheaper than a direct ride from A->C, if you knew how to pick B correctly. I once confused the hell out of a driver when I got out and got back in the same car at some nondescript spot.
That doesn’t strike me as malicious. If you just missed the train, other users probably did, too.
How did you find the price differentials with Lyft?
You may not have started with malicious intent but you may have unintentionally created a malicious algorithm that learned to squeeze profits off of lower income people who normally take the train to save money but just missed it.
In the pre-Uber world taxis would line up, the fare wouldn't be any different whether or not it is just after a train left, and more drivers would just know that there is higher demand at that location at certain times, without fare surges.
I do love being able to hail rides with a phone app, but I detest this fluctuating pricing.
It reminds me of why I like train travel in other countries but not so much in the US: In almost all of Europe and Asia, train tickets are fixed price based largely on distance travelled and class of train. In the US, Amtrak plays the idiot capitalist game of predatory money grabbing you if you need to make last minute emergency travel plans or changes.
Play with any Uber promo code they may give you via physical mailer or otherwise.
Open Uber in two browsers. Apply the promo code in one, don't in the other.
Watch as they increase the service fees when using the promo code to basically equal the other non-promo order.
CC companies, especially in the states, almost always favor the cardholder over the merchant.
Your card provider needs to keep you happy far more than your card provider needs to keep Uber happy.
With Uber, there simply isn't an alternative. If they don't accept Visa then i can't use a credit card (or most debit cards, since those go through the visa network too) and there isn't a reasonable way for me to pay at all.
Uber takes Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay too. Any would let you use a bank account. You can also deposit cash into PayPal and I think Venmo as well.
They (in collusion with MasterCard) could jack up prices and then there's be an antitrust case against them.
Here's the thing, though - as long as they don't abuse their duopoly position, those anti-trust cases are weaker. And a policy of preferring to side with the customer in these disputes is not exactly viewed as abuse of the monopoly position.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/uber-loses-appeal-b...
Visa/MasterCard/Discover/etc are little more than clearing houses.
Banks serve as both issuers (to the consumer) and processors (to the merchant), often times both.
Wells Fargo might underwrite the credit on my credit card, but I would immediately cancel that line of credit if it wasn’t accessible through the Visa network.
The value of a credit card isn’t just the line of credit, it is the near universal and frictionless acceptance as a method of payment.
I’ve had to do a handful of chargebacks and I don’t know or care whether they banned me: I would never voluntarily do business with them again anyway.
He found a local contractor to do the job instead.
They might have a practical monopoly on these services. Most cities are going to be serviced by only Lyft and Uber, with one having more drivers than the other. If you get burned by both services due to their refusal to provide adequate customer service checks on automated systems, you initiate two chargebacks and then lose your ability to call a cab until you pay them the money on the chargeback.
The full story is I requested a ride to an Air Force base and the driver was not able to take us there due to restrictions at the base. We requested the driver drop us off at a restaurant just outside of the base. The ride we were on was cancelled, a new one created, and calculated as if we were originating at our point of embarkation at the same time all of this happened. Which happened to be during surge pricing.
I tried support for weeks. I was in an endless loop of scripts and going nowhere. At the time, the extra $200 or so charge was a significant amount for me so I charged it back with my card. The card had no issue with this but every time I try signing into Uber, they insist I pay them the remainder of their error from years ago.
I won't go back and don't care one bit.
Support would not refund the yearly subscription despite an obvious change to the economic terms of the subscription and so a chargeback was issued which the credit card company agreed with.
Ransomware screen now on the account to the effect of "Pay $100 Immediately To Regain Your Account" with no transactions possible unless the ransom is paid.
How did they rectify this issue they “discovered”? They gave me Uber credit…
Seems the vendors are catching on, with orders often dramatically wrong without any consequence. This is pure speculation, however.
I also found vendors would often substitute items out of stock with those of a lesser value, but write a semi-cute message on it. Nothing like buying some fancy cola, only to get a can of coke and a love letter..
Endless chatbot and help option loops; I gave up, and refuse to use their services - though use was rare anyway.
Super interesting to me we have such different experiences. Maybe because I have UberOne?
When I want take-out food I just call the restaurant to order, then get in my car (or on my bike) and pick it up myself.
Mind you, that's still not exactly "expensive" for delivery [0], but I can make better food both faster and cheaper than waiting, I can pick it up and actually use an insulated bag faster than waiting for delivery, and pretty much any other food strategy at least guarantees I'll actually have the expected meal and not have to waste my time with customer support (or money if I decide it's not worth the hassle).
[0] Imagine you're a driver, you incur $3 in actual expenses, the delivery takes 15min, and they have to wait 15min for the food to be ready (this is the thing that makes pizza delivery more efficient -- as soon as you get to the store there's another pizza waiting). Suddenly that's a $14/hr gig without any benefits and where you need to purchase a special insurance on top of things, assuming the only part Uber keeps is the 20% fee they're scamming you out of. Beyond that, you're at a much higher risk of bodily harm than doing something like construction, and if those aren't good drivers I don't really want to be encouraging more of them to be on the street, especially with time pressures (and if they are skilled ... that's less than McDonald's pays even before you factor in benefits).
I started before they cranked up the exploitation and quit as the terms got increasingly bad.
I don't even think they ran a profit at that point, so I guess everyone was getting screwed
It's always here within 10-15 minutes. It's never been cold, and the bags are stapled shut, so I don't think the meals have ever been sampled.
Plus it feels nice to be able to stay in sometimes.
Additionally for past year or so they have always consistently charged me higher than what they quote originally.
I jump through the hoops to get a "refund" of the difference through automated support workflow. Ofcourse never real money -- just a credit applied to account or so they say.
That credit can never be seen or verified because wallet screen is always down for maintenance or whatever.
There is no email trail or anything else where you can prove you are owed an x amount of credit.
That credit never gets applied to a future ride.
Excellent "growth hack" I guess.
I have done screen recordings of this support workflow shenanigans a few times. Never had the energy to fight it till closure. I know the kind of duplicitous run around the support is going to give me the first five times I raise this.
This is exactly what chargebacks are for
> Users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel.
The worst I've experienced was equifax. I signed up for a free trial to see where my credit sat and what was up, then cancelled. It was a phone call, 30 minute wait, and SUPER weaselly behavior in the call center script. Something to the effect of Them: "Hey we want to give you this free gift", Me: "Will that gift keep my subscription active?" Them: "yes". Repeated several times as they tried just a bunch of avenues to not cancel my account. I literally had to say "No, I just want you to cancel my account" or "Are you going to cancel my account" like 20 times. It took over an hour.
I walked out before I became another victim.
This works for me, and I have no qualms lying to circumvent stupid tactics like these. I have turned into a LIAR when speaking to customer service for stuff like this because it just makes me more sympathetic as a customer, even though it's insane and unfair that one has to do this as a sort of social hack instead of the business just doing the right thing.
In my mind it should be something like 3 or 4 screens/prompts max.
Account (1) -> Cancel (2) -> Are you sure (3) -> Why did you cancel (4).
1: Account
2: Cancel
3: Call this number.
4: Call number.
5: Welcome to Customer Service press… … …press 9 to cancel.
6: We need to confirm who you are. Give birth date, etc.
7: Are you sure?
8: Agent gets on the line.
9: Why do you want to cancel?
10: We are offering you a discount to continue and not cancel, how about that?
11: Cancel
12: Are you sure again? (This time for real)
13: Cancelled, but we are offering you a BIGGER discou… this is when I hang up.
For Uber? In the handful of times I've canceled uber one trials I've never seen this. It's always through the app. Not even the FTC complaint alleges this.
I ran into this with a NYTimes subscription I tried to cancel. They detected I wasn't in a state with such protections and removed the cancellation options while not providing a way to cancel. Made things real hard to shutdown.
I should (pretend to) cancel more often!
I used to do this with the cable company but they seem to have gotten wise to it. Last time I tried in 2020 they basically told me to pound sand.
Fortunately I got fiber now and got to tell them to pound sand instead.
I felt a little bit bad about hanging up but mostly I was just mad.
Very clearly intended to combat “oh shit I need to cancel that one” when the charge shows up in hopes you forget again.
While I never implemented a restriction like this, it would have prevented a lot of weird bugs/customer support issues and kept the underlying code much simpler.
(Annoying math = time zones, prorations, discounts, billing cycle anchors, etc. see the “falsehoods programmers believe about X” series)
(Systems to sync between = internal DBs, billing APIs, payment processors, etc.)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr...
It's things like this that make agents potentially exciting. So much of enshittification is wrapping an essentially good service in a crappy and misleading UI to drive extra revenue. If you can replace the lying UI with a more honest one, and then do a fair and automatic comparison between Uber and Lyft, a lot of the annoyance goes away.
The Uber Eats delivery time estimates are a lie, plain and simple. Once they have your money in hand, they'll shamelessly admit to the lie, which is why the estimate jumps instantaneously.
First, there are three different ways that orders can come in. 1) Tight integration into the POS system. 2) Through a separate parallel physical tablet. 3) Something spits out something on a printer.
There are opportunities with 1 and 2 to do some sort of feedback on how busy things are. I know for the tablet option that at least for some restaurants they are able to indicate how long the order will take.
But half the places I get to have no integration, they just put the ticket on the pile and it's done when it's done. A couple places that do this in particular also don't even start the order until the driver shows up, on purpose. The app will tell the customer I'll pick it up in 5 minutes no matter what. There's a chain that does prep work in front of the customer, but certain locations will not make pickup/delivery orders if there's anyone in line in the shop. I stopped doing deliveries there.
You'd also think that places with the potential for awesome metrics making pickup timing a breeze would be fast food chains, right? Nope. Not a single iota of smart integration whatsoever.
I've found that keeping customers in the loop as to what's happening with their deliveries ends up keeping them happy, even if it's gonna be slow. I suppose some things never change.
Talking to people really does help though, everyone wants to be more forgiving when you remind them theirs a human factor involved in getting the food to them.
They then flipped the "make a profit" switch and are now shady in ways customers dislike (ripping you the customer off).
This is literally the business model of most VC and public companies.
A lot of it stacks now with “AI for X” running in the cloud funded by SaaS and/or ads. Just increasingly adversarial revenue models to turn customers into product (data) and/or hooked on forever recurring increasingly monthly spend.
Long gone the days of funding a piece of software customers purchase and use as long and as much as they wish.
But they all universally had a rather smug attitude that what THEY were working on was morally above what the rest of us were because they were just doing non-commercial r&d loss making stuff.
They didn’t sully themselves with anything to do with the core business!
Of course this steps over the darker aspects of the core business which funds their generous “non commercial” fun jobs…
Yes it could still be gamed, but anyone who's worked on user funnels knows that every added step reduces conversion, so it would be self-balancing.
I wonder... what if you artificially padded the signup process with feel-good stuff?
- screen: Did you know, <picture of Scarlett Johansson> Scarlett also uses this service?
- screen: Since you are signing up, we are adding a Free 10% off voucher for <stuff!>
- screen: Our customer Service Representative (attactive person) is always standing by!
etc...
- screen <n>: click [Yes] to sign up!
“We made you enter your name and address and password and credit card details. That’s 204 steps!”
Shortly after it was introduced it seemed every order of mine would get surprise delayed after pick up as the driver would have to first drop off a different order at >90° different direction from me, no doubt for the user who would get priority for being on UberOne.
I don’t order food often enough to justify a subscription, so I just switched to Mr D(elivery), a local South African company where the delivery time is at least almost always consistent. I also feel a bit better about less of the money leaving the country.
Based on my always getting hit by this, I guess almost everyone does it.
And if most people choose this, it’s probably rare they can do double deliveries, meaning it’s practically guaranteed that not choosing the priority delivery will result in the algorithm gleefully using the rare opportunity to make Uber more money on the order by making your order part of the same trip as someone paying priority.
So I naively assumed that most people don’t choose this and I would have a low chance of being penalised, but because almost everyone is not wanting their food to be delayed, they’re all paying extra to avoid that. Uber cannot put one priority user above another, so they still land up with too few drivers during peak times, meaning there is still a wait time even for priority users, but on average everyone is paying extra even if on average delivery times aren’t better on average because when near everyone is highest priority, no one is, in practice Uber has raised the base delivery fee unless you’re willing to accept a delay.
But if they’re being honest, they should rather raise the base fee and offer a “discount” if you’re willing to wait longer, which is more representative of the real experience of users.
I guess that no one wants to feel like they’re a cheapskate, hence streaming packages offering “normal” advertising subsidised packages and “premium” ad free packages, as opposed to say “lite” and “normal”.
I don’t see those deals on Uber Eats so it feels like the real value of Uber One is for heavy Uber Eats users.
PS. Worth going through the cancellation flow when you are up for renewal as they will probably offer you 50% off Uber One.
We have a restaurant where I can order a $10 meal and pick it up myself. The same meal done through uber is $30. Everything has a percentage added and there's at least 3 extra "you used us" fees that get tacked on. All the menu items can have anywhere from a 20->100% markup. It's quite insane.
Just recently, Uber (with some partner) started testing delivery robots in my (city) neighborhood. And I love Waymo, as much as I've been able to use them. Maybe automation will change the economics.
Also, IIRC, for many years, Amazon barely squeaked a profit. They wanted to be at the low end of the margins to capture market share. Once they got big enough, they increased their margins a little and started turning a big profit.
They report things like foreign currency transactions and stock based compensation as free cash flow.
The hope with uber is that they become an aggregator of AVs which belies an assumption that autonomous vehicles will essentially be a commodity. Or perhaps that AVs take much longer to become practical at scale than people think.
But one of the biggest red flags to me with this company is how they aggressively buy back stock and publicly announce that they believe it’s undervalued. You’re in the midst of an extremely competitive emerging market and your best idea for your cash is to… buy stock?
Well, keep in mind that 7 of that 12 billion went to cost of revenue (aka money paid to drivers etc). Turning a $770M profit off the remaining $5B isn't too bad.
There was something of a red flag in that last report as well in that for the first time as far as I can tell, profit grew exactly in line with trips and gross bookings. What that implies is that the unit economics are maxed out. The business is as profitable as it can be and their only hope is to add more riders.
I believe their comps are getting tougher and tougher every quarter as they aggressively drive to turn the profit spigot and squeeze more and more profit out of an inherently unprofitable business model. This is a single dimension stock that is 100% reliant on growing its user base.
They’ve been able to do that because users are aging into the platform faster than they’re aging out but eventually the well will run dry.
A company can save a lot of money by not handling edge cases.
There is no support. It does not exist.
Why do they do these things?
Because they can get away with it. Nestle has gotten away with killing nearly ten million children since 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestlé_boycott
Companies have no morality. Unless someone holds them accountable they're going optimize for making money.
Also nearly every dog/cat food is nestle as well. Only the livestock feed Purina makes isn't tainted by nestle.
Thank goodness for Smucker.
On another note, an actual edge case that happened to me is that I was in a different country when my Uber One was about to renew, but I had no way to cancel because the app kept geolocating me and displayed a UI specific to my visiting country. I got no Uber One benefits in that country anyway. So I had to send an email to stop renewal, and while I was waiting for a reply, I got charged. Support said they can’t refund me, and I ended up having to do a chargeback.
"CEO donors who gave $1 million include Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Tim Cook, head of Apple; and Dara Khosrowshahi, head of Uber."[1]
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rich-people-and-corp...
Uber Eats markets a 2 for 1 deal that I would have only ordered due to the deal. They always add both items when you take the deal to the cart, but they suddenly changed it. I didn't realize I had to manually add both, and only had one delivered. I called them up and they only refunded a portion, and not the whole thing without accounting for the fact that it was an opportunity cost for me. I would have just bought something else, or not at all. It's tin-foil hatting, but they coerced a purchase imho.
That's not what "coerced" means. "Deceived", maybe.
You'd think that given no services were actually rendered and no perishable items, it'd be an easy open-shut support case.
But, no, you see: "that automatically accepted order itself was the service rendered"
Cool. I took the L because I order food all the time. Hate them for it. I don't know what our alternative is. We all laughed at this company as they burned through billions a year to acquire us, and now it's a monopoly robbing us all.
Same for Uber Eats. They estimate 25 minutes for a drop off, but it's often more like 45 minutes.
I am far from a novice computer/device user. you’re already making a decent amount of money off me and the slave labor wages you pay your workers, why try to aggressively milk every penny I have? I stopped using it after their joke of an outsourced customer support would not do anything but run me in circles. How much did losing my business cost them in revenue vs. the blatant petty theft in dark patterns would have gained? There has to be a day where all these user hostile apps triggers some response from people like “no, enough of this.”
Since 2019, I've relied on ride-shares and delivery services, consistently questioning their fee structures. During this time, I've spent an unconscionable amount on Uber and Uber Eats alone.
A big shame both to the ones running the show and the ones who trained them to think this is acceptable.
Dear All,
As a driver for Uber Black and Black SUV services, I would like to express some concerns regarding the treatment of drivers and customers by the company. It seems that Uber prioritizes the interests of its board of directors and shareholders over those of both drivers and riders.
One issue I have observed is the disparity in compensation offers for similar ride requests. For instance, two drivers might receive the same request, yet each is offered a different amount of payment. It appears that the platform may take advantage of drivers who are known to accept lower fare rates by directing them less profitable rides.
Additionally, I want to share some insights that may not be widely known. Uber has led many passengers, including google AI search into providing false information to everyone regarding there payment structure. They have majority of everybody out there believing that drivers receive 75% to 80,% of the total trip cost, while the company (uber) retains 25% to 30%. However, based on my five years of experience with the platform, the actual compensation for drivers is closer to 25% to 30%, with Uber retaining 75% to 80%.
I encourage you to verify this for yourself during your next ride by inquiring with your driver about their earnings in relation to the fare you paid. This will provide a clearer picture of the company's compensation practices.
There is a pressing need for regulations to prevent companies from exploiting their workers in such ways. Unfortunately, meaningful change may be hindered by the connections some board members have with high-ranking government officials. A notable example is Tony West, Uber's board member and chief legal officer, who is related to former Vice President Kamala Harris
I believe this was in itself, a significant departure from business ethics: It may be the regulations were bad, but inviting drivers to become scofflaw and offering them indemnity from payment in civil suit, feels like taking corporate lawfare into a new realm.
Quite aside from this disregard for Australian Business law, Uber was transfer pricing the profits from the taxi business into the USA. It operated at a loss in Australia, and exported a lot of revenue to the USA.
There was, and continues to be, many problems with taxi as a business, and the regulator was highly deficient. These problems relate to reliability, driver ethics, safety for women, minorities (things like drivers refusing to take seeing-eye dogs, and hassling solo women riding home) -I'm not blind to the failure here and I do not personally view this as "all regulated industries are worse than free enterprise" -the regulator just couldnt be bothered enforcing it's requirements.
The real problem was that the cost of a taxi plate rose over a 20 year period at 2-3 times the rate of inflation. Towards the end, a taxi plate was a $500k investment and was owned by many ex accountants, lawyers, doctors and the like as a massive capital gain, independently of the social utility of running taxi as a function. -This destroyed the real driver cooperative movement, and made restriction of entry to taxi a necessary economic forcing function: all attempts to add drivers deflated the capital value of the plate, and were opposed by the current owners.
When this was eventually liquidated (Dublin for example) the capital losses were extreme. A $500k plate could drop to $10k or less. A lot of people had life savings eroded, the industry collapsed. Brisbane wasn't much different. Canberra had this too.
London, cities with a high barrier to entry like "the knowledge" and the LEZ have different models. I don't know if Uber is in London.
Funny enough I had to take an uber today but it was taking too long so I wanted to cancel the request and call a taxi, I was asked 4 times if I wanted to really cancel, small things like that really do just inflict a little bit of pressure it’s a horrible practice. The fact that a company comes up with these dark patterns to squeeze every cent from you says everything you need to know about them.
Happened to me with coinbase, I accidentally subscribed and got charged for 3 months. Luckily they were able to refund me since I didn’t actually use the service.
In some cities, they did, even before Uber existed.
But they still had to pay their drivers a living wage. Uber didn't, and people went with the cheaper fares.
Then there were no more taxis, and all the taxi drivers were making a third the money driving for Uber.
The situation is a complete mess here :/
Then they sold to a UK company, who sold to a German company, who recently sold to Lyft, each step along the way the new owner finding ways to make the service worse.
Well, now we're stuck at the airport waiting for a mob of cars to fight each other to transport us each as least efficiently as humans have figured out how to do. But at least we can stare at our phone while we wait to get fucked.
And this doesn't even touch the horror of the driving side
Meanwhile, my city is suing a local cooperative for "safety reasons" or some bullshit. I don't expect anything to ever improve at this point.
In lieu of that, you can just look at the back of any taxi. They'll have the number on it. It's usually like 8888888, because the personal injury lawyers always have 7777777.
Uber rides and Uber eats is a whole scam... they are CONTACTLESS... someone with power should be doing something about this because their complete scammers and do not care to follow the policies they stipulated over themselves... ridiculous.
Can’t say whether this is the recommended method for all services but it works for me.
If my bank did this to me I'd tell them I'm just going to charge back everything they automate.
If Uber banned me it would be the mildest of inconveniences. Every airport has an established taxi company (sure, wouldn't be as cheap but I wouldn't be stood up for 45 minutes to 1 hour at night) and some form of public transport. Each city and town still has established taxi companies. Many takeaways still take orders directly.
The answer isn't to try to make a crappy capitalistic company less crappy by slapping their wrists, it's to provide competition and use it
I guess now I'll be a party to the class action and get a gift card in 10-12 years from this BS. Neat!