Uber’s Latest Experiment Is Uber Cargo, a Logistics Service in Hong Kong | Hacker News Reader

Uber’s Latest Experiment Is Uber Cargo, a Logistics Service in Hong Kong

techcrunch.com

20 pointsdthal8 comments

I want a version of this for large items which are going to the dump (e.g. old washing machines, furniture, etc). We own a sedan and some items physically won't fit in there, the city's trash company doesn't do item pickups (either paid or free), and I'm yet to find private companies which do either (we're outside of their service area).

So you're left either finding a friend with a truck or renting something from e.g. U-Haul. However even U-Haul won't work for older or disabled people or those items which need two pairs of hands to load/unload.

It is surprisingly difficult to have these items removed. Maybe I should just buy a truck...

i've always found craiglist free section very handy for this.

In Chicago, we have junk pickers who scour the alleys daily for exactly this sort of stuff. They load it in the back of their pickup and it's gone. All you have to do is put it in the alley.

Have any of Uber's "experiments" of this sort been successful? Anyone know if the bike couriers in NYC (almost a year old) have gotten any traction? Has the service expanded?

How did their limited-time experiment of delivering toothbrushes in DC go? That was six months or so ago.

How about food delivery in LA?

For a certain definition of "success", yes definitely. Uber's sky-high valuation (and the accompanying deluge of investment dollars) hinges on their ability to address a market larger than US taxicabs. So press about them doing something other than driving around people in a market other than this one is worth a lot.

Are these experiments dollars-and-cents profitable? Almost certainly not.

OTOH, how much does it really cost them? They make some software modification, and they get to try out a new market. Maybe it works, in which case they just found a new long-term, possibly world-wide, revenue stream. Maybe it doesn't, in which case they have a bit of code to throw away.

I'm not asking if they're going to bleed out money or anything, I'm asking if there is any sign that this whole concept that there is a logistics company hiding inside Uber has any evidence for it.

It's interesting how Uber's business model bears similarity to sharecropping. Food for thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

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