Uber Is Testing a Massive Merchant Delivery Program
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I suspect there's a complicated relationship between density, profit margins and overall cart value of what's being delivered, price sensitivity, and other factors. It obviously does work in some domains and those who already have established something that could form the basis of a delivery infrastructure may be in the best position to experiment further. It won't work for everything or everyone but if fast delivery works for food for example, there's no inherent reason it shouldn't work for a lot of other goods that people can't get easily delivered today.
Not to mention the time this will save... I hate going to the store, which kills at least two hours a couple times a week. I'd pay $20-30 to have that time back. It won't reduce traffic either, but at least the uber drivers are more likely in economy/subcompact cars (a lot of prii) which would displace the SUV behemoths that would otherwise be used by those most likely to be ordering.
Maybe it's wrong of me but I find Uber hiding behind puppies to be about as despicable as the rest of their actions.
Maybe instead this should be left to the professionals. There's some honesty.
It was adorable.
That means that instead of solving problems that are sticky enough in the lab never-mind in the world, they can solve them with a market. For problems like who should deliver what package and how to optimize that, they can offload a lot of the intelligence to drivers.
This might have interesting implications for other products.
Each time I hear about it I think of a hollywood heist movie that starts and finishes quickly when the robbers simply figure out how to manipulate things so they're the uber driver delivering the package they want.
It'll be interesting to see if its able to drag Lyft, Instacart, Shyp under the water as it puts its very large oxygen tank to use.
Not a bad model really. Uber is a distributed worker service.
The funny think is that local merchants used to offer delivery a lot more ("butcher's basket" bicycles, fish vans, electric milk floats, etc). I guess we're coming back to that mode of business.
John Steinbeck
Funny how "competition" is great as long as you're on the "winning" side.
Imagine the question is, "Is purchasing food with money perfectly fine?".
Most people would agree that trading money for food is fine so long as it's consensual and both parties agree (i.e. assuming there is no coercion).
If one party used violence, or threats of violence, to get the other party to make the trade, that would be coercion. Most people would agree that this type of "trade" is not okay.
Hopefully that helped. Cheers.
The fact that Uber has found a loophole (which is being closed quickly) does not make it "okay, because it's consensual".
Also, I have issues with semantically null statements that could have been written by a Markov Chainer that's seeded with text from the Mises Institute, but that's a more personal problem.
- because of pooling it is more efficient overall to force companies or governments to pay benefits than it is to have individuals self-insure
The freedom of an individual to negotiate with employers exists in a context of wild inequality in negotiating position, information asymmetry, and coordination problems among workers that lead to a race to the bottom (absent collective bargaining or government intervention).
I don't know enough about Uber and their workers to comment on that in particular, but I don't think that "they could have not signed on, so it's OK" is necessarily a strong position from which to oppose collective intervention, governmental or otherwise, without qualification of the degree to which participants in an agreement were free to make their decisions, and what the consequences of thier decisions will be on the choices available to others. Since we're talking about low-wage workers and a giant company, my guess is that closer examination of those considerations won't aid an anti-intervention or pro-market (for common definitions of pro-market) argument.
The fact that they aren't choosing other things shows that they're making an informed decision that they believe is best for them given their alternatives. We're free to wonder about if things could be even better for the people who made the choice to work for Uber, which is where some kind of negotiation between workers and Uber would come in, but that seems to miss the point completely. If there were better alternatives provided by any other company, most of the workers would go there.
Can't it be both? Really, I don't see how the two can be considered separately. The individual negotiation occurs in the context of the broader field of choices and consequences available, and of the relative power of the participants (which may, perhaps most relevantly, be considered as their ability to cope with any harm that results from saying "no" to a given offer).
> The fact that they aren't choosing other things shows that they're making an informed decision that they believe is best for them given their alternatives.
I don't agree that the fact of a choice having been made gives us any insight in to the degree to which it was "informed" but otherwise, sure.
My point is: that someone said "yes" and that it was within their power to say "no", is a pretty poor metric for freedom per se, and a bit more than that is going to be needed to demonstrate that (say) government intervention would necessarily be inappropriate or harmful.