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.
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, but it’s working. So don’t be so fast to call BS when the dust hasn’t settled. People may very well be getting tired of a downgraded Uber experience and willing to change, and competitors are in the process of making that happen. “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...
Things get bad slowly and it can be hard to notice at first. When companies slightly shrink their products or change to cheaper ingredients, most people don't immediately notice. To an extent, it's like the boiling frog analogy. You slowly raise the prices and lower the service expectations and people don't notice as easily.
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.
Again, I don't know if your question is genuine or not, but it sounds like the kind of thing a libertarian troll might say under the assumption that everyone can freely make decisions. "If Uber isn't serving you well, you could just make your own transportation network that treated you better and use that." Um...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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
I'm sure it's entirely my fault, but I won't bother using them again.
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.
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.
Chelsea is a large, well-known neighborhood in Manhattan. It's had the same name since the 1700s. It is not an obscure nickname.
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 if 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.
Just put the whole price upfront and thats it, let the market forces find equilibrium
It's the difference between being a consumer and being a citizen.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.