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
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.