Who would have thought that they'd turn that research into algorithms that skim off surplus (from consumers and drivers)?
[0] Consumer surplus: roughly, the benefit of all those consumers who got a lower price than what they would have been willing to pay. Especially prevalent when there's one price for all. So the natural enemy of consumer surplus is price discrimination, where suppliers try to extract close to the maximum amount they're willing to pay from each consumer.
I don't know, isn't the consumer surplus evidenced by people using the app?
I wouldn't think of just blindly hailing a cab anymore, especially in a city that's new to me. It doesn't have to be the lowest possible price, the experience just has to be consistent.
Log into the app. It already has my credentials and payment information stored. See the price, distance and time up front. Follow along the route while I'm driving. No money exchanged, no watching the meter or wondering if he's driving me around in circles. No fumbling for payment or pressure to tip.
That's the value.
In terms of price discrimination, they make more money on business travels or when it's crazy busy. The alternative is you can't get a cab. So I'm okay with it.
Their operating margin is about 10% which is reasonable for a business. The S&P 500 operating margin is 12.22%
And it's super easy to shop around. I always look at both Lyft and Uber and almost always go w/ Lyft as it usually has the lower price.
You mean generally? Technology mystification. Taxis used to have price regulations and rules and the drivers were part of unions with health care benefits and pensions.
Now it's not-really-employees with magical floating prices and people accept it because "computer".
Ironically it is often the socially concious union types that call Uber or Lyft.
Sure, in some regions there is what basically amounts to a taxi mafia. But aside from that Uber/Lyft offer the definition of a gig economy where people on both end believe to be winning. Depends on the country, but in most countries it isn't the price sensitive choice.
This stuff happens everywhere. Look at Trader Joes and Whole Foods. TJ has been owned by Aldi, one of the largest grocery corporations since the 1970s. It's non-union and is currently doing the mobbing thing that starbucks did in the 90s to squeeze out independent grocers. They're being bastards.
I recently hailed a taxi. When I got in the driver refused to turn on the meter instead quoting me a crazy price and then said his card reader didnt work. I cant say taxi's were much better pre-uber. The simple reason ride share took off is because taxi's have long been horrible.
I think the issue arises from them doing this on the supply side of the market as well. Discriminating offers to drivers in order to prioritise people willing to drive for less. Or just finding ways to pay people less through algorithmic means.
It's not like people were very happy about their "disruption" of the job market to begin with.
Except that it's not a simple market because Uber/Lyft can charge a rider for a different rate than they pay the driver unless there's regulation prohibiting this.
You lack imagination. Two customers with the same itinerary might be quoted different prices not because of capacity constraints but because the platform has inferred that one customer is willing to pay more than the other... that's extracting consumer surplus and converting it to supplier surplus.
I guess I don't really care. I'm price sensitive, and I have options. So its pretty easy for them to pick up I'm price sensitive as I often check a route, check back 5 minutes later and ghost. So they can infer I'm going to a cheaper competitor.
There are some people that are loyal and don't mind paying slightly more. Or don't want the overhead of having multiple apps. Let them pay more.
This is essentially the same thing as coupons and sales. The people that take the effort to find and clip coupons and plan their shopping accordingly pay less. I don't bother so I pay more. I'm fine with this.
What is the bigger problem? Some democratic principle of everyone pays the same?
In that case we get your preferred route. People traveling these routes as well have a notoriously poor credit rating. See? We will make you pay either way.
While the Puritan culture that pervades America is usually derided, one thing they did and do have is issues with is price discrimination. The price is the price, doesn't matter if you're rich/poor/black/white/man/woman. So while that may be somewhat true, it's not universally so.
It's fancy modern haggling... Where one party has almost infinitely more knowledge than the other, both about you and about every other person that might buy the good/service.
That imbalance is what people hate. It's part of why people hate car salesmen. And a large part of why people hate most salesmen.
> I don't know, isn't the consumer surplus evidenced by people using the app?
You spend 10 years price dumping and being unprofitable to the tune of being 20 billion dollars in the red.
Customers are attracted by your price dumping because you offer cheaper rides than competition which has to deal with pesky insignificant things like labor laws, employees, inventory etc.
I’m not a huge fan of Uber’s corporate policies in general, but help me understand what’s wrong with this. Isn’t this what any company would do: maximize revenue from customers while minimizing expenses to their suppliers? Most businesses don’t tells us how they do this.
My grocer sells me a can of beans at some price. I have no idea how they arrived at that price, how much they paid their wholesaler, or that they may have a sale on beans next week. I buy or don’t buy beans based on whether I feel they’re worth the cost. And whether I feel like beans.
If I understand TFA correctly, what is going on, is that the grocer is going
* This person is wearing a suit, I'm going to charge double
* This is a regular that always buys the same thing every week, I can charge 30% more without breaking his routine
* This one is buying the ingredients for a recipe to do tonight, I can charge double more on one product because she won't want to go to another grocer just for one missing item.
Or in economic terms it is doing price discrimination to turn the consumer surplus into profit for itself. I think it's obvious why consumers wouldn't like that. Although they can also do "this one is a cheapstake with lots of free time, I have to offer a 20% discount to keep him coming"
"* This is a regular that always buys the same thing every week, I can charge 30% more without breaking his routine"
This one is getting to me more and more. When I grew up, you got the best deals as a regular customer. Nowadays it's the opposite. Loyalty is something that can be exploited. If you don't switch insurance regularly, you are paying way too much. If you stay at a job for longer, you get paid under market. If you use a service regularly, you get charged more.
I think it's really corroding society when loyalty and trust are viewed as an exploitable weakness.
I don't think its as much "corroding society" as it is a symptom of scale and corporate consolidation.
The mom and pop store making $200k/yr revenue selling physical goods gives regulars a deal because if their $100/mo spend goes elsewhere it is a demonstrably negative business impact, and there are 2 or 3 other mom and pop stores close by. The owner's kids also probably go to school with the regular's kids or there's some similar relationship. Plus, even if they wanted to maximize profit - they probably don't based on the previous point - they simply don't have enough data points to figure out how exactly to do it.
The multinational corporation has billions or tens of billions in revenue, tens or hundreds of thousands of locations, and so many data points they can test any price discrimination scheme they want and get data almost instantly. But this by itself isn't a problem (IMO, certainly some here would disagree). The root of the problem IMO is that there's no relationship. The manager of the location has no power, the district manager is in a city an hour away, the people making these pricing decisions live in another state or country, and they are judged on making the graph go up and to the right. Their bonuses depend on it, their livelihood depends on it.
In the mom and pop scenario, the customer interacts with someone whose livelihood depends on them being happy and has the power to make sure they are. With the multinational, they interact with someone who doesn't give a shit if they're happy or not, and has no power whatsoever, and the lowest person with power doesn't have any idea who they are and is actively incentivized to screw them.
Next: Cheapskate as a Service. Are you a cheapskate that can get discounts? Sign up on our app and use your "he gets great discounts" status to buy things for others, and earn a percentage of the savings!
We literally target advertisements in lookalike audiences based on behavioral profiling from on-site and in-store actions. It's been like this for more than a decade in my job; it's literally what I do for a living. But this has been happening with RFM direct mail for DECADES.
One major clothing retailer I worked with for 4+ years was big on promotions, particularly via direct mail. Those scratch-off coupons were not random; they were specifically targeted to individual customers based on their prior behavior.
For example:
- Customer A historically buys when they get a 30% coupon; test them with a 20% and see if they bite, but if not, give them the 30% and get some money.
- Customer B will always buy with almost ANY discount but never without one; give them the lowest one most of the time, but occasionally give them a higher one because it keeps them interested.
- Customer C will buy any time, but we need to keep them hooked so we send them the lowest one all the time.
---
I just don't know why people are surprised that this is happening at a bigger scale in app; it's baffling to me.
Versions of this already exist with "this one lives in a low cost country, buys Steam games, Netflix subscriptions, (...) and shares them with family in high-cost country"
The problem is most people don't know. In my country you can't change the price for a given person. So if you don't know it's done, you can't change your behaviour (like do legal actions).
This is not the law in all places sadly. I read that restaurants in Japan give a different, cheaper menu to locals and more expensive menus to tourists. Most tourists don’t know and the restaurant doesn’t want to price out the locals.
Costa Rica the vast majority of tourist attractions have a resident price and a tourist price. I have mixed feelings about it -- on the one hand, it makes sense for a country reliant on tourism to charge tourists more, since tourists are much richer, and a lot of the money goes to ecological protection, research, the arts, etc. On the other hand, it's kind of a bummer for a nominally cheap country to have quite expensive museum and national park admissions - it's hard not to feel like you're getting screwed, and it's not an ignorable difference for my budget.
It's an interesting dilemma. Personally, I prefer the version of price discrimination where you introduce high-margin premium value-adds that people can opt in or out of - alcohol or steak/lobster at a restaurant, rooms with views or additional packages at hotels, table service, etc, which can allow wealthier customers to subsidize less wealthy ones without necessarily compromising the core service. Though that's still a bummer when adding a view to a room is prohibitively expensive for something that cost the hotel nothing more to provide, and you feel like either you're getting screwed or you'll always have an alleyway view from your hotel.
That just sounds like racism though - how do they tell who qualifies for the ‘local discount’ versus the ‘tourist premium?’
Betting it’s based on stereotypical appearance and language, not checking IDs.
A more charitable approach might be to charge an extra fee for foreign credit cards - that way you get to effectively upcharge tourists, while encouraging conversion to and payment by local currency, additionally saving yourself transaction fees in the process.
Japan specifically is extremely xenophobic, they actively discourage people from immigrating, they do not want foreigners there except as tourists. If you are not born in Japan, you can never become Japanese as far as the locals and the government are concerned.
It's kind of reductionist to take that environment and that culture and just default to "giving the white guy the expensive menu is racism." You'd have to do that to probably 1500 people before you hit the person who has actually immigrated as opposed to a tourist.
> Presumably people are fine with getting "ripped off" by Uber, otherwise they wouldn't keep using Uber and paying for it.
They're fine with it because of the lack of real alternatives. There's effectively a duopoly with Lyft in most cities. Duopolies usually don't present every customer with at least some sort of solution that allows for both parties in the business transaction to gain value.
Which is why taxis were a regulated industry before some cokeheads in SV decided things needed to be "disrupted".
> Presumably people are fine with getting "ripped off" by Uber, otherwise they wouldn't keep using Uber and paying for it.
I’m not sure why we should presume people are “fine” with this just because it’s something that happens.
Plenty of things happen in this world that are not “fine” and make people upset, but continue to happen because of market forces, lack of reasonable alternatives, something being the “least bad” option, etc.
I think one of the most glaring issues is that Uber has established dominance in the category, which gives them power of their users and allows them to implement pricing strategies that are user-hostile with less chance of repercussions.
Right, people keep using Uber because it solves a real problem for them and provides convenience in their life.
If someone creates the same or better service at a more reasonable price, the consumers will switch. There is no vendor lock-in for Uber and no monopoly.
I don't see anything illegal going on here, just good old business.
Anyone can use coupons. Even if they don't want to spend the time to do it, they could. Same with store brand products made by the name brand manufacturer the choice is up to the consumer.
Uber's price discrimination is opaque. Even if they aren't doing dastardly things with it, people don't like feeling ripped off. We have no way of knowing when we are.
But most big box stores have moved to digital coupons that are indeed customized based on their creepy individualized spy dossier on you. At our grocery store, my partner and I get different coupons or even different deals for the same items.
Actually I may have a theory on why this is so annoying. Most people in Western countries are used to not haggling, and hate dealing with haggling for the two B2C products that are frequently haggled for, cars and housing, and frequently come out of the transaction feeling ripped off. And now Uber is trying to apply a faceless unilateral "take it or leave it" haggling process.
Yeah sure, but Joel Spolsky does point in this article how it pisses consumers off. And I think this sort of algorithm "pure" price discrimination based on mind reading how much the consumer is willing to pay is much more annoying than doing it by having cheaper and more expensive options.
Challenge: Implement price discrimination in a setting where all prices are published on the shelf under the product without knowledge of who is viewing the price.
Possibility: Develop a "loyalty" program where customers provide a member id like a phone number at checkout. Anonymous shoppers get the worst pricing. Everybody else voluntarily signs up for price discrimination disguised as rewards.
Also the low-tech version: farmer's markets, bakeries, anything with perishables they sell daily will often give steep discounts or freebies if you show up close to closing, rewarding those that are in-the-know or are willing to modify their schedule to save some cash.
I’d agree - but is it? Where I live (not a top-ten US metro area) we also have Lyft and a number of traditional cab companies. Uber is big, but by no means a monopoly.
I was thinking the same thing! Also, I have a Lyft app on my phone right next to Uber. Most places I go are served by both customers. It's easier to switch than groceries.
A suggestion: Install both Lyft and Uber (or whatever the second biggest ride app is in your area).
I get regular notifications along the lines of "$20 off your next ride with Lyft/Uber" when i do this. I do not get these otherwise. It's pretty clear that to use a ride app you need to have at least 2 on your phone, otherwise there's no reason not to charge you exorbitantly since you've trapped yourself.
Yeah for all the talk that it's impossible for the apps to detect each other, "app was opened and a destination set but ride never taken" is a pretty easy thing for an app to trigger a notification on.
In fact i just tested. Lyft discount notification came in after 2mins of doing the above.
This can usually be done on iOS by testing custom URL schemes. When it became apparent apps were doing this, Apple changed it so that you need to declare at build time exactly which schemes you are looking for. This information is present in the app bundle, so anybody can download and inspect the Uber app to determine if they are doing this.
I am using an iPhone. I assume the difference comes from taking a break from one app over the other. They are probably noticing I'm not doing my usual routine (because the other app gave me a discount).
This is why people hate modern tech companies. They don't optimize for efficiency and providing the best service, they optimize for profit in 500 different messed up manipulative ways. I don't want to have a 'social credit score' to manage while on vacation in the form of my AirBnB rating. I don't want to gamify between two apps to get a ride. But tech says 'do it or we'll exploit you'.
Modern tech business models make you pay a tax to not waste mental energy on their BS games and it gets exhausting. So you stop and resent the companies for ripping you off/manipulating you. I hope that frustrations comes back to bite them and instead of being special darlings with regulation carveout's they become the most regulated industry.
Slightly off topic, but Lyft has really creeped me out recently. The last three times I’ve landed at SFO, I’ve gotten a push notification on my iPhone from Lyft saying “welcome to SFO, get a Lyft.” It’s always come as we were taxiing to the gate.
After the first notification, I turned off location services for Lyft and only do one time authorizations, and then close the app when I’m done, but I still get the push notification. How is Lyft figuring out that I just landed at SFO? FWIW it has not happened at any other airport.
Holy shit. I’ve also been similarly creeped out by this behavior as well, and did the same setting changes as the original commenter. This comment made me remember I signed up for a Delta/Lyft promo way back in college. In my case in explicitly signed up to link both accounts, but I wonder if they have other methods
Apple restricts this as part of the location services permission though, and to clarify, it’s always happened very shortly after touchdown, just as we started to taxi, where probably the terminal WiFi is not in range.
After thinking about it more, I think they somehow know what flight I’m on and are using flightaware or a similar service to know when the plane touches down.
The question then is how they know I’m on the flight. They can do this if you share your calendar with them, but I don’t. The only thing I can think of is either the airline is selling them the data or they’re getting it from my credit card company. Airline flights are unusual on credit cards in that the entire itinerary is on your credit card statement, not just “American Airlines” or whatever.
I wonder if it uses Significant Location Change monitoring—which apparently works around “Always Allow” location permissions, and would be consistent with allowing location “once” or “while using the app” (which Lyft, I believe, requires as part of delivering its actual service). It also might explain why only SFO: is SFO one of your Apple-determined-and-enumerated “Significant Locations”?
(Edit: annoyingly, the parentheses are part of the URL. I don’t know how to encode them to make HN’s link parser happy, so you may have to add them by hand if you follow the link.)
I wouldn't assume this is how it works. But it could know your time zone changes and assume departure/arrival times based on it not being able to ping a server, then link this between possible airports based on time zones then possible flights based on the times.
But I suspect the false positives on this would be huge and if you felt so compelled could easily test while at your desk.
expanded receipt data is totally a thing, but then why would SFO be the only airport you've experienced this at? seems more likely there's something SFO is doing to see cell phone subscriber info, and selling that information to Lyft.
Does Uber have a patent moat or is their moat the brand?
For as much hate as they receive, I'm not sure why a driver-owned cooperative app has not emerged that takes no profit. Is there something like this we should all start using instead?
There isn't much technological innovation in ride-sharing that the FOSS community couldn't solve. I'd love to work in this area.
> driver-owned cooperative app that takes no profit
FWIW, the oversight of Uber on drivers is part of the success of Uber. I'm not talking about their mistreatments of drivers, but the fact that as a consumer I have reasonable confidence that the driver has been doing a decent job so far and that if I have a problem with the driver, there'd be some consequences through Uber.
It's part of what allowed their success: from unaccountable taxi mafias to a service consumers can trust.
It's far from perfect of course but it's good enough that I'm confident enough using Uber (although I avoid it for other reasons) even in foreign countries. It's probably not impossible to achieve with a co-op, but it seems more difficult
I've been treated to the the "you're so beautiful, do you have a boyfriend" act about 2% of the time[0] I get into a stranger's car pretty much across the board, which makes me a little bit skeptical about whether these companies do meaningful oversight. It's possible that these incidents go mostly unreported though. I didn't report mine.
As an aside, this is why I generally trust public transit more whenever it's an option. The worst case scenario is just so much less sinister when there are other people around than it is in a car alone with a stranger.
[0] once in a lyft in seattle, the other in a taxicab in barcelona. figuring I've taken about 100 lifetime solo car rides with strangers which is probably an overestimate.
Well there are two competing factors, one of which you pointed out--not every woman who experiences harassment reports it. The other which may be less obvious is that the people who behave this way tend to do so not only repeatedly but frequently. Eventually they may harass the wrong woman and get reported. Without knowing the numbers I can't speculate more about whether lyft knew about the driver who harassed me.
I definitely trust public transport more too. I have decent confidence in my uber rides but there’s no denying that being a man is certainly helping for that
This is my biggest problem with taxi service in the past. Unless they behave criminally towards you and you can go to police, you were at their mercy. Any cost had to be accepted, no idea how much it would cost upfront.
There were whole scam rings around that in some parts of Europe, taking foreign customers via very elongated roads to destination. Or a story from a colleague - taxi driver in Paris literally threw out a customer in the middle of highway since he didn't like his personal political views on famous french protests. In normal situation that would mean the taxi guy losing his 200k euro medallion, in reality of course nothing, zilch, nada.
Yes their moat is the brand, drunk women will get in an Uber and feel safe because corporate is ultimately putting their name on the line every ride. Nobody will feel safe dealing directly with random strangers.
This. Also, Waymo, if they keep scaling, is going to eat their lunch in this market. No human in the drivers seat is ultimately the solution to this problem.
Waymo costs more in areas where it operates right now yet I've heard people swear by it and state that they don't care how much more it costs, they'll always use a Waymo over an Uber or Lyft.
Which is a surprising viewpoint for those of us who don't have the safety concerns others may have but when you think about it, it makes complete sense.
The ride apps solve the biggest concerns. They have driver ratings so you can see verification from many other riders that the driver is good and they have upfront pricing. Taxi's have started to use apps but at this point the trust is pretty much broken to anyone that's experienced the old "My meters not working but I'll give you a special rate" type of shit.
Essentially Taxi drivers are the random strangers over the apps with ratings and reviews from other riders showing clearly.
Given the quality of drivers and cars I have experienced, the ratings mean nothing.
Instead, I do get comfort in knowing that there is a database timestamped entry linking myself with an Uber driver identifier. Should something happen, I could theoretically complain/give a lead so investigators can locate my murdered body. Random cab is more anonymous and feels more dangerous in unfamiliar territory.
Some searching suggests it’s not that far from 50:50 in terms of actual rides. Uber drivers average well under 20 hours per week. Taxi have significantly fewer drivers working much longer hours, but they dominate very short trips.
Makes sense to me. There is a lot of existing infrastructure anticipating cab companies. Airports, stadiums, hotels, resorts, etc. all with dedicated cab lines that can get you seated in a vehicle in seconds.
The idea is that drivers pay a flat fee per month and get to keep the entirety of the fare. I used it for a while but my desire to get somewhere fast outweighed my disdain for Uber as middleman. Eventually I went back to Uber/Lyft due to long wait times and unreliable pickups.
It is a lot more like "some guy giving you a ride" instead of a car service. My buddy initially pitched it to me as a cheap alternative to Uber for drivers that were banned from Uber. It is nice that they don't have surge pricing. Empower is somewhere in between the convenience and price of Uber and public transportation.
Yeah. India has nammayatri.in as well (opensource/open data btw!)
While it's availablity is very good, there are three competitors (one of which is uber) with better, more reliable availability so it's tough competition.
It's actually not that easy, especially at scale. Background checks cost money/time + compliance requirements are vastly different between regions/states/cities.
And there are tons of government systems you need to get data from. And some counties require in-person visit to obtain court records. And you need those records to make valid assessments.
Uber offers a lot more than just locating a driver. It’s a platform that generates a recommended route for the driver, shows the progress of the route to the customer in realtime so they know the driver is going the right direction, it calculates fares (e.g. distance, surge pricing, etc), and has other features like “share my ride details with my spouse” for example…for security purposes.
That’s just what i could think of off the top of my head and i’m not a product manager at uber. Things are NEVER as simple as they initially seem.
Other thoughts:
- at uber’s scale, payment processing alone likely takes up quite a bit of compute server side. You could outsource this to a 3rd party, but it’s still an expense as you scale.
- how would a decentralized system work if something goes wrong during the ride? who does the customer call? Drunk driver, attempted rape, etc. list of things that can go wrong is long.
- your platform/app would need to be smart enough to know where all the “proper” ride share pickup spots are at every airport. Not trivial!
- how would you offer a feature to “reserve a ride” like uber does, if you only build an app that can find “nearby drivers”?
food for thought. :) All im pointing out is this kind of product needs to be a platform and is likely not cheap to run. It’s not 90% client side. Unless you literally just want to reinvent the taxi concept, in which case maybe the 90% client side approach is feasible.
There are such apps. In Sweden there is Fair, but from what I can gather it uses an app produced by ATOM Mobility, so I take it they use a ready-made platform. Check it out.
> Uber chief tells French lobbying inquiry company’s culture has been transformed
May 2023[1]
This is even more funny, especially after they had to change the hole leader-ship team, the leaks and corruption investigations. And now the opaque algorithm. Just don't use uber.
I would assume they get a notification showing the amount they'll earn, and then they can either press "accept" or "deny." As a driver, you're an "independent contractor," so you're not forced to accept any rides. If you don't like the route/client/value, you can just not accept it.
I drive for Uber sometimes I use an app where it'll automatically take an Uber and turn off Lyft and door dash.. when it meets a filter... for example: $1 per mile, 25 per hour avg, and over $5 minimum...
you can manually accept ones less than the filter... but it pops up a thing with all this data so you can make a decision whether it's worth it and while driving it's nice it turns the rest off so you don't have bad stats when they send you an offer and you don't take it because you couldn't turn it off yet....
it's $18 per month but worth every penny!
plus I just hit 1 button to login to every service...
https://l.myst.ro/N0Q9/movhhjr5 (disclaimer: aff Link.... you can just look for myst in the app store on Android (not sure about iPhone).
Uber/lyft pricing models are extremely unfair. They "purchase" marginal rides and marginal driver hours using bonuses and meaning those bonuses go towards riders and drivers who are the most price sensitive, like a mom who only drives if the money is good. But for the driver who drives 10hrs rain or sun, they rarely get bonuses because their hours are static.
If driver A needs to be incentivized to drive, and Uber needs more drivers, they should have to pay more. If driver B is driving no matter what why would Uber pay them more if not for retention or something?
You're basically penalized for treating uber/lyft as a real job and having loyalty, ie. getting paid less for the same amount of work. You don't think that's unfair?
It's a bidding system. If nobody accepts a ride at $X, the offered price increases to $Y. Does Uber have a responsibility to maximize its employees' (in the general sense, not getting into the employee/contractor distinction) earnings? Does your boss or their boss have a responsibility to get you as much money as possible?
Assume we're both drivers for Uber, you're willing to do a drive for $30 and I'm willing to do the same drive but not for less than $40. Is it unfair to me for you to take that job for $30, knowing that I won't get it? I'd argue it's not (even if you know I'm waiting for the price to go up), and if that's unfair it's hard to make an argument that it's unfair for Uber to run that system.
Uber invented a particular form of algorithmic wage discrimination; if its drivers are picky about which rides they accept, Uber will slowly raise the rates to entice those drivers—until they start accepting rides. Once a driver does accept a ride, "the wage starts to push down and down at random intervals in increments that are too small for human beings to readily notice". ...
As anyone with a technical background knows, "any task that is simple, but time-consuming is a prime candidate for automation". This kind of "wage theft" would be tedious and expensive to do by hand, but it is trivial to play these games using computers.
Technically you're right - it's price discrimination. But it's aimed at the workers, not for them.
Drivers who treat Uber like a real job and show up consistently end up making less than those who only drive when it’s lucrative. That’s not illegal, but it feels exploitative, especially when it's driven by opaque algorithms.
Imagine your salary dropping just because you showed up every day. Wouldn’t feel fair, would it?
I get what you're saying, and I agree that's how it feels but that doesn't necessarily mean that's how it is.
I guarantee you there are companies in the US right now paying their full-time employees who work 40+ hours less than they pay consultants who are also writing code who are working 30, 20, even 10 hours a week or less. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're taking advantage of their employees (though they may well be). Everyone agreed to do the thing they're doing knowing exactly what the terms were.
If I agree to do a job for $X that is otherwise "not exploitation" by whatever metric we choose to use, it doesn't suddenly become exploitation if I could have gotten 2X or 3X to do the same job.
You do though. The sibling comment's LWN link shows that if you don't accept rides, the price you're offered for rides increases.
Edit: I'd love for this to be another thing to add to the list of reasons why Uber sucks. But this specific thing seems pretty normal and what absolutely any company would do in a similar circumstance.
That part is completely opaque to the user. It's at best a dark pattern, but really it just takes advantage of a certain group of people who depend on ridesharing for primary income.
And btw, the no one really knows the exact mechanism thru which you get bonuses cuz its a model trained on many inputs. Not accepting rides is just one part of the equation.
If I were trying to run an ethical pricing model, I would give bonuses to anyone driving in surge/prime hours; I wouldn't limit the bonuses to people that I think would drive in those hours cause that's bs
I've noticed that a trip I've taken for years has increased significantly in price over the last 6 to 8 months. I used to pay around $17 to $20, but now the same trip costs approximately $25 or more. I spoke with the driver, and he mentioned that he still receives the same amount—$11.00—so it seems the extra cost is going to the platform, not the driver.
It's now more than I use to pay to take a cab and all the cabs are gone.....
This has been a known strategy from Uber for a long time. Run at a loss to squeeze out the existing offerings, then dramatically increase prices once they've established a monopoly.
Combine this with exploiting loopholes to get around local labour regulation or just outright ignoring it just because, giving them an unfair advantage over competitors that were operating more or less honestly.
I wish I could say I was surprised they got away with it just because they were doing it through an app :shrug:
Doing it through an app is what made it possible to turn each transaction into effectively a pair of opaque auctions with Uber holding all the information, but they got away with it because consumers really like low prices.
Feels like the new algorithm now is almost a flat dollar a minute plus surge. How I long for the days I could get most anywhere from $4-$7. The uber there and back from the airport can be more than the flight now (once surged to $120 one way for a 35 min trip).
I've observed Uber surges to $180 for a 30 minute trip home from SJC. I was ready to sleep on the bench all night and have a friend come in the morning, but fortunately Lyft was only $47.
In hindsight , TechCrunch Disrupt actually looks really disgusting.
Cab drivers dramatically boosted profits while decreasing driver pay? This goes way beyond increasing prices. Uber both increased prices and decreased driver pay at the same time. I used to driver Uber to make extra cash. They usually took about 16-17% and I made $25-30/hour (before taxes and expenses). Now they take more than 25% and I make $20/hour before expenses so I only drive when I want to have a bunch of conversations with random people
Cab drivers are by law (in much of Europe) required to have their prices stated on the window or inside the car, with surcharges clearly displayed. The driver must also have a valid id and license displayed inside the car.
Are you sure you actually rode a taxi and not some illegal or almost illegal rideshare like Uber which has no such regulations? If I were you I would have taken a picture of the car with the license plate and then reported them to the authorities.
They have all of that. Then you get to the place and they hit some buttons and crazy opaque math happens and then you have a 30 minute fight with the dude. And the reader was always broken and no they can't break a 100 or a 20 or a 5
Up front pricing is way better. When I used to do cabs I'd always do upfront prices. $40 to the airport no meter includes tip. 50 ok sounds good. Let's go.
Almost 10 years ago, Uber was hailed for creating consumer surplus [0] in similar studies:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2837639
Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478847
Who would have thought that they'd turn that research into algorithms that skim off surplus (from consumers and drivers)?
[0] Consumer surplus: roughly, the benefit of all those consumers who got a lower price than what they would have been willing to pay. Especially prevalent when there's one price for all. So the natural enemy of consumer surplus is price discrimination, where suppliers try to extract close to the maximum amount they're willing to pay from each consumer.
I don't know, isn't the consumer surplus evidenced by people using the app?
I wouldn't think of just blindly hailing a cab anymore, especially in a city that's new to me. It doesn't have to be the lowest possible price, the experience just has to be consistent.
Log into the app. It already has my credentials and payment information stored. See the price, distance and time up front. Follow along the route while I'm driving. No money exchanged, no watching the meter or wondering if he's driving me around in circles. No fumbling for payment or pressure to tip.
That's the value.
In terms of price discrimination, they make more money on business travels or when it's crazy busy. The alternative is you can't get a cab. So I'm okay with it.
Their operating margin is about 10% which is reasonable for a business. The S&P 500 operating margin is 12.22%
And it's super easy to shop around. I always look at both Lyft and Uber and almost always go w/ Lyft as it usually has the lower price.
What are people complaining about exactly?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-163022654
https://www.gurufocus.com/economic_indicators/4226/sp-500-op...
You mean generally? Technology mystification. Taxis used to have price regulations and rules and the drivers were part of unions with health care benefits and pensions.
Now it's not-really-employees with magical floating prices and people accept it because "computer".
Ironically it is often the socially concious union types that call Uber or Lyft.
Sure, in some regions there is what basically amounts to a taxi mafia. But aside from that Uber/Lyft offer the definition of a gig economy where people on both end believe to be winning. Depends on the country, but in most countries it isn't the price sensitive choice.
“In some regions”
Guatemala is the only place outside the US where I was not quoted 3-5x Uber prices by very pushy taxi drivers.
Taxi drivers are scam artists and thieves. There’s no reputational damage either, as you will never see them again.
Uber solves the reputation problem: every driver is rated, and poorly rated and badly behaved drivers do not get to work for them.
This stuff happens everywhere. Look at Trader Joes and Whole Foods. TJ has been owned by Aldi, one of the largest grocery corporations since the 1970s. It's non-union and is currently doing the mobbing thing that starbucks did in the 90s to squeeze out independent grocers. They're being bastards.
Still though, I shopped there last night.
I recently hailed a taxi. When I got in the driver refused to turn on the meter instead quoting me a crazy price and then said his card reader didnt work. I cant say taxi's were much better pre-uber. The simple reason ride share took off is because taxi's have long been horrible.
I think the issue arises from them doing this on the supply side of the market as well. Discriminating offers to drivers in order to prioritise people willing to drive for less. Or just finding ways to pay people less through algorithmic means.
It's not like people were very happy about their "disruption" of the job market to begin with.
> Discriminating offers to drivers in order to prioritise people willing to drive for less.
Isn't this just describing a market? If I am trying to buy something (in this case a driver's services), I will first buy the cheapest?
Except that it's not a simple market because Uber/Lyft can charge a rider for a different rate than they pay the driver unless there's regulation prohibiting this.
You lack imagination. Two customers with the same itinerary might be quoted different prices not because of capacity constraints but because the platform has inferred that one customer is willing to pay more than the other... that's extracting consumer surplus and converting it to supplier surplus.
I guess I don't really care. I'm price sensitive, and I have options. So its pretty easy for them to pick up I'm price sensitive as I often check a route, check back 5 minutes later and ghost. So they can infer I'm going to a cheaper competitor.
There are some people that are loyal and don't mind paying slightly more. Or don't want the overhead of having multiple apps. Let them pay more.
This is essentially the same thing as coupons and sales. The people that take the effort to find and clip coupons and plan their shopping accordingly pay less. I don't bother so I pay more. I'm fine with this.
What is the bigger problem? Some democratic principle of everyone pays the same?
Again, Uber has 10% operating margins.
In that case we get your preferred route. People traveling these routes as well have a notoriously poor credit rating. See? We will make you pay either way.
Price discrimination is the foundation of business
While the Puritan culture that pervades America is usually derided, one thing they did and do have is issues with is price discrimination. The price is the price, doesn't matter if you're rich/poor/black/white/man/woman. So while that may be somewhat true, it's not universally so.
Non-productive businesses and rent-seekers perhaps.
That happens with airlines as well.
More businesses than the authors can imagine work this way. They really ought to sit down and have a coffee with some salespeople.
It's fancy modern haggling... Where one party has almost infinitely more knowledge than the other, both about you and about every other person that might buy the good/service.
That imbalance is what people hate. It's part of why people hate car salesmen. And a large part of why people hate most salesmen.
> I don't know, isn't the consumer surplus evidenced by people using the app?
You spend 10 years price dumping and being unprofitable to the tune of being 20 billion dollars in the red.
Customers are attracted by your price dumping because you offer cheaper rides than competition which has to deal with pesky insignificant things like labor laws, employees, inventory etc.
Did you create "customer surplus"?
> Who would have thought that they'd turn that research into algorithms that skim off surplus (from consumers and drivers)?
Literally any educated adult whos ever read Marx, Engels, or Paul Sweezy.
literally anyone whos ever turned the lens of historical materialism on capitalism.
I’m not a huge fan of Uber’s corporate policies in general, but help me understand what’s wrong with this. Isn’t this what any company would do: maximize revenue from customers while minimizing expenses to their suppliers? Most businesses don’t tells us how they do this.
My grocer sells me a can of beans at some price. I have no idea how they arrived at that price, how much they paid their wholesaler, or that they may have a sale on beans next week. I buy or don’t buy beans based on whether I feel they’re worth the cost. And whether I feel like beans.
If I understand TFA correctly, what is going on, is that the grocer is going
* This person is wearing a suit, I'm going to charge double
* This is a regular that always buys the same thing every week, I can charge 30% more without breaking his routine
* This one is buying the ingredients for a recipe to do tonight, I can charge double more on one product because she won't want to go to another grocer just for one missing item.
Or in economic terms it is doing price discrimination to turn the consumer surplus into profit for itself. I think it's obvious why consumers wouldn't like that. Although they can also do "this one is a cheapstake with lots of free time, I have to offer a 20% discount to keep him coming"
"* This is a regular that always buys the same thing every week, I can charge 30% more without breaking his routine"
This one is getting to me more and more. When I grew up, you got the best deals as a regular customer. Nowadays it's the opposite. Loyalty is something that can be exploited. If you don't switch insurance regularly, you are paying way too much. If you stay at a job for longer, you get paid under market. If you use a service regularly, you get charged more.
I think it's really corroding society when loyalty and trust are viewed as an exploitable weakness.
I don't think its as much "corroding society" as it is a symptom of scale and corporate consolidation.
The mom and pop store making $200k/yr revenue selling physical goods gives regulars a deal because if their $100/mo spend goes elsewhere it is a demonstrably negative business impact, and there are 2 or 3 other mom and pop stores close by. The owner's kids also probably go to school with the regular's kids or there's some similar relationship. Plus, even if they wanted to maximize profit - they probably don't based on the previous point - they simply don't have enough data points to figure out how exactly to do it.
The multinational corporation has billions or tens of billions in revenue, tens or hundreds of thousands of locations, and so many data points they can test any price discrimination scheme they want and get data almost instantly. But this by itself isn't a problem (IMO, certainly some here would disagree). The root of the problem IMO is that there's no relationship. The manager of the location has no power, the district manager is in a city an hour away, the people making these pricing decisions live in another state or country, and they are judged on making the graph go up and to the right. Their bonuses depend on it, their livelihood depends on it.
In the mom and pop scenario, the customer interacts with someone whose livelihood depends on them being happy and has the power to make sure they are. With the multinational, they interact with someone who doesn't give a shit if they're happy or not, and has no power whatsoever, and the lowest person with power doesn't have any idea who they are and is actively incentivized to screw them.
Next: Cheapskate as a Service. Are you a cheapskate that can get discounts? Sign up on our app and use your "he gets great discounts" status to buy things for others, and earn a percentage of the savings!
With the way things are going, this isn’t even far fetched.
We literally target advertisements in lookalike audiences based on behavioral profiling from on-site and in-store actions. It's been like this for more than a decade in my job; it's literally what I do for a living. But this has been happening with RFM direct mail for DECADES.
One major clothing retailer I worked with for 4+ years was big on promotions, particularly via direct mail. Those scratch-off coupons were not random; they were specifically targeted to individual customers based on their prior behavior.
For example:
- Customer A historically buys when they get a 30% coupon; test them with a 20% and see if they bite, but if not, give them the 30% and get some money.
- Customer B will always buy with almost ANY discount but never without one; give them the lowest one most of the time, but occasionally give them a higher one because it keeps them interested.
- Customer C will buy any time, but we need to keep them hooked so we send them the lowest one all the time.
---
I just don't know why people are surprised that this is happening at a bigger scale in app; it's baffling to me.
As someone who has no idea what a "scratch-off coupon" is, we could be surprised because we have no idea that this is going on at all at any level.
Versions of this already exist with "this one lives in a low cost country, buys Steam games, Netflix subscriptions, (...) and shares them with family in high-cost country"
Love it!
I think Uber sucks, but people keep using it, and seem to beg to differ.
I don't see what the problem is.
Presumably people are fine with getting "ripped off" by Uber, otherwise they wouldn't keep using Uber and paying for it.
It's not like it's some free ad-supported product that's a scourge on society where all the costs are hidden.
I avoid Uber at all costs, other people are happy to rely on it. To each their own.
Fun fact, it's very easy for apps to see what apps you have installed on your phone.
If you only have Uber installed on your phone, see what happens with future pricing when you install Lyft, Curb, Waymo, etc.
You don't even need to ever use them. Just have them installed.
> I don't see what the problem is.
The problem is most people don't know. In my country you can't change the price for a given person. So if you don't know it's done, you can't change your behaviour (like do legal actions).
This is not the law in all places sadly. I read that restaurants in Japan give a different, cheaper menu to locals and more expensive menus to tourists. Most tourists don’t know and the restaurant doesn’t want to price out the locals.
Costa Rica the vast majority of tourist attractions have a resident price and a tourist price. I have mixed feelings about it -- on the one hand, it makes sense for a country reliant on tourism to charge tourists more, since tourists are much richer, and a lot of the money goes to ecological protection, research, the arts, etc. On the other hand, it's kind of a bummer for a nominally cheap country to have quite expensive museum and national park admissions - it's hard not to feel like you're getting screwed, and it's not an ignorable difference for my budget.
It's an interesting dilemma. Personally, I prefer the version of price discrimination where you introduce high-margin premium value-adds that people can opt in or out of - alcohol or steak/lobster at a restaurant, rooms with views or additional packages at hotels, table service, etc, which can allow wealthier customers to subsidize less wealthy ones without necessarily compromising the core service. Though that's still a bummer when adding a view to a room is prohibitively expensive for something that cost the hotel nothing more to provide, and you feel like either you're getting screwed or you'll always have an alleyway view from your hotel.
That just sounds like racism though - how do they tell who qualifies for the ‘local discount’ versus the ‘tourist premium?’
Betting it’s based on stereotypical appearance and language, not checking IDs.
A more charitable approach might be to charge an extra fee for foreign credit cards - that way you get to effectively upcharge tourists, while encouraging conversion to and payment by local currency, additionally saving yourself transaction fees in the process.
Japan specifically is extremely xenophobic, they actively discourage people from immigrating, they do not want foreigners there except as tourists. If you are not born in Japan, you can never become Japanese as far as the locals and the government are concerned.
It's kind of reductionist to take that environment and that culture and just default to "giving the white guy the expensive menu is racism." You'd have to do that to probably 1500 people before you hit the person who has actually immigrated as opposed to a tourist.
I figured the same but wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt
> Presumably people are fine with getting "ripped off" by Uber, otherwise they wouldn't keep using Uber and paying for it.
They're fine with it because of the lack of real alternatives. There's effectively a duopoly with Lyft in most cities. Duopolies usually don't present every customer with at least some sort of solution that allows for both parties in the business transaction to gain value.
Which is why taxis were a regulated industry before some cokeheads in SV decided things needed to be "disrupted".
You can't look at an economic transaction and deduce that parties involved were "fine" with it.
> Presumably people are fine with getting "ripped off" by Uber, otherwise they wouldn't keep using Uber and paying for it.
I’m not sure why we should presume people are “fine” with this just because it’s something that happens.
Plenty of things happen in this world that are not “fine” and make people upset, but continue to happen because of market forces, lack of reasonable alternatives, something being the “least bad” option, etc.
I think one of the most glaring issues is that Uber has established dominance in the category, which gives them power of their users and allows them to implement pricing strategies that are user-hostile with less chance of repercussions.
Right, people keep using Uber because it solves a real problem for them and provides convenience in their life.
If someone creates the same or better service at a more reasonable price, the consumers will switch. There is no vendor lock-in for Uber and no monopoly.
I don't see anything illegal going on here, just good old business.
> I think Uber sucks, but people keep using it, and seem to beg to differ.
This sort of thing happens when you reach de facto monopoly status...
> It's not like it's some free ad-supported product that's a scourge on society where all the costs are hidden.
It is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44378508
Groceries regularly do price discrimination (and have for a long time) via coupons. People mostly seem to be fine with it.
Anyone can use coupons. Even if they don't want to spend the time to do it, they could. Same with store brand products made by the name brand manufacturer the choice is up to the consumer.
Uber's price discrimination is opaque. Even if they aren't doing dastardly things with it, people don't like feeling ripped off. We have no way of knowing when we are.
Two huge differences:
1. The existence and mechanism of coupon programs is visible instead of secret.
2. They are not based on creepy individualized spy dossiers.
Coupons of yesteryear, maybe.
But most big box stores have moved to digital coupons that are indeed customized based on their creepy individualized spy dossier on you. At our grocery store, my partner and I get different coupons or even different deals for the same items.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
Hardly a new idea. And Uber didn’t create it, they just do it well.
Actually I may have a theory on why this is so annoying. Most people in Western countries are used to not haggling, and hate dealing with haggling for the two B2C products that are frequently haggled for, cars and housing, and frequently come out of the transaction feeling ripped off. And now Uber is trying to apply a faceless unilateral "take it or leave it" haggling process.
Yeah sure, but Joel Spolsky does point in this article how it pisses consumers off. And I think this sort of algorithm "pure" price discrimination based on mind reading how much the consumer is willing to pay is much more annoying than doing it by having cheaper and more expensive options.
Your grocer doesn’t sell the next person a can of beans at a different price though. Hey nice watch, we have a 50% on discount for you.
I use uber a lot, I’m in one right now. My partners phone consistently gets cheaper estimates.
Grocers run coupons and promos to help achieve price discrimination based on purchase timing preferences.
Some even have a coupon app and offer different deals to different people.
Challenge: Implement price discrimination in a setting where all prices are published on the shelf under the product without knowledge of who is viewing the price.
Possibility: Develop a "loyalty" program where customers provide a member id like a phone number at checkout. Anonymous shoppers get the worst pricing. Everybody else voluntarily signs up for price discrimination disguised as rewards.
Also the low-tech version: farmer's markets, bakeries, anything with perishables they sell daily will often give steep discounts or freebies if you show up close to closing, rewarding those that are in-the-know or are willing to modify their schedule to save some cash.
> Your grocer doesn’t sell the next person a can of beans at a different price though.
Yes they do. They even do everything they can to track me so they can optimize the coupons based on the watch I wear.
If the retailer is in a monopoly position and the prices are not public it may be exploitative
I’d agree - but is it? Where I live (not a top-ten US metro area) we also have Lyft and a number of traditional cab companies. Uber is big, but by no means a monopoly.
Yea I agree Ubers not a monopoly in many markets. Fixed taxi pricing would be the baseline alternative
I was thinking the same thing! Also, I have a Lyft app on my phone right next to Uber. Most places I go are served by both customers. It's easier to switch than groceries.
A suggestion: Install both Lyft and Uber (or whatever the second biggest ride app is in your area).
I get regular notifications along the lines of "$20 off your next ride with Lyft/Uber" when i do this. I do not get these otherwise. It's pretty clear that to use a ride app you need to have at least 2 on your phone, otherwise there's no reason not to charge you exorbitantly since you've trapped yourself.
I also have several apps installed and usually check one or two for the same ride. Pretty sure the one not chosen offers a discount next time.
Yeah for all the talk that it's impossible for the apps to detect each other, "app was opened and a destination set but ride never taken" is a pretty easy thing for an app to trigger a notification on.
In fact i just tested. Lyft discount notification came in after 2mins of doing the above.
On an iPhone, there should be no way for one app to determine the other is installed. Are you using Android?
This can usually be done on iOS by testing custom URL schemes. When it became apparent apps were doing this, Apple changed it so that you need to declare at build time exactly which schemes you are looking for. This information is present in the app bundle, so anybody can download and inspect the Uber app to determine if they are doing this.
I am using an iPhone. I assume the difference comes from taking a break from one app over the other. They are probably noticing I'm not doing my usual routine (because the other app gave me a discount).
This is why people hate modern tech companies. They don't optimize for efficiency and providing the best service, they optimize for profit in 500 different messed up manipulative ways. I don't want to have a 'social credit score' to manage while on vacation in the form of my AirBnB rating. I don't want to gamify between two apps to get a ride. But tech says 'do it or we'll exploit you'.
Modern tech business models make you pay a tax to not waste mental energy on their BS games and it gets exhausting. So you stop and resent the companies for ripping you off/manipulating you. I hope that frustrations comes back to bite them and instead of being special darlings with regulation carveout's they become the most regulated industry.
> So you stop and resent the companies for ripping you off/manipulating you
It will probably work for both sides, as the only people left are either ok with that or clueless, perfectly self selected.
I wish Lyft was in my city
Slightly off topic, but Lyft has really creeped me out recently. The last three times I’ve landed at SFO, I’ve gotten a push notification on my iPhone from Lyft saying “welcome to SFO, get a Lyft.” It’s always come as we were taxiing to the gate.
After the first notification, I turned off location services for Lyft and only do one time authorizations, and then close the app when I’m done, but I still get the push notification. How is Lyft figuring out that I just landed at SFO? FWIW it has not happened at any other airport.
There are many theories about this, but the one I find most plausible is that the airlines sell the data to Lyft.
Previous HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687696 Another forum discussion: https://archive.ph/wip/ck9CJ
Holy shit. I’ve also been similarly creeped out by this behavior as well, and did the same setting changes as the original commenter. This comment made me remember I signed up for a Delta/Lyft promo way back in college. In my case in explicitly signed up to link both accounts, but I wonder if they have other methods
My first thought was it could scan the WiFi names. I think there's many ways to determine location without GPS.
Apple restricts this as part of the location services permission though, and to clarify, it’s always happened very shortly after touchdown, just as we started to taxi, where probably the terminal WiFi is not in range.
After thinking about it more, I think they somehow know what flight I’m on and are using flightaware or a similar service to know when the plane touches down.
The question then is how they know I’m on the flight. They can do this if you share your calendar with them, but I don’t. The only thing I can think of is either the airline is selling them the data or they’re getting it from my credit card company. Airline flights are unusual on credit cards in that the entire itinerary is on your credit card statement, not just “American Airlines” or whatever.
I wonder if it uses Significant Location Change monitoring—which apparently works around “Always Allow” location permissions, and would be consistent with allowing location “once” or “while using the app” (which Lyft, I believe, requires as part of delivering its actual service). It also might explain why only SFO: is SFO one of your Apple-determined-and-enumerated “Significant Locations”?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/clloc...
(Edit: annoyingly, the parentheses are part of the URL. I don’t know how to encode them to make HN’s link parser happy, so you may have to add them by hand if you follow the link.)
(Edit 2: fixed, duh--thanks @akovaski!)
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/clloc...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Percent-en...
I wouldn't assume this is how it works. But it could know your time zone changes and assume departure/arrival times based on it not being able to ping a server, then link this between possible airports based on time zones then possible flights based on the times.
But I suspect the false positives on this would be huge and if you felt so compelled could easily test while at your desk.
expanded receipt data is totally a thing, but then why would SFO be the only airport you've experienced this at? seems more likely there's something SFO is doing to see cell phone subscriber info, and selling that information to Lyft.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
Yeah but it looks like it shouldn’t work in this case since the location permission wasn’t given:
> Before scheduling any notifications using this trigger, your app must have authorization to use Core Location and must have when-in-use permissions.
Does Uber have a patent moat or is their moat the brand?
For as much hate as they receive, I'm not sure why a driver-owned cooperative app has not emerged that takes no profit. Is there something like this we should all start using instead?
There isn't much technological innovation in ride-sharing that the FOSS community couldn't solve. I'd love to work in this area.
> driver-owned cooperative app that takes no profit
FWIW, the oversight of Uber on drivers is part of the success of Uber. I'm not talking about their mistreatments of drivers, but the fact that as a consumer I have reasonable confidence that the driver has been doing a decent job so far and that if I have a problem with the driver, there'd be some consequences through Uber.
It's part of what allowed their success: from unaccountable taxi mafias to a service consumers can trust.
It's far from perfect of course but it's good enough that I'm confident enough using Uber (although I avoid it for other reasons) even in foreign countries. It's probably not impossible to achieve with a co-op, but it seems more difficult
I've been treated to the the "you're so beautiful, do you have a boyfriend" act about 2% of the time[0] I get into a stranger's car pretty much across the board, which makes me a little bit skeptical about whether these companies do meaningful oversight. It's possible that these incidents go mostly unreported though. I didn't report mine.
As an aside, this is why I generally trust public transit more whenever it's an option. The worst case scenario is just so much less sinister when there are other people around than it is in a car alone with a stranger.
[0] once in a lyft in seattle, the other in a taxicab in barcelona. figuring I've taken about 100 lifetime solo car rides with strangers which is probably an overestimate.
> It's possible that these incidents go mostly unreported though. I didn't report mine.
How would uber know? They can’t unless someone reports the driver or gives them a poor rating.
Well there are two competing factors, one of which you pointed out--not every woman who experiences harassment reports it. The other which may be less obvious is that the people who behave this way tend to do so not only repeatedly but frequently. Eventually they may harass the wrong woman and get reported. Without knowing the numbers I can't speculate more about whether lyft knew about the driver who harassed me.
I definitely trust public transport more too. I have decent confidence in my uber rides but there’s no denying that being a man is certainly helping for that
> From unaccountable taxi mafias
This is my biggest problem with taxi service in the past. Unless they behave criminally towards you and you can go to police, you were at their mercy. Any cost had to be accepted, no idea how much it would cost upfront.
There were whole scam rings around that in some parts of Europe, taking foreign customers via very elongated roads to destination. Or a story from a colleague - taxi driver in Paris literally threw out a customer in the middle of highway since he didn't like his personal political views on famous french protests. In normal situation that would mean the taxi guy losing his 200k euro medallion, in reality of course nothing, zilch, nada.
Yes their moat is the brand, drunk women will get in an Uber and feel safe because corporate is ultimately putting their name on the line every ride. Nobody will feel safe dealing directly with random strangers.
This. Also, Waymo, if they keep scaling, is going to eat their lunch in this market. No human in the drivers seat is ultimately the solution to this problem.
Waymo costs more in areas where it operates right now yet I've heard people swear by it and state that they don't care how much more it costs, they'll always use a Waymo over an Uber or Lyft.
Which is a surprising viewpoint for those of us who don't have the safety concerns others may have but when you think about it, it makes complete sense.
> Nobody will feel safe dealing directly with random strangers.
Let me tell you about taxi cabs.
The ride apps solve the biggest concerns. They have driver ratings so you can see verification from many other riders that the driver is good and they have upfront pricing. Taxi's have started to use apps but at this point the trust is pretty much broken to anyone that's experienced the old "My meters not working but I'll give you a special rate" type of shit.
Essentially Taxi drivers are the random strangers over the apps with ratings and reviews from other riders showing clearly.
Given the quality of drivers and cars I have experienced, the ratings mean nothing.
Instead, I do get comfort in knowing that there is a database timestamped entry linking myself with an Uber driver identifier. Should something happen, I could theoretically complain/give a lead so investigators can locate my murdered body. Random cab is more anonymous and feels more dangerous in unfamiliar territory.
This is part of why taxi cabs got maybe 1% of the ridership across the US of what uber/lyft get.
Everyone hated taxis because they were so unreliable and unaccountable for scamming you outside of a few dense cities like NY.
Some searching suggests it’s not that far from 50:50 in terms of actual rides. Uber drivers average well under 20 hours per week. Taxi have significantly fewer drivers working much longer hours, but they dominate very short trips.
Makes sense to me. There is a lot of existing infrastructure anticipating cab companies. Airports, stadiums, hotels, resorts, etc. all with dedicated cab lines that can get you seated in a vehicle in seconds.
You say this as if every single woman doesn't have a laundry list of uber horror stories and creepy drivers.
They use uber because uber killed anything else. That was the entire point of the ride price subsidies.
Feeling safe and being safe are different things. Im talking about the sub-conscious thoughts at point of purchase
In Washington DC we have Empower https://driveempower.com/
The idea is that drivers pay a flat fee per month and get to keep the entirety of the fare. I used it for a while but my desire to get somewhere fast outweighed my disdain for Uber as middleman. Eventually I went back to Uber/Lyft due to long wait times and unreliable pickups.
It is a lot more like "some guy giving you a ride" instead of a car service. My buddy initially pitched it to me as a cheap alternative to Uber for drivers that were banned from Uber. It is nice that they don't have surge pricing. Empower is somewhere in between the convenience and price of Uber and public transportation.
Yeah. India has nammayatri.in as well (opensource/open data btw!)
While it's availablity is very good, there are three competitors (one of which is uber) with better, more reliable availability so it's tough competition.
Is driver verification a hard thing here? Or simple to solve with a web of trust, assuming you could seed it with enough good actors?
I think Uber verifies driver quality/qualifications and vehicle roadworthy-ness?
It's actually not that easy, especially at scale. Background checks cost money/time + compliance requirements are vastly different between regions/states/cities.
And there are tons of government systems you need to get data from. And some counties require in-person visit to obtain court records. And you need those records to make valid assessments.
A decentralized Uber is an interesting thought experiment. I imagine the processing power required is a big barrier to entry for the FOSS community.
Processing power? I don't think there is much processing power needed. Like, you only need to ping drivers in your vincinity.
Uber offers a lot more than just locating a driver. It’s a platform that generates a recommended route for the driver, shows the progress of the route to the customer in realtime so they know the driver is going the right direction, it calculates fares (e.g. distance, surge pricing, etc), and has other features like “share my ride details with my spouse” for example…for security purposes.
That’s just what i could think of off the top of my head and i’m not a product manager at uber. Things are NEVER as simple as they initially seem.
Other thoughts:
- at uber’s scale, payment processing alone likely takes up quite a bit of compute server side. You could outsource this to a 3rd party, but it’s still an expense as you scale.
- how would a decentralized system work if something goes wrong during the ride? who does the customer call? Drunk driver, attempted rape, etc. list of things that can go wrong is long.
- your platform/app would need to be smart enough to know where all the “proper” ride share pickup spots are at every airport. Not trivial!
- how would you offer a feature to “reserve a ride” like uber does, if you only build an app that can find “nearby drivers”?
food for thought. :) All im pointing out is this kind of product needs to be a platform and is likely not cheap to run. It’s not 90% client side. Unless you literally just want to reinvent the taxi concept, in which case maybe the 90% client side approach is feasible.
There are such apps. In Sweden there is Fair, but from what I can gather it uses an app produced by ATOM Mobility, so I take it they use a ready-made platform. Check it out.
> the FOSS community couldn't solve
My guess is the real difficult part is maintenance and server costs. It's probably pretty expensive to run
And plenty of competitors have popped up. Any time you travel outside of the US you need to use the local app. Didi, gojek, grab
> Uber chief tells French lobbying inquiry company’s culture has been transformed
May 2023[1]
This is even more funny, especially after they had to change the hole leader-ship team, the leaks and corruption investigations. And now the opaque algorithm. Just don't use uber.
[1] https://www.icij.org/investigations/uber-files/uber-chief-te...
The author of the study has written a blog post with lots of data, analysis, and visualizations:
https://len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-became-a-cash-genera...
I found the author's blog post more informative than the newspaper article.
I’m confused about how drivers are able to accept or not accept a ride based on price
I would assume they get a notification showing the amount they'll earn, and then they can either press "accept" or "deny." As a driver, you're an "independent contractor," so you're not forced to accept any rides. If you don't like the route/client/value, you can just not accept it.
I drive for Uber sometimes I use an app where it'll automatically take an Uber and turn off Lyft and door dash.. when it meets a filter... for example: $1 per mile, 25 per hour avg, and over $5 minimum...
you can manually accept ones less than the filter... but it pops up a thing with all this data so you can make a decision whether it's worth it and while driving it's nice it turns the rest off so you don't have bad stats when they send you an offer and you don't take it because you couldn't turn it off yet....
it's $18 per month but worth every penny!
plus I just hit 1 button to login to every service...
https://l.myst.ro/N0Q9/movhhjr5 (disclaimer: aff Link.... you can just look for myst in the app store on Android (not sure about iPhone).
Uber/lyft pricing models are extremely unfair. They "purchase" marginal rides and marginal driver hours using bonuses and meaning those bonuses go towards riders and drivers who are the most price sensitive, like a mom who only drives if the money is good. But for the driver who drives 10hrs rain or sun, they rarely get bonuses because their hours are static.
Why is this unfair?
If driver A needs to be incentivized to drive, and Uber needs more drivers, they should have to pay more. If driver B is driving no matter what why would Uber pay them more if not for retention or something?
You're basically penalized for treating uber/lyft as a real job and having loyalty, ie. getting paid less for the same amount of work. You don't think that's unfair?
It's a bidding system. If nobody accepts a ride at $X, the offered price increases to $Y. Does Uber have a responsibility to maximize its employees' (in the general sense, not getting into the employee/contractor distinction) earnings? Does your boss or their boss have a responsibility to get you as much money as possible?
Assume we're both drivers for Uber, you're willing to do a drive for $30 and I'm willing to do the same drive but not for less than $40. Is it unfair to me for you to take that job for $30, knowing that I won't get it? I'd argue it's not (even if you know I'm waiting for the price to go up), and if that's unfair it's hard to make an argument that it's unfair for Uber to run that system.
From [0]:
[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/1021871/This isn't wage theft though, which is by definition an illegal act. This is just price discrimination on the supply side instead of the demand side.
Technically you're right - it's price discrimination. But it's aimed at the workers, not for them.
Drivers who treat Uber like a real job and show up consistently end up making less than those who only drive when it’s lucrative. That’s not illegal, but it feels exploitative, especially when it's driven by opaque algorithms.
Imagine your salary dropping just because you showed up every day. Wouldn’t feel fair, would it?
I get what you're saying, and I agree that's how it feels but that doesn't necessarily mean that's how it is.
I guarantee you there are companies in the US right now paying their full-time employees who work 40+ hours less than they pay consultants who are also writing code who are working 30, 20, even 10 hours a week or less. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're taking advantage of their employees (though they may well be). Everyone agreed to do the thing they're doing knowing exactly what the terms were.
If I agree to do a job for $X that is otherwise "not exploitation" by whatever metric we choose to use, it doesn't suddenly become exploitation if I could have gotten 2X or 3X to do the same job.
Except its not a real bidding because because you as a loyal employee don't have access to the "high value" rides at all.
You do though. The sibling comment's LWN link shows that if you don't accept rides, the price you're offered for rides increases.
Edit: I'd love for this to be another thing to add to the list of reasons why Uber sucks. But this specific thing seems pretty normal and what absolutely any company would do in a similar circumstance.
That part is completely opaque to the user. It's at best a dark pattern, but really it just takes advantage of a certain group of people who depend on ridesharing for primary income.
And btw, the no one really knows the exact mechanism thru which you get bonuses cuz its a model trained on many inputs. Not accepting rides is just one part of the equation.
If I were trying to run an ethical pricing model, I would give bonuses to anyone driving in surge/prime hours; I wouldn't limit the bonuses to people that I think would drive in those hours cause that's bs
I've noticed that a trip I've taken for years has increased significantly in price over the last 6 to 8 months. I used to pay around $17 to $20, but now the same trip costs approximately $25 or more. I spoke with the driver, and he mentioned that he still receives the same amount—$11.00—so it seems the extra cost is going to the platform, not the driver.
It's now more than I use to pay to take a cab and all the cabs are gone.....
This has been a known strategy from Uber for a long time. Run at a loss to squeeze out the existing offerings, then dramatically increase prices once they've established a monopoly.
Combine this with exploiting loopholes to get around local labour regulation or just outright ignoring it just because, giving them an unfair advantage over competitors that were operating more or less honestly.
I wish I could say I was surprised they got away with it just because they were doing it through an app :shrug:
Doing it through an app is what made it possible to turn each transaction into effectively a pair of opaque auctions with Uber holding all the information, but they got away with it because consumers really like low prices.
Feels like the new algorithm now is almost a flat dollar a minute plus surge. How I long for the days I could get most anywhere from $4-$7. The uber there and back from the airport can be more than the flight now (once surged to $120 one way for a 35 min trip).
I've observed Uber surges to $180 for a 30 minute trip home from SJC. I was ready to sleep on the bench all night and have a friend come in the morning, but fortunately Lyft was only $47.
In hindsight , TechCrunch Disrupt actually looks really disgusting.
The playbook is similar to other platforms (e.g. AdWords). Third party analysis are great but don't reach the final chain.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323593 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323593 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323593 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323593 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323593 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323593 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323593
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322314 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322314 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322314 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322314 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322314 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322314 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5321874 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322268 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322272 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322314
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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323301 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323301
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322268 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322272 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322300 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322314 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322753 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322916 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323000 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323240 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323301 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323593 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322423 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322443 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322486 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322516 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322630 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322684 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5322966 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5323105
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Sadly, cab drivers did the same thing. Countless times I was given overpriced rates in times of need, like late night closing time.
Cab drivers dramatically boosted profits while decreasing driver pay? This goes way beyond increasing prices. Uber both increased prices and decreased driver pay at the same time. I used to driver Uber to make extra cash. They usually took about 16-17% and I made $25-30/hour (before taxes and expenses). Now they take more than 25% and I make $20/hour before expenses so I only drive when I want to have a bunch of conversations with random people
Cab drivers are by law (in much of Europe) required to have their prices stated on the window or inside the car, with surcharges clearly displayed. The driver must also have a valid id and license displayed inside the car.
Are you sure you actually rode a taxi and not some illegal or almost illegal rideshare like Uber which has no such regulations? If I were you I would have taken a picture of the car with the license plate and then reported them to the authorities.
They have all of that. Then you get to the place and they hit some buttons and crazy opaque math happens and then you have a 30 minute fight with the dude. And the reader was always broken and no they can't break a 100 or a 20 or a 5
Up front pricing is way better. When I used to do cabs I'd always do upfront prices. $40 to the airport no meter includes tip. 50 ok sounds good. Let's go.