But I find it interesting that almost everything I read about Uber's customer experience is positive. People seem to like Uber rides. Meanwhile, every other news about the company itself implies that it's a tasteless company with shitty tactics. I wonder if it's the ultimate capitalist success path.
Just a complete outsiders observation. I don't personally have a single experience with them.
I think some of the genius of Uber was identifying an industry where the quality was so incredibly low, and yet customers tolerated it anyway.
I used to catch taxis every week, and one taxi driver spent the trip explaining to me why he believed Hitler had the right idea. Another taxi driver lectured me on the religious immorality of nightclubs & drinking alcohol before letting me out of his car. Another driver spent the trip talking to his girlfriend on the phone, forbidding her to take a job she had been offered because he believed a woman's place was in the home.
Uber is soooo much better, but the quality bar is so low that it isn't difficult to be better. It's just that no-one had dared to compete before (because government regulations prohibited anyone from doing so).
Agreed. I had to take a cab from O'Hare to Skokie a few months back (because I can't expense an Uber w/the gov't travel system). Smelled like fresh urine, and the guy had no idea where he was going. I had to direct him with my phone. And he still expected a tip.
With the most recent taxi I took, the driver didn't know how to program his GPS, so he handed it to me to program and then ignored it, so I had to also program my phone, which he also ignored, so I had to call out every turn several times, which he also ignored, backtracking, extending the route, and asking where we were, to one of the main streets in the city.
Next I tried Uber twice, and the drivers showed up immediately, were friendly, and offered a tour of interesting spots in the city as we went and made suggestions about favorite places to visit around town. Also, the same trip was 1/10th the price. If that's even sometimes typical, I don't see how Uber can lose. I do hope the company can act responsibly and keep up that kind of service.
I have found a fairly frequent distinction between taxi drivers and Uber drivers as well. Taxi drivers must be at least 30 years old, which may skew it slightly, though young Uber drivers are not the norm either.
Uber drivers tend to shoot the shit more, talk informally about business, about their day jobs, maybe about politics or what restaurants are nearby. Taxi drivers tend to talk about the past, about passengers they've had, or about how bad other drivers are.
Maybe this is because a lot of Uber drivers are only part-time, so their life experience has more facets. Maybe it's because of the age bias. Or perhaps it's because feedback about taxi drivers is rarely registered. In any case, the expected value of conversation is higher with Uber than a taxi. I suspect it's likely to level out over time; I hope taxis drivers will up their game rather than Uber ones lowering theirs.
It took me a while to decide to drive my own car, and one of the incidents prompting me to do it was when a taxi driver, having arrived at the destination (in this instance, the building where I worked), had walked out to urinate, right there on the sidewalk, in plain sight.
It's kinda sad how without personal accountability, that's the service that you get, and on the other hand, how Orwellian many of the ways to make workers accountable are.
There's something to be said about an industry where the bar for "good" is the service employee just not talking to you at all for an extended period of time.
I like to talk to my taxi drivers. They've mostly been immigrants and I ask them about their home country, their family, what they think about America.
In addition to the nice things you said, I've found out about lots of incredible ethnic food I never would have heard about otherwise. A ride with a Tajik driver led to an incredible Afghan restaurant (which is apparently as close as the Bay Area gets to Tajikistan's cousine).
Drivers in general are in one of those very interesting roles that interacts with a broad swatch of the population. Even aside from their own background, they are one of the stirring sticks that mixes a place's cultures together.
I think you're just describing how our economy works.
People love cheap clothing stores, cheap items off Amazon, quick delivery, etc. That's the impact on them.
How it happens is immaterial. You can do it via magic 3d-printing device, 8-year old slaves, minimum wage workers, hamsters running on a wheel with a dog as foreman, none of that matters to the customer.
What matters is firstly the actual experience, and secondly your presentation - because most customers won't research it, and if you get to Uber size, whether you're lying is immaterial unless the authorities become interested in you.
I don't think this is limited to capitalism. It's just realpolitik. Consider that many of my comments on Hacker News have some up votes. That can be considered rewarding my comments. The utility to others has been in reading them. Funny, informative, whatever.
Maybe I've employed an army of unpaid interns to produce my comments whilst whipping them twice weekly. It doesn't matter (to my up vote count), because no-one cared enough to research it, and even if they did, most people viewing the comments wouldn't know, and even if they did, of that group even fewer would care enough to prioritise an alternative.
The ultimate hope here is that the benefit to the customers outweighs the negative to the workers. Which in the case of Uber, is probably true, at least in the short term.
Whether it's beneficial longer term for larger portions of the economy to tend towards lower incomes for more work remains to be seen. But can we even do anything about it anyway? Not sure. such world.
If you want some bad experiences, then I can offer you some. I live in UK, Newcastle to be specific. I've had several Uber rides and not going to use them again. All the drivers I had spoke barely any English, they had no idea where they were going(road to the airport was closed, the driver had no idea how to get there without looking it up on google maps), and the worst thing is that you can't pre-book a ride. I'm just going to stick with local taxi companies, thank you.
To me, the need to resort to such tactics indicates that Uber doesn't have a very big advantage over its competitors.
The usual reason passengers seem to prefer Uber is their easier availability and greater reliability. Others will catch on to this soon enough.
It is also notable that in places with a better reputation for taxi services, such as in London, Uber's inroads have not been as great as they have been in SF or NY.
>better reputation for taxi services, such as in London, Uber's inroads have not been as great as they have been in SF or NY.
Odd, my personal experience has been the exact opposite. I can't remember any of my friends (aged in their 20s) ever getting a taxi in London but catching Uber's is a weekly occurrence.
Same. London black cabs are fairly expensive, and at busy times (like just after pubs and bars close at night) you can have a really hard time trying to find one. I don't know what the deal is with the non-black cabs in London ... but they seem more shady, it's much harder to tell if the driver is registered or just some dude with a car, so I just avoid them. Uber solves both these problems. I and my friends are in our 30s, and we nearly all have been using Uber exclusively since it arrived.
If you're flagging down anything but a black taxi in central London then it's just some dude with a car: Official minicabs have to be booked by phone or from their offices.
A lot of those who used to drive for minicabs now drive under Uber's banner.
However, for the last 30 years at least, in London there has always been the distinction between the more loosely regulated (and cheaper) minicabs with the more expensive Black Cabs providing a better service.
With the advent of Uber and the like, minicab services have been the most under pressure since Black Cabs have officially sanctioned advantages that minicabs/Uber don't, such as using bus lanes, and actually knowing where they're going (rather than using a GPS). Also, they are more spacious than almost all ordinary vehicles and can accommodate you and up to 5 of your mates/family + luggage for the price of 1.
In contrast a typical yellow taxi in NY has a tiny amount of space for the passenger, is usually upholstered with ripped plastic, and the driver is fresh off the boat, and a bit lost.
So the improvement Uber offered over the prevailing options was much greater in NY and SF than in London.
I've put my answer a bit higher in the thread: because the competition and customer experience are currently so much worse. (Lyft hasn't arrived in my city yet.) Some of the competitors here have used shady tactics against Uber as well, I've had taxi drivers pull up pretending to be my Uber driver.
If a competitor can match or exceed Uber's service, I'd consider switching. The convenience of travelling interstate / overseas & using the same service I use at home is quite compelling though.
I did wonder that. Perhaps he would have threatened to call it in to police as a customer refusing to pay. Maybe he just wanted to torch the ratings of Uber customers, by having them no-show for the Uber they actually ordered.
The whole thing just felt very unsafe. This happened in the early hours of the morning as well. I was very glad when he finally drove off.
They can wage their own wars. It doesn't bother me, really. I have had a Lyft driver who also drove for Uber, tell me he used very similar tactics. He and other drivers would accept Uber rides and leave those people hanging at the airport to protest Uber's price decreases.
The same reason everyone uses iPhones despite them being built in part by child labor - people don't care about how they get things, they care about what they get and how good they are.
Uber as a company is slimy that does shady things to crush their competition. But Uber as a service is awesome and provides a way better experience than using a Taxi in most cities.
Because ultimately voting with your dollar doesn't matter. It's ineffective and it does nothing.
It's a myth that if people don't like [x], then they won't buy from companies that support/enact [x] -- the market can take care of collective action problems! It ends up being a convenient way to push the responsibility onto some amorphous other person and say "not my job".
People don't like sweatshops. They don't like abusive monopolies who engage in shady anticompetitive practices like Uber. And yet most products are made in sweatshops, and Uber is wildly successful.
I'm not sure why people (myself included) don't do this. I suspect a lot of it is information/guilt overload; our global capitalist system is so dysfunctional that almost any purchase you make is contributing to something morally abhorrent. So in order to get by and have a daily life we just have to turn that part of our moral compass off when we make purchases to some extent.
In the end, it will never be effective to allow the market to decide matters like this: if a bar of soap whose purchase guarantees the murder of a baby for $2 is sitting next to a normal one on a supermarket shelf for $4, people will fight tooth and nail for the chance to kill that baby. Because they figure if they don't, somebody else will, and why waste $2?
That's assuming they are even informed -- businesses, when necessary, will spend millions of dollars on PR and advertising campaigns to ensure their customers are uninformed and that the market is dysfunctional.
The only solution is regulatory power, to through taxes or some other means delete the businesses with immoral practices from the market.
I'd say that voting with dollars is the only democracy. Most people don't have the value to choose correctly, or simply don't care. If people don't care why would the government feel forced to do anything?
Lyft user here. I always ask the question "What do you like about Lyft compared to driving for Uber"? The answer is that Lyft takes better care of them with better pay incentives and less rigorous scheduling demands. If you want more of your money to go to the driver instead of a central command, use Lyft. I've never noticed a lack of drivers in most medium-to-large sized cities that I'm.
Not OP, but both Uber and Lyft tie bonuses to weekly/monthly acceptance rate and rides completed. I can't recall numbers, and they have been tricky to find on my phone. But I too can anecdotally confirm that Lyft drivers seem to enjoy it more in the Bay Area, and one of the reasons I've heard is that the bonus structure is a bit more liberal.
A Lyft driver told me the other day that it was something like a 30% bonus on whatever you had earned that week when you hit 80 rides in a calendar week.
I've used Uber much more than Lyft, but I've had almost entirely positive experiences with both. Only one time did a Lyft driver cancel a trip on me after I waited 15mins and almost missed a flight. I reported the incident through the app and a $10 USD credit showed up instantly in my account with a friendly note from the rep.
At an airport, an Uber driver picked up my fare and then immediately canceled it which caused a $5 USD charge on my account. A quick report through the app rectified the situation in < 24hrs.
The Uber experience is so seamless across time-zones, countries, etc and directly integrates with Expensify. If Lyft expands more into Europe, I will definitely use them as well. I tend to use Lyft more in big US cities. Hailo is also quite popular in Europe. When traveling, I never take a regular taxi if I can help it. The one exception to this is Dublin, Ireland. Taxis are so ubiquitous and cheap that you can get one 24/7 from almost anywhere in city by just walking outside and putting your hand out.
For the ultimate in customer service and luxury, Blacklane is better than both. You pay a huge surcharge for it, but sometimes you need a pre-scheduled ride that is 100% reliable.
Hailo is immensely popular in Dublin, absolutely fantastic service. Sometimes I take it for granted, then threads about Uber and Lyft come up and I realise how amazing it is.
I felt the same way until I realized you can literally hit a couple buttons on your phone and have a car pick you up almost instantaneously and I don't have to deal with thinking about payment at all...
I try to use Lyft as often as I can, they seem to genuinely care for their employees(drivers). Uber is quite ruthless when it comes to pricing. Simple features such as tipping is not present.
It is my part-time hobby of sorts to interview drivers who drive for both and inevitably (27 - 1) they prefer driving for Lyft. The one case where the driver said she prefers Uber was that the #rides were more (Bay area).
I think voting with your wallet is a powerful concept and in some cases, it is the only thing we can do.
45 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadBut I find it interesting that almost everything I read about Uber's customer experience is positive. People seem to like Uber rides. Meanwhile, every other news about the company itself implies that it's a tasteless company with shitty tactics. I wonder if it's the ultimate capitalist success path.
Just a complete outsiders observation. I don't personally have a single experience with them.
I used to catch taxis every week, and one taxi driver spent the trip explaining to me why he believed Hitler had the right idea. Another taxi driver lectured me on the religious immorality of nightclubs & drinking alcohol before letting me out of his car. Another driver spent the trip talking to his girlfriend on the phone, forbidding her to take a job she had been offered because he believed a woman's place was in the home.
Uber is soooo much better, but the quality bar is so low that it isn't difficult to be better. It's just that no-one had dared to compete before (because government regulations prohibited anyone from doing so).
Next I tried Uber twice, and the drivers showed up immediately, were friendly, and offered a tour of interesting spots in the city as we went and made suggestions about favorite places to visit around town. Also, the same trip was 1/10th the price. If that's even sometimes typical, I don't see how Uber can lose. I do hope the company can act responsibly and keep up that kind of service.
Uber drivers tend to shoot the shit more, talk informally about business, about their day jobs, maybe about politics or what restaurants are nearby. Taxi drivers tend to talk about the past, about passengers they've had, or about how bad other drivers are.
Maybe this is because a lot of Uber drivers are only part-time, so their life experience has more facets. Maybe it's because of the age bias. Or perhaps it's because feedback about taxi drivers is rarely registered. In any case, the expected value of conversation is higher with Uber than a taxi. I suspect it's likely to level out over time; I hope taxis drivers will up their game rather than Uber ones lowering theirs.
It's kinda sad how without personal accountability, that's the service that you get, and on the other hand, how Orwellian many of the ways to make workers accountable are.
It's been great every time.
Drivers in general are in one of those very interesting roles that interacts with a broad swatch of the population. Even aside from their own background, they are one of the stirring sticks that mixes a place's cultures together.
People love cheap clothing stores, cheap items off Amazon, quick delivery, etc. That's the impact on them.
How it happens is immaterial. You can do it via magic 3d-printing device, 8-year old slaves, minimum wage workers, hamsters running on a wheel with a dog as foreman, none of that matters to the customer.
What matters is firstly the actual experience, and secondly your presentation - because most customers won't research it, and if you get to Uber size, whether you're lying is immaterial unless the authorities become interested in you.
I don't think this is limited to capitalism. It's just realpolitik. Consider that many of my comments on Hacker News have some up votes. That can be considered rewarding my comments. The utility to others has been in reading them. Funny, informative, whatever.
Maybe I've employed an army of unpaid interns to produce my comments whilst whipping them twice weekly. It doesn't matter (to my up vote count), because no-one cared enough to research it, and even if they did, most people viewing the comments wouldn't know, and even if they did, of that group even fewer would care enough to prioritise an alternative.
The ultimate hope here is that the benefit to the customers outweighs the negative to the workers. Which in the case of Uber, is probably true, at least in the short term.
Whether it's beneficial longer term for larger portions of the economy to tend towards lower incomes for more work remains to be seen. But can we even do anything about it anyway? Not sure. such world.
People and companies rarely betray their true nature. The customer focus will be there for as long as it needs to be, no longer.
The usual reason passengers seem to prefer Uber is their easier availability and greater reliability. Others will catch on to this soon enough.
It is also notable that in places with a better reputation for taxi services, such as in London, Uber's inroads have not been as great as they have been in SF or NY.
Odd, my personal experience has been the exact opposite. I can't remember any of my friends (aged in their 20s) ever getting a taxi in London but catching Uber's is a weekly occurrence.
However, for the last 30 years at least, in London there has always been the distinction between the more loosely regulated (and cheaper) minicabs with the more expensive Black Cabs providing a better service.
With the advent of Uber and the like, minicab services have been the most under pressure since Black Cabs have officially sanctioned advantages that minicabs/Uber don't, such as using bus lanes, and actually knowing where they're going (rather than using a GPS). Also, they are more spacious than almost all ordinary vehicles and can accommodate you and up to 5 of your mates/family + luggage for the price of 1.
In contrast a typical yellow taxi in NY has a tiny amount of space for the passenger, is usually upholstered with ripped plastic, and the driver is fresh off the boat, and a bit lost.
So the improvement Uber offered over the prevailing options was much greater in NY and SF than in London.
Genuine question: Why would you want to support such a company by being a customer?
If a competitor can match or exceed Uber's service, I'd consider switching. The convenience of travelling interstate / overseas & using the same service I use at home is quite compelling though.
The whole thing just felt very unsafe. This happened in the early hours of the morning as well. I was very glad when he finally drove off.
Uber as a company is slimy that does shady things to crush their competition. But Uber as a service is awesome and provides a way better experience than using a Taxi in most cities.
It's a myth that if people don't like [x], then they won't buy from companies that support/enact [x] -- the market can take care of collective action problems! It ends up being a convenient way to push the responsibility onto some amorphous other person and say "not my job".
People don't like sweatshops. They don't like abusive monopolies who engage in shady anticompetitive practices like Uber. And yet most products are made in sweatshops, and Uber is wildly successful.
I'm not sure why people (myself included) don't do this. I suspect a lot of it is information/guilt overload; our global capitalist system is so dysfunctional that almost any purchase you make is contributing to something morally abhorrent. So in order to get by and have a daily life we just have to turn that part of our moral compass off when we make purchases to some extent.
In the end, it will never be effective to allow the market to decide matters like this: if a bar of soap whose purchase guarantees the murder of a baby for $2 is sitting next to a normal one on a supermarket shelf for $4, people will fight tooth and nail for the chance to kill that baby. Because they figure if they don't, somebody else will, and why waste $2?
That's assuming they are even informed -- businesses, when necessary, will spend millions of dollars on PR and advertising campaigns to ensure their customers are uninformed and that the market is dysfunctional.
The only solution is regulatory power, to through taxes or some other means delete the businesses with immoral practices from the market.
At an airport, an Uber driver picked up my fare and then immediately canceled it which caused a $5 USD charge on my account. A quick report through the app rectified the situation in < 24hrs.
The Uber experience is so seamless across time-zones, countries, etc and directly integrates with Expensify. If Lyft expands more into Europe, I will definitely use them as well. I tend to use Lyft more in big US cities. Hailo is also quite popular in Europe. When traveling, I never take a regular taxi if I can help it. The one exception to this is Dublin, Ireland. Taxis are so ubiquitous and cheap that you can get one 24/7 from almost anywhere in city by just walking outside and putting your hand out.
For the ultimate in customer service and luxury, Blacklane is better than both. You pay a huge surcharge for it, but sometimes you need a pre-scheduled ride that is 100% reliable.
We have had a thriving taxi ecosystem here forever, and the money stays locally. I don't want the new worldwide taxi monopoly moving, thanks.
It is my part-time hobby of sorts to interview drivers who drive for both and inevitably (27 - 1) they prefer driving for Lyft. The one case where the driver said she prefers Uber was that the #rides were more (Bay area).
I think voting with your wallet is a powerful concept and in some cases, it is the only thing we can do.