My suspicion, which some drivers have anecdotally confirmed, is that the income is outpaced by the depreciation on the cars. Uber’s real business appears to be financing on the cars.
Uber is a way for unsophisticated drivers to convert vehicle depreciation to immediate income at a poor conversion rate, under the guise of a sustainable taxi platform.
That's still just pushing the cost onto someone else, isn't it? City driving for 10 hours a day is going to put 3 or 4 times as many miles on the car as the leasing company estimates. Unless they've accommodated for that in the contract they're going to get a worn out piece of junk at the end that they can't resell.
This isn’t happening for any rideshare driver. I can’t imagine a scenario where you drive 8 hours a day and don’t exceed the normal 10-15k mile/yr lease. The average person can barely stay under the 15k.
I still don't get this argument. The amount of depreciation that comes from miles is quite small. Suppose you've driven your Prius for Uber for a few years. The bluebook on a 2010 Prius with 156,000 miles (the expected number for a 13 year old car) is ~$4000.
If driving for Uber instead caused you to have 500,000 miles on it the bluebook value would be ~$2500, so the extra miles reduced the car's value by ~$1500. By contrast, at 50 MPG and $3/gallon the extra 344,000 miles would have cost you >$20,000 in gas.
When you already have the car as a sunk cost because you need one for yourself, the depreciation is almost completely irrelevant unless you're doing something ridiculous like selling the car when it still has significant market value left.
> If driving for Uber instead caused you to have 500,000 miles on it
Try to find a 2010 Prius with over 300,000 miles. There are only a handful in the US because they fall apart long before 500,000 miles.
Depreciation isn't just about the car's value - it's also about the amount of mechanical work you have to put in for the suspension, tires, brakes, etc during the time that it goes from 150,000 miles to 500,000 miles.
My mom's 2010-era Prius is a good example. The dash displays failed at around 100,000 miles, and she bought a new car rather than pay $2,500 to have the dash pulled out and display replaced.
> Try to find a 2010 Prius with over 300,000 miles.
This isn't hard to find when they're used for car service. They're harder to find on the used market because the people who put >300,000 miles on a car don't generally sell them while they still run.
> Depreciation isn't just about the car's value
Depreciation is just about the car's value. Repairs aren't depreciation.
And many of the people who drive as an occupation learn to repair their own vehicles, so they have lower repair costs than other people.
The point that he's making is that your figure includes survival bias-- you're looking only at the cars that "make it" rather than are scrapped before this point. And you're also ignoring that upkeep and maintenance isn't linear with mileage.
A big fraction of things that we consider depreciated to zero are still worth something. A big fraction fail before the point where we would do that. A big fraction incur larger operating costs later in their lifetime.
The full value of the car if you hadn't put any additional miles on it, and it hadn't died without you putting any additional miles on it, is $4000. That's the most you can lose, and you can't even lose that much because a car that needs a new engine and transmission is still worth some money as scrap metal and parts.
You may incur some repairs as a result of the additional miles, but that's not depreciation, and it's also not a covert cost you don't pay until later even though you're committing to it now. The cost of expected future repairs is already reflected in the market value. The cost of past and present repairs is not a hidden future cost.
It's not the most you can lose, because you have a bunch of repeated times where you're making a choice about whether to repair or not, and then whether to keep in service driving it. You can easily be wrong or get unlucky. You can choose to do an expensive repair because it seems to be the thing that preserves the most value, and continue to drive it for Uber because you expect to have a good operating history from this point.
It's the most you can lose from depreciation, which I reiterate was the original claim.
You can incur arbitrarily high operating costs if you're unlucky, but if you're unlucky you can incur arbitrarily high operating costs without putting any additional miles on it. There is a reason the vehicles used in car service skew towards specific models with a strong reliability record.
> Depreciation is just about the car's value. Repairs aren't depreciation.
The cost to maintain and repair affects a car's value, though, at least for commodity cars (classic and rare cars are of course a different scenario). Mileage is a proxy for the likely extent of repair and maintenance a car needs.
But those kilometres on it can cost more than the 4000. So value drops by 1500, but you could have spend the original value and extra 4000 to get there.
If the car needs $9000 in repairs but it's a $4000 car, you haven't lost $9000 because you don't do the repairs. You've lost the $4000 value of the car, less whatever you can get for it as scrap.
If the car needs $400 in repairs, you might find it worthwhile to do the repairs, but that's not depreciation.
Once you're driving a 2010 Prius with >300,000 miles on it already, you're taking an awful risk basing your livelihood on that car continuing to function every day. If you're dependent on ride share work for income, surely you get rid of the high miler at some point?
Cars are a fungible commodity. If something not worth fixing happens to it, you can buy another one then. If it still runs or can be repaired for much less than it costs to buy another car, why do it now?
Finding another car takes work and involves risk, both of which you'd rather do less often than more often.
Cars used in car service commonly exceed 300,000 miles. There are tales of some that do millions. For commercial trucks that isn't even uncommon.
And 500,000 miles was chosen as an extreme case to demonstrate that you're not going to incur a lot of "depreciation" no matter how many miles you put on something.
There's also the maintenance costs that aren't tires, and go far faster in a taxi. Oil changes, tire changes and rotations, brake pads and belts. You can find taxi drivers explaining their costs out there.
This summer in Spain, many a taxi driver was driving a Tesla instead of the traditional Mercedes. The reason: Not just electricity vs gas, but massive savings in other maintenance.
Aside from the fact that it’s probably impossible to put 500k miles of ubering on a car because the interior will be so clapped out after 100k that you’ll get 1-starred into oblivion.
The IRS is taking the average cost, but if you're doing this as more than a hobby you choose a vehicle with above average reliability and efficiency and learn to do your own repairs, so you have lower costs. And the IRS includes all of the sunk costs of vehicle ownership, not just the incremental cost of putting more miles on a car you would have regardless.
That’s just the sale price. To safely drive those miles you need many new tires, many motor oil changes, many air and fluid filter replacements, about 1 transmission oil change, many wiper blades, hundreds of car washes and/or hundreds of man hours of self cleaning, a few light bulb replacements, a greater chance of needing to swap various belts, hoses, batteries, many windshield wiper changes, etc. It’s pretty challenging to make an exhaustive list of these charges which is how individual drivers can accidentally miscalculate and get screwed.
Assuming you buy a cheap Corolla that lasts 200k miles without major repairs you are looking at $0.125/mi, gas at $4/gal and 32mi/gal is the same putting you at $0.25/mi.
Given Uber pays $0.63/mi you are giving up half of your income to your car.
When people say that you are paying in depreciation they are talking about more expensive cars. A $60k car that can go 150k miles and a 24 mi/gal fuel economy turns it into a $0.56/mi cost.
1k for 200,00 miles? I think you'd probably spend more than that on just tires, and that's not counting the oil changes, probably multiple brake replacements, and likely a few belts and some struts.
> ... once I saw what I believe was a lack of quality with the product as it related to delivering, then I bought a Tesla, and I started driving as well.
Oh boy, no wonder the ceo needed to drive for uber to understand the plight of the average man.
In all seriousness it makes a lot of sense. If you drive 8 hours a day you could easily be paying $500/month for gas, which is the car payment on a used Tesla. Which you would then own after a few years and still not be paying for gas.
That's not true at all. A 3-4 year old Tesla goes for approximately 35,000. A 6 year loan at 6.7% is a payment of $600 a month, and by the time you're done paying you'll need to start over because your vehicle will be too old for Uber - assuming you haven't already had to spend tens of thousands more replacing the batteries.
In either case they'll still be spending tens of thousands on a vehicle (and dealing with the depreciation), but I'd imagine the fuel saving calculations pay off a lot quicker for a taxi than they would for most people.
As an aside, locally the Model 3 starts at around $35k USD after rebates. <2 year old used models are around the $23k USD mark. We have a /lot/ of Teslas running around as Ubers now.
A new Tesla is less than $35,000. You can get a used one for ~$20,000. And that's right now, when used car prices are still crazy.
Repair costs are common to all vehicles. Battery replacements are around $13,000, but batteries generally last 300,000-500,000 miles, during which time you might have needed 2-3 engine and transmission repairs at a similar total expense.
Spain is full of professional taxi drivers (not on Uber) driving Teslas. People that had been driving before, for years, and do it full time. They drive Teslas because they are big enough for a taxi, and they really end up ahead. And take into account that the other normal Taxi cab there drive isn't a 4 year old Kia, but a Mercedes.
You still have to pay for electricity, and if you're driving a Tesla for Uber that means you have to recharge mostly at superchargers, where the electricity is 2x-4x as expensive as electricity at home.
Supercharger energy is still cheaper than gasoline, but not by a huge amount.
Why would you have to recharge mostly at superchargers? A car with a 300 mile range would last for 8 hours at an average speed of 37.5 MPH, which you'd be lucky to get as an average speed in a city. You drive a full shift and charge when you get home.
And you still have to pay for electricity, but in the alternative you still have to pay for a car.
Uber actually encourages their drivers to drive Teslas, so even though it seems out of touch for him to say, "and then I bought a Tesla," it's more likely that he was going through the standard routine for an Uber driver. He could have been going through the car financing process and not paying outright with cash.
> then I bought a Tesla, and I started driving as well.
I don’t think he understood the plight of the average man. All the things mentioned in the article mostly point to annoyances a rich person would have. As the article suggests he’s still completely oblivious to the economics of it all, which is the most important factor for the drivers (and the customers).
I order food from DoorDash a few times a week. Everyonce in a while, I get a promo from Uber Eats and decide to try it out. Always a terrible experience. DoorDash is crushing Uber Eats. The delivery from doordash is always on time, and the food is usually as the driver picked it up. Most of the time from Uber Eats the food shows up half open.
Also, theres nothing revolutionary about a CEO evaluating their own product
I can say the same for each of New York, the Bay Area and other cities. DoorDash sucks in some markets.
(Uber Eats is roughly on par with them in central Manhattan, though the quality falls off quickly as you go north of 59th or ask them to tote something more than a few blocks.)
DoorDash really got into gear, in Manhattan, by acquiring Caviar. Unfortunately, that also involved the latter’s standards falling precipitously.
I live in SoCal and I have literally never had an order arrive open. They're usually sealed with tape. I don't have as many orders as you, but if it's that common I should've ran into it at least once by now
The last time I used DoorDash I received an order from a completely different restaurant and had to jump through hoops. Eventually just ordering from the restaurant directly and picking it up while wait for a refund in a few days.
> When Wired's editor at large, Steven Levy, asked him to estimate the cost of a 2.95-mile Uber ride in New York City, Khosrowshahi ventured "20 bucks" — less than half the actual price of $51.69, including a tip for the driver.
“I mean it’s one banana, Micheal, what could it cost… $10?”
To be fair, prices fluctuate a lot based on time of day. Just checked the price of a 2.7 mile ride to a restaurant I like in Brooklyn and an UberX is $17.90.
Mentioning Brooklyn is also a good segue into the ambiguity of a ride "in New York City"; I suspect that even at the same time the price of a ride will vary by borough (or even neighborhood within a borough). The price of a ride from lower to upper Manhattan will presumably be different than the same distance in Brooklyn or the Bronx or Queens (although we can all probably agree that no reasonable person would interpret the question as being about Staten Island...)
This is the opposite of that joke though. Sure, both demonstrate rich people being out of touch with regular life, but the real life version is even more depression than the joke from the show; things being cheaper than a rich person expects wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but even a billionaire CEO thinking that the cost of a common service (from their own company!) is too high is a pretty clear sign that common people will struggle be able to afford things.
Anecdotally, I have taken dozens of 3 mile ride in lower Manhattan and $20 is a typical estimate for what I have spent. Sometimes it is higher, and then I take the subway.
But I don't get this. I'm looking up a 3 mile ride from me in NYC ride now and it says $19.47 in the Uber app.
So seems like Khosrowshahi was right about the base price? I'm assuming Levy must have encountered surge pricing, but there's no way Khosrowshahi could have known how much that would be.
There is always a stark disconnect from the top and the people at the bottom or those who actually use the app.
Also, never had a problem with either DoorDash or Uber with food delivers.
> Uber's CEO says his time delivering food for his company revealed a "lack of quality" with its product from a driver's perspective.
Yes, everything is really nice and works great when you don't actually use the thing. I can't even find the words...
> "It wasn't a pleasant all-hands with the company, but it set a tone, and we set that expectation — we started celebrating employees going out there delivering, employees driving," he said. "It is a point of pride for employees now — when they drive they get a little badge on their corporate profile, etc."
God forbid you be an everyman.
Edit: I've now read it and removed "I haven't read the article but".
1) Tipping shouldn't happen. There should be a fair salary. Tipping was introduced in 2017, and Uber is trying to make it more common. If drivers should be paid more, it should raise fares and incomes.
2) Arriving late should be okay. Passengers should be charged for it at a rate fair to the driver. Especially arriving at an airport after a 16+ hour flight, I'm glad to pay a driver to wait.
I disagree with tipping culture in general (ie. always expected to tip because they're not paid enough) but for an exceptional driver I'm happy to throw a tip their way. Some drivers are really knowledgable and will happily give tips on where to go for dinner, what to do and see around, places to avoid etc. and I think a bit of monetary recognition (if you can afford it) is a good thing.
Sure you can, opting out of tipping changes the equilibrium. Tipping restaurants seems deeply ingrained in American culture, but chipping at the edges is how you get real change.
Tipping isn’t a neutral activity, it actively supports exploitive work environments. I actively boycott such businesses, but even just scaling down tips is a positive change.
You wrote that you boycott "exploitive work environments" which is not stating clearly that you never, ever, without exception go to any establishment where staff expects a tip.
Waiters or bartenders at some popular restaurants can earn an annual income in the 6 figures. So, these places, not exploitative but highly desirable, are fair game for you to visit and then not tip or scale down tipping.
You still have not said you do not ever go to any establishments whatsoever where tipping occurs. If you do, and then even "scale down" your tip, then it's you who are the exploiter, sorry.
If you're in the US, this means you go to no bars, nor any restaurants, and you do not order any food delivered to your home. Nor do you ever take a taxi. Nor get a massage. Nor order room service at a hotel.
Not tipping is reprehensible. For me, even bad wait service still gets 15%. Maybe they are having a bad day and could use a boost. They still brought me food and are but one member of a team of people. Good service gets 20%. Extraordinary service gets 25%. Maybe even 30% in trying, unusual circumstances.
Same with food deliverers. Brown, no English, possibly illegal? Does not matter: pay a full 15% tip if tip is expected. I have seen people give these folks $2 on a $50 order in heavy rain at night. If it's raining or shit weather or you live in a 5th floor walkup, boost it to 20%
I have only once in my 30 years of being an adult not tipped, and it was because the waiter disappeared with my $50 bill on a $14 check. After 20 minutes of waiting for change - at an extraordinarily busy, crowded, NYC restaurant- still assuming that she had simply forgotten, when I tracked her down and politely smiled and said "hello", she yelled at me that this was her tip. She knew better. She had tried to dodge me.
This is a deeply held value of mine: the people who serve you honor you, and you treat them well, full stop. The workers are there because that is their best option. Making their day a bit more shit by not giving them an expected tip will not make their workplace less exploitative or whatever you think it should be.
When GP says they recommend no tipping in order to put pressure on businesses not to be exploitative, I am already mortified. When called out that this isn't actually going to end tipping as a practice, they justify it the only way they can: that they don't tip because they don't use any services. Of that I'm skeptical.
No, I don't doubt that some people live the lifestyle of no restaurants, taxis, delivery or spas. That's effectively me these days.
I feel almost exactly the opposite. The practice of tipping is reprehensible.
It was rooted in racism and still used for this in some areas. It shifts the risk of slow business from the proprietor who is more able to affect it to the workers who aren't. It misleads consumers by making prices effectively false advertising when the tip which is allegedly optional is in practice not. It's a mechanism for tax evasion, but only by higher income people who make an unusually large amount of money from tips. Everything about it should be destroyed.
So I avoid establishments where this is expected, not because I think it's socially harmful not to do it -- I think it's socially harmful to do it. The reason I avoid them is that people get so upset when you tell them this, that it's easier to avoid the environment where it comes up. But even that feels like a cowardice because the result at scale would be to reduce the number of such establishments rather than to reduce the prevalence of tipping within those establishments.
Which is the other reason it feels right to promote this. If you evaluate it as your own individual contribution, anyone by themselves will make no significant difference in either direction. A single digit number of dollars to a stranger at an interval of months or years is not going to affect their life. But if you evaluate the effect at scale -- what if everybody did this? -- the effect of everybody doing it would destroy the practice, which is a powerful good.
To even have a hope of convincing me that you're not just an entitled, unprincipled miscreant, you have to do more than just "avoid" tipping establishments. You have to not go to any establishment that has tipping. If you do happen to find yourself at one for some reason, and you neither tip nor tell the server upfront before they take your order that they're not going to get a tip, then you're just a loser who takes advantage of the cheap prices set by the social convention that the customer adds 15% to the listed price. There is no convincing me otherwise.
> If you do happen to find yourself at one for some reason, and you neither tip nor tell the server upfront before they take your order that they're not going to get a tip,
So you would be fine if someone, or everyone, actually did this?
What if your issue is not with tipping whatsoever but rather with the default being 15% instead of 0%, so that tips are only for exceptional service?
> If you do, and then even "scale down" your tip, then it's you who are the exploiter, sorry.
If you hire a landscaping company, the workers are underpaid either because they're in the country illegally or because that hiring practice is widespread and suppresses wages. So these are exploited workers.
Tipping isn't generally expected for landscaping. Are you the exploiter if you hire one and don't tip the workers? If not, why doesn't that make you the exploiter? Should you also tip Amazon drivers and PhD candidates and women of every profession including ones who make more money than you?
The criteria can't be that they would be getting exploited without it, because that's arguably true of all of them. Probably of everyone in one way or another. So is your argument just status quo bias?
At least now you no longer pretend that your stance against tipping is but selfless regard for the plight of the exploited worker.
Choose:
a) Establishment A charges 40% more and pays the workers fairly with benefits and actively refuses tips, or
b) Establishment B has the same menu and quality, only charges normal prices and has an expectation of tipping the staff 15%.
Maybe from the inherently altruistic goodness of your heart you only ever go to
Establishment A, lighter of wallet but warmed by your moral virtue, but most people will go to Establishment B and pay the tip.
That's your choice. You might not like it but that's the reality. What you don't get to do is have establishment B's prices with establishment A's tipping policy.
Maybe, being clever, you think
c) Establishment C charges 15% more and pays it directly to the workers but they must actively refuse tips
Believe it or not, C has been tried and it is universally disliked by staff and customers. Staff will happily go to work at B where they can earn more through hard work. Because most people are not no-tip assholes. Customers would rather go to B (and tip) where they can get better service for the same cost.
To answer you directly, yes. Yes. If the convention is that the business charges less and you make up the difference, then yes you do. You have an obligation to make up the difference.
> At least now you no longer pretend that your stance against tipping is but selfless regard for the plight of the exploited worker.
Is it not? The status quo persists in the absence of some change.
You're essentially arguing that a local maxima is preferable to descending the slope to reach the global one.
> Customers would rather go to B (and tip) where they can get better service for the same cost.
The reason businesses charge $9.99 instead of $10.00 is that psychology plays a large role in consumer behavior. The "false advertising" component of culturally mandated tipping is a competitive advantage in the absence of something to counteract it.
It's like saying companies should just avoid hidden fees because customers don't like them. The trouble is the companies that use them get more customers because their prices appear lower.
> Staff will happily go to work at B where they can earn more through hard work. Because most people are not no-tip assholes.
So in order to make C work you need customers to make B unsustainable. (Also somewhat obviously, if staff "can earn more" the other way then you haven't added the amount to their base wages that makes up for the lack of tips.)
And you have a similar psychological component with workers as with customers, because it's harder for workers to evaluate the risk of slow business. Tipping is very casino psychology. People remember the time they got a $50 tip, not the time they stood around all day for $2/hour and there were no customers. They do the math for this week and don't consider what this compensation structure is going to do to them in an economic downturn.
If you knew C doesn't work without doing something to counteract the dark patterns in B, why did you recommend it as a solution? Do you have an actual alternate proposal that could feasibly lead to the end of tipping?
> If the convention is that the business charges less and you make up the difference, then yes you do. You have an obligation to make up the difference.
I've already addressed all of these questions. Bottom line is if your stance made your life more difficult while making workers lives easier, I'd be more inclined to listen and take what you say seriously. But it doesn't. The workers earn less and conveniently you get to keep more money in your pocket, all while you get to tell yourself and anyone who will listen that you are fighting racism and exploitation or whatever.
Ok, I'm done with this conversation. I will read whatever response you have and it will likely be the last word.
I feel like you have a situation where some employers are racist and are paying black people less than white people, and I propose a solution, which is to offer to everyone only the prevailing wage that black workers get.
Which would actually work. I might hire proportionally more black workers, but they're just as good and now I have lower average labor costs and can outcompete anyone not doing this.
Which would ultimately raise the prevailing wage for black workers, because in order to compete with me the other businesses would either have to lower their labor costs or raise mine, which they can only do by narrowing the gap between what they offer to black workers and white workers.
You're now upset with me and accuse me of wickedness because I'm not actually sacrificing anything, I'm only paying the white workers less. You say that in order to prove that I'm not just a selfish jerk I would have to pay everyone the prevailing wage for white workers.
But then it would be me who is driven out of business because my average labor costs would be higher rather than lower than the competition. Which doesn't help anybody, because a business that immediately goes under changes nothing.
Your criteria is structured to condemn effective solutions. If it has to disadvantage you then only affluent people with surplus to burn can do it, which inhibits widespread adoption and commonly turns it into a vapid virtue signaling exercise which is more about showing other members of your own social class what an altruist you are. The real test is whether it's a viable path to effective change.
That all you have to do is act in your own self-interest and not have to be a self-sacrificing social activist is a great advantage, because it enables you to get the people who don't care about that to do the thing.
I'm also not sure what self-interested benefit I'm supposed to be receiving by trying to convince strangers I don't otherwise want anything from to do this. If anything it would be the opposite, right? If I succeeded in convincing everyone else to stop tipping then the cost of paying workers would end up being reflected in the price of the services and I would lose the ability to pay less than other people.
You "obviously" failed to understand that "OP" means the root of this thread, and not your comment.
However, "recommending others tip less" is also not boycotting a business. You're recommending people harm the people least in control of the situation to make a point to the people least harmed by the action.
It's ridiculous.
Boycott or tip appropriately. Those are your options.
Tip less is perfectly reasonable thing to suggest. Sure it’s your wedding anniversary, no that doesn’t mean you should tip someone 100% the cost of the meal. Doing so is actively harmful.
If you feel the desire to leave an extravagant tip, resist the impulse.
PS: OP said, “Tipping shouldn't happen.” but provided no means to get to that point.
tipping less just means the employee legally gets paid less than minimum wage and the restaurant owners really don't care as long as they don't have to pay full wages. the only way to solve tipping is to change the minimum wage laws that allow lower wages for tipping industries.
I tip a flat rate and simply never return to the restaurant, etc if my experience was sub-par.
Interestingly, tipping became popular in the US just after slavery was abolished, since many people resented paying blacks, full stop. Tips allowed customers to legally only pay the white workers.
At least one deep-south state supreme court banned tip-based compensation, but the federal supreme court sadly overrode them.
(This context helps me understand why some waiters in Europe get offended if you tip them.)
What is a flat-rate restaurant tip? A specific amount regardless of the bill? Or fixed percentage? And how does the server know it's a "flat rate" regardless of the effort they put into serving you?
Restaurants don't care if you tip; they'll happily keep paying people crappy wages, same as ever. Your "protest" goes unnoticed by the forces you're trying to sway.
no they just hire someone else to work in their place. Restaurant owners I've worked for don't care if customers tip, that's the servers problem. And cooks don't care either if they are the reason the server doesn't get a tip. They get full wages regardless.
Owners are supposed to make up the difference if tipped employee federal minimum wage plus tips ($2.13/hour + tips) is less than the regular federal minimum wage ($7.25/hour).
So that means the first $5.12 of tips each hour goes into the owner's pocket, not the employee's.
They often don't. Wage abuse in the restaurant industry is rampant. The current purpose of tipping is to have staff that essentially works on commission so restaurants don't really have to pay them, and getting 20% off the gross usually isn't a bad deal... But if you get a string of shit tippers, $7.25 an hour isn't worth much in rural Nebraska, let alone cities where most restaurants exist. This is a career for many people who have families to feed and clothe, mortgages and rent to pay, etc. "But they still make minimum wage" is an excuse that dissolves once you move beyond places that employ part-time high school students. Your electrician would also survive on their other customers if you stiffed them— the difference is that it's illegal. Even though stiffing waitstaff is not illegal, our country's social contract states that you tip a minimum of 15% (and usually 20%) when you dine out. If you stiff them altogether, they even get taxed on what the IRS assumes they were tipped at a minimum.
No matter what kind of BS justification people break out, usually styled as a righteous social protest supposedly in defense of the people they're screwing, not tipping employees making tipped wages is, morally, theft of services.
You are not a warrior for change against tipping culture by not tipping. Purchasing services and then not tipping or "scaling down tipping" just makes you an entitled jerk. There's no sacrifice for you. Your "activism" is conveniently cheaper for you and puts pressure on precisely the wrong person.
If you want to change tipping culture, actively apply pressure by never purchasing services if it requires tipping, and following through by writing a letter to the company explaining your decision. Get other people to do it.
Or lead by example! Open a restaurant (or delivery service, or hotel, spa, whatever) and pay the staff a living wage and instruct staff to refuse tips. Encourage fellow establishment owners to do the same.
When you do purchase services that conventionally expect tips then tip and tip generously.
I boycott and recommended others not tip or at minimum tip less.
Tipping actively subsidies non tippers the thief’s you’re so concerned with. Boycott if you have conviction, tip less if you have the willpower, just don’t perpetuate this terrible system.
This is one of the best ways to get something to change. Convince people to do something that benefits them selfishly which at scale causes the evil to become unsustainable.
The ideal case is for everyone to adopt this practice as quickly as possible so the evil is eradicated quickly. The harmful thing is to advocate against it so it spreads less quickly and causes the transition period when some people tip and some people don't to last longer before the system is rightfully destroyed.
No it's one of the best ways to wrap dubious, self-serving moral bankruptcy and lack of empathy in a shroud of self-righteousness. It's nonsense.
I outlined above the only ways to change tipping culture. You really care about the poor, exploited worker? Ask them and listen to what they think you should do to help them.
Purchasing services when tipping is the convention and then not tipping ain't it, chief.
> If you want to change tipping culture, actively apply pressure by never purchasing services if it requires tipping, and following through by writing a letter to the company explaining your decision. Get other people to do it.
Most other people don't care enough about the issue to refrain from patronizing services where tipping is expected, even if they agree, because they only care a little and that would increase costs on them rather than reducing them.
Asking owners nicely doesn't work, because it's this:
> Open a restaurant (or delivery service, or hotel, spa, whatever) and pay the staff a living wage and instruct staff to refuse tips.
As long as customers continue to tip elsewhere, doing this is a competitive disadvantage, because your prices will appear higher since they have to include the cost of paying higher wages, and the perverse risk shifting that imposes costs on workers alleviates them from owners. These industries are highly competitive and minor disadvantages are make or break, so it doesn't work in the absence of a culture shift.
Another unlikely avenue would be a law that bans tipping, but that is difficult to pass because it doesn't benefit the owners and it doesn't benefit the subset of workers who make the most from tips and customers are unlikely to change their vote over this. It's a standard case where the baddies care about something more and it negatively affects a much larger number of ordinary people but only a little, so we get the rules that benefit the baddies.
Which leaves a market-based change driven by customer behavior, i.e. people stop doing it. Which certainly seems like it would work if widely implemented, and people have the selfish incentive to do it, so the only thing preventing it is a harmful preexisting cultural norm that could be eroded through advocacy.
Well when I said I disagree with tipping culture, I didn't mean to imply that I don't tip where tips are expected. What I meant is that I'm happy to tip even where it's not expected if the service was exceptional.
Uber taking 25% commissions on each trip is insane. The drivers are not paid fairly because of that. Besides the commission they need to pay tax and car maintenance. If you over charge the passengers then they’ll use other services.
These are year 2000 numbers, but driving a taxi, I paid a $50 lease to the cab company. That got me the car for an 8 hour shift. The expectation was that I would return it clean and with the same amount of fuel I took it out with, ideally, full. The full amount of the fare went in my pocket.
On bad weekdays, I could usually hustle at least $100 in fare, less fuel and expenses, it put around $20 to $30 in my pocket. On good weekends, I could sometimes get over $300, less fuel and expenses, it put $150 to $200 in my pocket. Drunks often tip well, but they also sometimes vomit.
I wonder if that's not a sustainable driver business model. The trade is, you really do need drivers to show up and hold shifts for coverage. Even driving a taxi we got a bunch of call ins and more lucrative "time orders" where people would schedule rides for a specific time well in advance. Sometimes the same people you would get good tips from on the weekends.
Anyways.. there's a lot of variability and you could argue that Uber's cut is to afford drivers the flexibility they otherwise wouldn't get in a "lease" style model.
I don't tip because society says I have to. All right, if someone deserves a tip, if they really put forth an effort, I'll give them something a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, it's for the birds.
minimum wage for industry with tips is 2.13 an hour and the IRS estimates how much tip you make and taxes you that amount. Not tipping simply robs the worker.
> and the IRS estimates how much tip you make and taxes you that amount
I have plenty of problems with tipping culture, but this one is entirely of the server's making, and is a common trope.
If you can demonstrate/document less tips than the IRS estimate, that's exactly what you will be taxed. Nobody is forcing you to be taxed on unearned income...
... but most servers don't do that because the vast majority of them make entirely more than the IRS tipping estimates.
For those who don't know, this is a quote from Tarantino's debut movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992). The line is said by Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) in the first scene.
> Tipping was introduced in 2017, and Uber is trying to make it more common
Uber was anti-tipping, and it seems like the media backlash forced their hand, to not look like scrooges, together with driver demand for it. I don't see how Uber is trying to make it more common?
> Especially arriving at an airport after a 16+ hour flight, I'm glad to pay a driver to wait.
That might work anywhere but the airport. There isn't enough space in front of arrivals to handle everybody who wants to do this, in a way that doesn't block traffic. Uber already has special-case systems for airport pickups to reduce congestion (that riders don't see).
>Uber already has special-case systems for airport pickups to reduce congestion (that riders don't see).
Those special case systems (IMHO) are solving the wrong problem. Uber airport queues should be exactly like taxi queues: the passenger at the front of the queue takes the taxi at the front of the queue and you're done. No more which car is yours, let me find a spot, block other cars while we load, etc, etc.
At Newark, for instance, Uber drivers regularly take 10-30 minutes to show up after accepting your ride, and even then, they'll often call you and ask you meet on a different floor, one specifically meant for private cars, not car hire services, because the traffic on the floor they're supposed to pick you up on is so very busy.
It's far better to just do front of queue matching and let the passengers scan a QR code that establishes that driver as their driver for the trip. No more brinksmanship of ordering an Uber when you deplane and hoping you are ready with your luggage around the time your driver arrives.
This is how Uber works in airports in India. You don't get assigned a driver, you are given a six digit code. You give it to the next driver up when you reach the front of the queue and then your ride starts as normal.
That's fascinating, I had no idea. Why haven't they implemented this at other airports?
The only potential loser I see in this situation is the driver, who would no longer have advance knowledge of the destination before accepting a ride, but I would imagine that it would be made clear up front that that's what you'd be opting in to as a driver if you chose to work the airport.
Guess it works in India because in the existing system (pre-paid airport taxis), drivers would have no advance knowledge of the destination before being assigned a ride. Also helped that the pre-paid taxis in most cities were actually a police initiative.
One big reason this works is that there is a specific area in which all the rideshare cabs can wait. I am guessing this isn't the case in the US either due to a lack of space or the cab cartels not letting it happen.
> That might work anywhere but the airport. There isn't enough space in front of arrivals to handle everybody who wants to do this, in a way that doesn't block traffic. Uber already has special-case systems for airport pickups to reduce congestion (that riders don't see).
That's not how my local airport works. My local airport has a designated pickup location for Uber+Lyft in the central garage with plenty of room. It has adequate room even during e.g. Christmas rush season.
This was a bizarre compromise between taxis, airport, and apps. Airport collected taxi fees. Taxis didn't want to compete with Uber. In the end, they allowed Uber, but made it as awkward as possible.
Even so, before Uber, what we did was usually curbside pickup with a relative waiting. After Uber and these contortions, curbside pickup isn't even busy (drop-off still is).
It’s not clear to me that this story actually changed anything for the drivers… and the CEO doesn’t even know their pricing, makes me wonder how much he drove at all.
> "It wasn't a pleasant all-hands with the company, but it set a tone, and we set that expectation — we started celebrating employees going out there delivering, employees driving," he said. "It is a point of pride for employees now — when they drive they get a little badge on their corporate profile, etc."
This summer I had the chance to experience Uber in Europe as well as at home in Michigan. In Michigan the app might ask you to walk across the street as a convenience to the driver. It's rare but it happens.
But in Europe it might ask you to walk over a mile! I was careful (or so I thought) to find a place that made sense for the driver. But Uber wouldn't agree even if it meant getting picked up at a bus stop where by the time I arrived was already gone. I was always charged as the at fault party.
In Poland and the Czech Republic Uber was super cheap and I had some amazing conversations with the drivers but never knew if getting picked up would go smoothly or not.
In the US, at least, they used to penalize drivers for ghosting, but the courts ruled they would have to give them employee benefits if they had rules like that.
I’d happily pay 2x for a service where drivers got health care, pto, retirement benefits, etc, but had to pass a driving test and were fired for repeatedly failing to pick up accepted fares.
It’s been a few years since my last US visit, but my experience has been that Uber (and Lyft) are much better in the States than Uber in Australia.
Frequent cancellations, or a driver just not moving until you cancel the ride, is a major issue in Melbourne. Airport pickup is now basically no different than getting a taxi from the taxi rank. UberEats drivers will often just leave food at a different house on our street, or not at all, even though there is no issue with how our house is marked on maps. There is no quality control with Uber Comfort; 90% of the time it’ll be the same thrashed Camry being used for UberX. I could go on.
We’ve stopped using UberEats as a bunch of restaurants we like have alternative options, but I’m surprised the taxi industry here haven’t gotten their game together. At least among my social group, which are moderate Uber users, the sentiment towards Uber (and the available clones, ie Didi) is negative and if there was any decent competition then we’d all switch in a heartbeat.
Experienced that as well. I had one ride where three drivers in a row cancelled. One of them pulled up and as soon as I reached the passenger door he just drove away leaving me flabbergasted.
But the app automatically scheduled a fourth driver and he was excellent. Spoke to him about it and he said it was rush hour and drivers would get a chance at a more lucrative client and they'd drop you and quickly take it. He told me I can't just treat people like that even if it means I make less money.
Taxis are also higher quality. The last time I hailed an Uber/Lyft, I had to wait 10 minutes for the driver to ghost me (get on with it, already!), and then immediately stepped into a cab in the line in front of my hotel.
The CEO should have just set up a "Suggestions Box" or "Comment Hotline" and very real issues would have been collected, probably along with junk. Hire a firm to sift thru it, possibly match it against accounts for verification of issues, and you'd have an awesome list for a Product Manager to prioritize.
I'll tell you some real issues. When living overseas, I didnt drive for 3 full years, just Uber'ed everywhere. These were work-paid and I tipped generously. I took thousands of trips. Then boom mysteriously they wouldnt let me add credit cards one day. I tried a bunch of credit cards, no luck. No recourse, no help from customer service, nothing. No error code, no next step.
Completely out of luck, I switched entirely to Careem. Then, when I returned to the US years later, still out of luck. Still no resolution from Uber. I switched here to Lyft.
How can this happen? How many other three-sigma customers are mysteriously ghosted off Uber cold-turkey? How can a public company survive with this brittle a system?
I think these companies are just fundamentally not profitable, and they have zero incentives to care, even less than the systems they tried to replace. My DoorDash account is now flagged because a driver delivered to a completely different house, and I had the gall to report it as not delivered. I even texted the driver after they sent a picture (which verifies it as not my house), but they didn't respond. Now, my DoorDash account has all sorts of weird things happen to it, as if my account is a fraud account, even though their own systems verify my report. The GPS coordinates associated with the delivery email also show it was at a completely different address. The DoorDash support just ended tha chat when I chatted in about the subsequent issues.
These modern day, purely software-based companies don't care about customers because they don't have to. They abstract away the customer and the customer experience to pure statistics. The best (i.e., worst) example of this is Amazon. It takes somewhere around 5 minutes to get to an actual human after you are barraged and belittled by their Alexa chat assistant. The chat assistant will condescendingly tell you to give it accurate information, otherwise it will give poor resolutions. Oh, I'm sorry Amazon "forgot" to refund me $700+ for an item that was successfully returned and they "forgot" to encode this into their system. And there are some instances where it will refuse to connect you to an agent.
That happened to me with Amazon. Driver decided for some weird random reason to deliver my entire monthly order to a strange address two blocks away.
Amazon insisted that was impossible because their deliveries are GPS fenced within a small distance of the address.
However the delivery photo didn't match the apartment of any of my previous 100+ deliveries or any apartment in my complex for that matter.
They made me fill out by hand an incident report for every single item in the box (like a dozen) before they would give me a refund and now my account seems silently flagged for fraud where every CSR interaction is difficult and tedious.
I finally found a matching photo of the random apartment by browsing google street maps and sent it to them but they could care less.
The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing).
Oh also, all my Amazon deliveries since then now come via USPS and not their own drivers/contracted
I'm sure that is beyond frustrating. These companies just truly do not care, in an actually agressive way.
> The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing).
Yep, I edited my comment with additional Amazon elaboration, probably while you were responding, because they're the worst. Haha. They didn't refund me properly for an expensive returned item and ended up giving me a "one-time exception" for money they owed me. It's not only just frustrating and mindnumbing, it's like getting slapped in the face. Sort of like those robot patrol cops in Elysium. And the silent flagging you described is what happened with my DoorDash account.
We are heading more and more into a "computer says no" dystopia. How many times per day are we already told things like "the system won't let me do that", "I'm not sure why the system says that", "that's weird", "just wait and it'll sort itself out", etc.
We have however many lines of code running that has little proper encoding of domains and required knowledge, but the systems are treated as the single source of action and truth.
How nice would it be if AI chat replaced virtually all customer service agents, but those same people were employed to resolve escalations with the authority to do so?
The problem is that these companies are so large that they can only handle customer service with automated error-prone systems, but are also so large that if you get blackballed by them you are in a real jam because they’re the only vendor in their market.
Those are their problems, though, not ours. These corporations have become incredibly adept at making their problems their customers' and others' problems.
They have even been farming out R&D and testing to customers and unwitting participants, such as the self-driving car companies and even Apple with features like their fall detection flooding 911 call centers with false positives.
By three sigma customer, I meant that I've taken thousands of Uber rides in three years, and tipped very well. They have completely ignored what a positive outlier the account was when deciding to abandon it.
In triage, my customer segment is one you'd want to save. At least thinking rationally as a business owner.
> How can this happen? How many other three-sigma customers are mysteriously ghosted off Uber cold-turkey? How can a public company survive with this brittle a system?
If you have ever worked in one of these move fast companies, you know that nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense.
Fundamentally, these companies are not set up with the right mission and the right incentives. Doing good by customers and employees is not a thing.
The suggestion that this has something to do with "these move fast companies" is off the mark. I can tell you about tiny local businesses with about dozen employees, maybe less, whose owners' don't-care attitude has the same effect.
My point was that among public companies, there is a class of companies that move fast and quick, as opposed to businesses that are slower and cautious. The slower companies by design are slow because they care more about long term value than the next quarter alone. Slower companies go through ups and downs in their stock prices all the time and don't blink much because they want to be around for a long time.
> The slower companies by design are slow because they care more about long term value than the next quarter alone.
This is something that is at odds with my firsthand experience here, too. Your previous characterization:
> nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense
... also applies to them—i.e., large, inefficient orgs that have nothing in common with the move-fast approach. Slow companies are slow because their size and approach to hiring/retention means they're stupidly inefficient. They end up with ossified corporate and social structures that the defenders don't even understand. (Ones that aren't a form of redundancy or the result of other wisdom, but because tons of people in the org, including leadership, can't see beyond the end of the shift, let alone to the same quarter the next year, and can't be bothered to care, either).
For the people building the product, suggestion boxes don’t hit the same way as actually using it. I think the employee driver badge is super corporate but also a good move if you want to improve the product. At Microsoft this was called dogfooding, and for pre-release software it was painful, but an important part of the culture.
I notice this all the time with software. I tend to keep hardware for 5-8 years, and by the end of that window, apps and websites start feeling sluggish. Of course they do: all the devs have modern hardware and don’t notice how crappy the experience is on old hardware. You can tell them, but they don’t feel the pain and their empathy is limited by how much it actually impacts the bottom line.
Several people have told me that Bertrand Serlet used to have Core OS engineers run with very low ram and slow computers so they’d feel the pain. Any 90’s-early 2000s MacOS engineers around to confirm?
For me, I have 2 phones: the one with all the google software removed, in which uber and lyft wont work.
The phone which has all the google software: lyft works, uber wont.
Same experience with uber error reporting as you said. They dont exist.
Message received loud and clear though, I'll just use taxis first and lyft second and uber never.
Every driver i speak with complains about the large fees. Clients complain about driver quality issues.
To me the reason uber sucks is clear. They alienated good drivers through excessive commissions. Lower them so better drivers not just desperate can provide their services.
>When Wired's editor at large, Steven Levy, asked him to estimate the cost of a 2.95-mile Uber ride in New York City, Khosrowshahi ventured "20 bucks" — less than half the actual price of $51.69
I don't use ridesharing apps, is that just an exceptional price because it's NYC? There's no way I'd pay 50 bucks for what is a 15 minute bike ride, who can afford this?
The Uber bubble is over. Uber is now just as expensive and almost as crappy as taxis used to be. We had a great, cheap cab service for about 10 years subsidized by dumb VCs, so thanks very much dumb VCs!
But that was unsustainable so it's over now. Fortunately the old-fashioned taxis improved a little bit because of the competition, so the current situation is slightly better than before Uber started. I'm grateful to Uber for that.
This is a very interesting take, thank you. Is there "denied party screening" for things such as Uber passenger rides or food delivery? I have the same exact experience (almost identical) with Grubhub+ when ordering food, though just with these vendors (Uber, Grubhub) and no others.
What vendor does this, is it possible to correct one's profile? Also, is there any general redress mechanism?
The whole thing is strange since Uber and Grubhub dont have any real identification on you except phone/email/creditcard name -- is that even enough to do denied party screening and blacklist someone?
Also, anyone know the rationale to conduct denied party screening on food orders?
It means their name matches someone else's name on a US government watch list, or that they are considered a terrorist or are sanctioned. The Middle East has a large number of these individuals, as does Russia, and North Korea.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 368 ms ] threadHe drives 10+ hours a day and had like 60k trips completed. I'm sure he is doing okay.
It's rare, but it can happen.
They brought the fucking over and being fucked over steps in-house, but outsourced the middlemen.
Amazing!
If driving for Uber instead caused you to have 500,000 miles on it the bluebook value would be ~$2500, so the extra miles reduced the car's value by ~$1500. By contrast, at 50 MPG and $3/gallon the extra 344,000 miles would have cost you >$20,000 in gas.
When you already have the car as a sunk cost because you need one for yourself, the depreciation is almost completely irrelevant unless you're doing something ridiculous like selling the car when it still has significant market value left.
Try to find a 2010 Prius with over 300,000 miles. There are only a handful in the US because they fall apart long before 500,000 miles.
Depreciation isn't just about the car's value - it's also about the amount of mechanical work you have to put in for the suspension, tires, brakes, etc during the time that it goes from 150,000 miles to 500,000 miles.
My mom's 2010-era Prius is a good example. The dash displays failed at around 100,000 miles, and she bought a new car rather than pay $2,500 to have the dash pulled out and display replaced.
This isn't hard to find when they're used for car service. They're harder to find on the used market because the people who put >300,000 miles on a car don't generally sell them while they still run.
> Depreciation isn't just about the car's value
Depreciation is just about the car's value. Repairs aren't depreciation.
And many of the people who drive as an occupation learn to repair their own vehicles, so they have lower repair costs than other people.
A big fraction of things that we consider depreciated to zero are still worth something. A big fraction fail before the point where we would do that. A big fraction incur larger operating costs later in their lifetime.
You may incur some repairs as a result of the additional miles, but that's not depreciation, and it's also not a covert cost you don't pay until later even though you're committing to it now. The cost of expected future repairs is already reflected in the market value. The cost of past and present repairs is not a hidden future cost.
It's not the most you can lose, because you have a bunch of repeated times where you're making a choice about whether to repair or not, and then whether to keep in service driving it. You can easily be wrong or get unlucky. You can choose to do an expensive repair because it seems to be the thing that preserves the most value, and continue to drive it for Uber because you expect to have a good operating history from this point.
You can incur arbitrarily high operating costs if you're unlucky, but if you're unlucky you can incur arbitrarily high operating costs without putting any additional miles on it. There is a reason the vehicles used in car service skew towards specific models with a strong reliability record.
The cost to maintain and repair affects a car's value, though, at least for commodity cars (classic and rare cars are of course a different scenario). Mileage is a proxy for the likely extent of repair and maintenance a car needs.
It's a $4000 car. It can't lose more than $4000 in value.
If the car needs $400 in repairs, you might find it worthwhile to do the repairs, but that's not depreciation.
Finding another car takes work and involves risk, both of which you'd rather do less often than more often.
Cars used in car service commonly exceed 300,000 miles. There are tales of some that do millions. For commercial trucks that isn't even uncommon.
And 500,000 miles was chosen as an extreme case to demonstrate that you're not going to incur a lot of "depreciation" no matter how many miles you put on something.
This summer in Spain, many a taxi driver was driving a Tesla instead of the traditional Mercedes. The reason: Not just electricity vs gas, but massive savings in other maintenance.
If a driver makes more than that, roughly speaking, they are profiting
The IRS is taking the average cost, but if you're doing this as more than a hobby you choose a vehicle with above average reliability and efficiency and learn to do your own repairs, so you have lower costs. And the IRS includes all of the sunk costs of vehicle ownership, not just the incremental cost of putting more miles on a car you would have regardless.
Given Uber pays $0.63/mi you are giving up half of your income to your car.
When people say that you are paying in depreciation they are talking about more expensive cars. A $60k car that can go 150k miles and a 24 mi/gal fuel economy turns it into a $0.56/mi cost.
I felt like 200k is also before major repairs for the types of vehicle you would want for this.
If you had $9k repairs and $1k of maintenance it would be 0.05/mi of cost but the former seems padded for a $20k vehicle.
Oh boy, no wonder the ceo needed to drive for uber to understand the plight of the average man.
As an aside, locally the Model 3 starts at around $35k USD after rebates. <2 year old used models are around the $23k USD mark. We have a /lot/ of Teslas running around as Ubers now.
That's not what I'm seeing anywhere:
https://seattle.craigslist.org/search/cta?max_price=25000&mi...
https://chicago.craigslist.org/search/cta?max_price=25000&mi...
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=6001&makeval=Tesla&LH...
5 years old with battery troubles, 8 years old with 142k miles, 3 year old with bumper damage.... not a huge selection here.
The one I was looking at when I wrote that comment has (unsurprisingly) sold already, but it was 3 years old, 23k miles, with a small scratch on the bumper for $39k NZD. https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/motors/cars/tesla/model-3/listin...
USD$41,200.
Repair costs are common to all vehicles. Battery replacements are around $13,000, but batteries generally last 300,000-500,000 miles, during which time you might have needed 2-3 engine and transmission repairs at a similar total expense.
Supercharger energy is still cheaper than gasoline, but not by a huge amount.
And you still have to pay for electricity, but in the alternative you still have to pay for a car.
I vouched for your comment because it's accurate.
Sources:
https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/vehicle-solutions/hertz/tes...
https://fortune.com/2022/06/28/uber-lfyt-gig-workers-teslas-...
https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/services/electric/
I don’t think he understood the plight of the average man. All the things mentioned in the article mostly point to annoyances a rich person would have. As the article suggests he’s still completely oblivious to the economics of it all, which is the most important factor for the drivers (and the customers).
Also, theres nothing revolutionary about a CEO evaluating their own product
I can say the same for each of New York, the Bay Area and other cities. DoorDash sucks in some markets.
(Uber Eats is roughly on par with them in central Manhattan, though the quality falls off quickly as you go north of 59th or ask them to tote something more than a few blocks.)
DoorDash really got into gear, in Manhattan, by acquiring Caviar. Unfortunately, that also involved the latter’s standards falling precipitously.
NYC and SoCal isn't the whole country.
The last time I used DoorDash I received an order from a completely different restaurant and had to jump through hoops. Eventually just ordering from the restaurant directly and picking it up while wait for a refund in a few days.
I’ve used them both enough to see no difference.
Uber eats has never once had that issue in my area.
“I mean it’s one banana, Micheal, what could it cost… $10?”
So seems like Khosrowshahi was right about the base price? I'm assuming Levy must have encountered surge pricing, but there's no way Khosrowshahi could have known how much that would be.
Also, never had a problem with either DoorDash or Uber with food delivers.
> Uber's CEO says his time delivering food for his company revealed a "lack of quality" with its product from a driver's perspective.
Yes, everything is really nice and works great when you don't actually use the thing. I can't even find the words...
> "It wasn't a pleasant all-hands with the company, but it set a tone, and we set that expectation — we started celebrating employees going out there delivering, employees driving," he said. "It is a point of pride for employees now — when they drive they get a little badge on their corporate profile, etc."
God forbid you be an everyman.
Edit: I've now read it and removed "I haven't read the article but".
1) Tipping shouldn't happen. There should be a fair salary. Tipping was introduced in 2017, and Uber is trying to make it more common. If drivers should be paid more, it should raise fares and incomes.
2) Arriving late should be okay. Passengers should be charged for it at a rate fair to the driver. Especially arriving at an airport after a 16+ hour flight, I'm glad to pay a driver to wait.
A lot of this feels like misaligned incentives.
Tipping isn’t a neutral activity, it actively supports exploitive work environments. I actively boycott such businesses, but even just scaling down tips is a positive change.
That's not "opting out of tipping" and isn't the behavior the OP described.
I boycott and recommend others tip less if they feel the need to go to such places.
Waiters or bartenders at some popular restaurants can earn an annual income in the 6 figures. So, these places, not exploitative but highly desirable, are fair game for you to visit and then not tip or scale down tipping.
Many businesses such as exterminators haven’t crossed that threshold, but still add a tipping line to bills because it’s got no downside to them.
Do I actively ask if a dentist office has a tip line, no I don’t.
I'm pretty skeptical.
Same with food deliverers. Brown, no English, possibly illegal? Does not matter: pay a full 15% tip if tip is expected. I have seen people give these folks $2 on a $50 order in heavy rain at night. If it's raining or shit weather or you live in a 5th floor walkup, boost it to 20%
I have only once in my 30 years of being an adult not tipped, and it was because the waiter disappeared with my $50 bill on a $14 check. After 20 minutes of waiting for change - at an extraordinarily busy, crowded, NYC restaurant- still assuming that she had simply forgotten, when I tracked her down and politely smiled and said "hello", she yelled at me that this was her tip. She knew better. She had tried to dodge me.
This is a deeply held value of mine: the people who serve you honor you, and you treat them well, full stop. The workers are there because that is their best option. Making their day a bit more shit by not giving them an expected tip will not make their workplace less exploitative or whatever you think it should be.
When GP says they recommend no tipping in order to put pressure on businesses not to be exploitative, I am already mortified. When called out that this isn't actually going to end tipping as a practice, they justify it the only way they can: that they don't tip because they don't use any services. Of that I'm skeptical.
No, I don't doubt that some people live the lifestyle of no restaurants, taxis, delivery or spas. That's effectively me these days.
It was rooted in racism and still used for this in some areas. It shifts the risk of slow business from the proprietor who is more able to affect it to the workers who aren't. It misleads consumers by making prices effectively false advertising when the tip which is allegedly optional is in practice not. It's a mechanism for tax evasion, but only by higher income people who make an unusually large amount of money from tips. Everything about it should be destroyed.
So I avoid establishments where this is expected, not because I think it's socially harmful not to do it -- I think it's socially harmful to do it. The reason I avoid them is that people get so upset when you tell them this, that it's easier to avoid the environment where it comes up. But even that feels like a cowardice because the result at scale would be to reduce the number of such establishments rather than to reduce the prevalence of tipping within those establishments.
Which is the other reason it feels right to promote this. If you evaluate it as your own individual contribution, anyone by themselves will make no significant difference in either direction. A single digit number of dollars to a stranger at an interval of months or years is not going to affect their life. But if you evaluate the effect at scale -- what if everybody did this? -- the effect of everybody doing it would destroy the practice, which is a powerful good.
So you would be fine if someone, or everyone, actually did this?
What if your issue is not with tipping whatsoever but rather with the default being 15% instead of 0%, so that tips are only for exceptional service?
If you hire a landscaping company, the workers are underpaid either because they're in the country illegally or because that hiring practice is widespread and suppresses wages. So these are exploited workers.
Tipping isn't generally expected for landscaping. Are you the exploiter if you hire one and don't tip the workers? If not, why doesn't that make you the exploiter? Should you also tip Amazon drivers and PhD candidates and women of every profession including ones who make more money than you?
The criteria can't be that they would be getting exploited without it, because that's arguably true of all of them. Probably of everyone in one way or another. So is your argument just status quo bias?
If a worker whose employer you're paying to do something is underpaying them, is it your obligation to make up the difference?
Choose: a) Establishment A charges 40% more and pays the workers fairly with benefits and actively refuses tips, or b) Establishment B has the same menu and quality, only charges normal prices and has an expectation of tipping the staff 15%.
Maybe from the inherently altruistic goodness of your heart you only ever go to Establishment A, lighter of wallet but warmed by your moral virtue, but most people will go to Establishment B and pay the tip.
That's your choice. You might not like it but that's the reality. What you don't get to do is have establishment B's prices with establishment A's tipping policy.
Maybe, being clever, you think
c) Establishment C charges 15% more and pays it directly to the workers but they must actively refuse tips
Believe it or not, C has been tried and it is universally disliked by staff and customers. Staff will happily go to work at B where they can earn more through hard work. Because most people are not no-tip assholes. Customers would rather go to B (and tip) where they can get better service for the same cost.
To answer you directly, yes. Yes. If the convention is that the business charges less and you make up the difference, then yes you do. You have an obligation to make up the difference.
Is it not? The status quo persists in the absence of some change.
You're essentially arguing that a local maxima is preferable to descending the slope to reach the global one.
> Customers would rather go to B (and tip) where they can get better service for the same cost.
The reason businesses charge $9.99 instead of $10.00 is that psychology plays a large role in consumer behavior. The "false advertising" component of culturally mandated tipping is a competitive advantage in the absence of something to counteract it.
It's like saying companies should just avoid hidden fees because customers don't like them. The trouble is the companies that use them get more customers because their prices appear lower.
> Staff will happily go to work at B where they can earn more through hard work. Because most people are not no-tip assholes.
So in order to make C work you need customers to make B unsustainable. (Also somewhat obviously, if staff "can earn more" the other way then you haven't added the amount to their base wages that makes up for the lack of tips.)
And you have a similar psychological component with workers as with customers, because it's harder for workers to evaluate the risk of slow business. Tipping is very casino psychology. People remember the time they got a $50 tip, not the time they stood around all day for $2/hour and there were no customers. They do the math for this week and don't consider what this compensation structure is going to do to them in an economic downturn.
If you knew C doesn't work without doing something to counteract the dark patterns in B, why did you recommend it as a solution? Do you have an actual alternate proposal that could feasibly lead to the end of tipping?
> If the convention is that the business charges less and you make up the difference, then yes you do. You have an obligation to make up the difference.
What if you want to change the convention?
Ok, I'm done with this conversation. I will read whatever response you have and it will likely be the last word.
Which would actually work. I might hire proportionally more black workers, but they're just as good and now I have lower average labor costs and can outcompete anyone not doing this.
Which would ultimately raise the prevailing wage for black workers, because in order to compete with me the other businesses would either have to lower their labor costs or raise mine, which they can only do by narrowing the gap between what they offer to black workers and white workers.
You're now upset with me and accuse me of wickedness because I'm not actually sacrificing anything, I'm only paying the white workers less. You say that in order to prove that I'm not just a selfish jerk I would have to pay everyone the prevailing wage for white workers.
But then it would be me who is driven out of business because my average labor costs would be higher rather than lower than the competition. Which doesn't help anybody, because a business that immediately goes under changes nothing.
Your criteria is structured to condemn effective solutions. If it has to disadvantage you then only affluent people with surplus to burn can do it, which inhibits widespread adoption and commonly turns it into a vapid virtue signaling exercise which is more about showing other members of your own social class what an altruist you are. The real test is whether it's a viable path to effective change.
That all you have to do is act in your own self-interest and not have to be a self-sacrificing social activist is a great advantage, because it enables you to get the people who don't care about that to do the thing.
I'm also not sure what self-interested benefit I'm supposed to be receiving by trying to convince strangers I don't otherwise want anything from to do this. If anything it would be the opposite, right? If I succeeded in convincing everyone else to stop tipping then the cost of paying workers would end up being reflected in the price of the services and I would lose the ability to pay less than other people.
However, "recommending others tip less" is also not boycotting a business. You're recommending people harm the people least in control of the situation to make a point to the people least harmed by the action.
It's ridiculous.
Boycott or tip appropriately. Those are your options.
If you feel the desire to leave an extravagant tip, resist the impulse.
PS: OP said, “Tipping shouldn't happen.” but provided no means to get to that point.
Interestingly, tipping became popular in the US just after slavery was abolished, since many people resented paying blacks, full stop. Tips allowed customers to legally only pay the white workers.
At least one deep-south state supreme court banned tip-based compensation, but the federal supreme court sadly overrode them.
(This context helps me understand why some waiters in Europe get offended if you tip them.)
So that means the first $5.12 of tips each hour goes into the owner's pocket, not the employee's.
No matter what kind of BS justification people break out, usually styled as a righteous social protest supposedly in defense of the people they're screwing, not tipping employees making tipped wages is, morally, theft of services.
If you want to change tipping culture, actively apply pressure by never purchasing services if it requires tipping, and following through by writing a letter to the company explaining your decision. Get other people to do it.
Or lead by example! Open a restaurant (or delivery service, or hotel, spa, whatever) and pay the staff a living wage and instruct staff to refuse tips. Encourage fellow establishment owners to do the same.
When you do purchase services that conventionally expect tips then tip and tip generously.
Tipping actively subsidies non tippers the thief’s you’re so concerned with. Boycott if you have conviction, tip less if you have the willpower, just don’t perpetuate this terrible system.
This is one of the best ways to get something to change. Convince people to do something that benefits them selfishly which at scale causes the evil to become unsustainable.
The ideal case is for everyone to adopt this practice as quickly as possible so the evil is eradicated quickly. The harmful thing is to advocate against it so it spreads less quickly and causes the transition period when some people tip and some people don't to last longer before the system is rightfully destroyed.
I outlined above the only ways to change tipping culture. You really care about the poor, exploited worker? Ask them and listen to what they think you should do to help them.
Purchasing services when tipping is the convention and then not tipping ain't it, chief.
> If you want to change tipping culture, actively apply pressure by never purchasing services if it requires tipping, and following through by writing a letter to the company explaining your decision. Get other people to do it.
Most other people don't care enough about the issue to refrain from patronizing services where tipping is expected, even if they agree, because they only care a little and that would increase costs on them rather than reducing them.
Asking owners nicely doesn't work, because it's this:
> Open a restaurant (or delivery service, or hotel, spa, whatever) and pay the staff a living wage and instruct staff to refuse tips.
As long as customers continue to tip elsewhere, doing this is a competitive disadvantage, because your prices will appear higher since they have to include the cost of paying higher wages, and the perverse risk shifting that imposes costs on workers alleviates them from owners. These industries are highly competitive and minor disadvantages are make or break, so it doesn't work in the absence of a culture shift.
Another unlikely avenue would be a law that bans tipping, but that is difficult to pass because it doesn't benefit the owners and it doesn't benefit the subset of workers who make the most from tips and customers are unlikely to change their vote over this. It's a standard case where the baddies care about something more and it negatively affects a much larger number of ordinary people but only a little, so we get the rules that benefit the baddies.
Which leaves a market-based change driven by customer behavior, i.e. people stop doing it. Which certainly seems like it would work if widely implemented, and people have the selfish incentive to do it, so the only thing preventing it is a harmful preexisting cultural norm that could be eroded through advocacy.
On bad weekdays, I could usually hustle at least $100 in fare, less fuel and expenses, it put around $20 to $30 in my pocket. On good weekends, I could sometimes get over $300, less fuel and expenses, it put $150 to $200 in my pocket. Drunks often tip well, but they also sometimes vomit.
I wonder if that's not a sustainable driver business model. The trade is, you really do need drivers to show up and hold shifts for coverage. Even driving a taxi we got a bunch of call ins and more lucrative "time orders" where people would schedule rides for a specific time well in advance. Sometimes the same people you would get good tips from on the weekends.
Anyways.. there's a lot of variability and you could argue that Uber's cut is to afford drivers the flexibility they otherwise wouldn't get in a "lease" style model.
I have plenty of problems with tipping culture, but this one is entirely of the server's making, and is a common trope.
If you can demonstrate/document less tips than the IRS estimate, that's exactly what you will be taxed. Nobody is forcing you to be taxed on unearned income...
... but most servers don't do that because the vast majority of them make entirely more than the IRS tipping estimates.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Fill this out every month: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-access/f4070_accessible.pdf
Uber was anti-tipping, and it seems like the media backlash forced their hand, to not look like scrooges, together with driver demand for it. I don't see how Uber is trying to make it more common?
> Especially arriving at an airport after a 16+ hour flight, I'm glad to pay a driver to wait.
That might work anywhere but the airport. There isn't enough space in front of arrivals to handle everybody who wants to do this, in a way that doesn't block traffic. Uber already has special-case systems for airport pickups to reduce congestion (that riders don't see).
Those special case systems (IMHO) are solving the wrong problem. Uber airport queues should be exactly like taxi queues: the passenger at the front of the queue takes the taxi at the front of the queue and you're done. No more which car is yours, let me find a spot, block other cars while we load, etc, etc.
At Newark, for instance, Uber drivers regularly take 10-30 minutes to show up after accepting your ride, and even then, they'll often call you and ask you meet on a different floor, one specifically meant for private cars, not car hire services, because the traffic on the floor they're supposed to pick you up on is so very busy.
It's far better to just do front of queue matching and let the passengers scan a QR code that establishes that driver as their driver for the trip. No more brinksmanship of ordering an Uber when you deplane and hoping you are ready with your luggage around the time your driver arrives.
it's a very simple problem to solve
The only potential loser I see in this situation is the driver, who would no longer have advance knowledge of the destination before accepting a ride, but I would imagine that it would be made clear up front that that's what you'd be opting in to as a driver if you chose to work the airport.
Seems like that takes away a lot of the essential agency from the driver
That's not how my local airport works. My local airport has a designated pickup location for Uber+Lyft in the central garage with plenty of room. It has adequate room even during e.g. Christmas rush season.
This was a bizarre compromise between taxis, airport, and apps. Airport collected taxi fees. Taxis didn't want to compete with Uber. In the end, they allowed Uber, but made it as awkward as possible.
Even so, before Uber, what we did was usually curbside pickup with a relative waiting. After Uber and these contortions, curbside pickup isn't even busy (drop-off still is).
The article says they had an unpleasant meeting…
It’s not clear to me that this story actually changed anything for the drivers… and the CEO doesn’t even know their pricing, makes me wonder how much he drove at all.
Oh sweet. A badge on a corporate profile
But in Europe it might ask you to walk over a mile! I was careful (or so I thought) to find a place that made sense for the driver. But Uber wouldn't agree even if it meant getting picked up at a bus stop where by the time I arrived was already gone. I was always charged as the at fault party.
In Poland and the Czech Republic Uber was super cheap and I had some amazing conversations with the drivers but never knew if getting picked up would go smoothly or not.
I’d happily pay 2x for a service where drivers got health care, pto, retirement benefits, etc, but had to pass a driving test and were fired for repeatedly failing to pick up accepted fares.
Frequent cancellations, or a driver just not moving until you cancel the ride, is a major issue in Melbourne. Airport pickup is now basically no different than getting a taxi from the taxi rank. UberEats drivers will often just leave food at a different house on our street, or not at all, even though there is no issue with how our house is marked on maps. There is no quality control with Uber Comfort; 90% of the time it’ll be the same thrashed Camry being used for UberX. I could go on.
We’ve stopped using UberEats as a bunch of restaurants we like have alternative options, but I’m surprised the taxi industry here haven’t gotten their game together. At least among my social group, which are moderate Uber users, the sentiment towards Uber (and the available clones, ie Didi) is negative and if there was any decent competition then we’d all switch in a heartbeat.
But the app automatically scheduled a fourth driver and he was excellent. Spoke to him about it and he said it was rush hour and drivers would get a chance at a more lucrative client and they'd drop you and quickly take it. He told me I can't just treat people like that even if it means I make less money.
It's just too damn expensive. Taxis are much cheaper than Ubers at SeaTac now!
I'll tell you some real issues. When living overseas, I didnt drive for 3 full years, just Uber'ed everywhere. These were work-paid and I tipped generously. I took thousands of trips. Then boom mysteriously they wouldnt let me add credit cards one day. I tried a bunch of credit cards, no luck. No recourse, no help from customer service, nothing. No error code, no next step.
Completely out of luck, I switched entirely to Careem. Then, when I returned to the US years later, still out of luck. Still no resolution from Uber. I switched here to Lyft.
How can this happen? How many other three-sigma customers are mysteriously ghosted off Uber cold-turkey? How can a public company survive with this brittle a system?
These modern day, purely software-based companies don't care about customers because they don't have to. They abstract away the customer and the customer experience to pure statistics. The best (i.e., worst) example of this is Amazon. It takes somewhere around 5 minutes to get to an actual human after you are barraged and belittled by their Alexa chat assistant. The chat assistant will condescendingly tell you to give it accurate information, otherwise it will give poor resolutions. Oh, I'm sorry Amazon "forgot" to refund me $700+ for an item that was successfully returned and they "forgot" to encode this into their system. And there are some instances where it will refuse to connect you to an agent.
Amazon insisted that was impossible because their deliveries are GPS fenced within a small distance of the address.
However the delivery photo didn't match the apartment of any of my previous 100+ deliveries or any apartment in my complex for that matter.
They made me fill out by hand an incident report for every single item in the box (like a dozen) before they would give me a refund and now my account seems silently flagged for fraud where every CSR interaction is difficult and tedious.
I finally found a matching photo of the random apartment by browsing google street maps and sent it to them but they could care less.
The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing).
Oh also, all my Amazon deliveries since then now come via USPS and not their own drivers/contracted
> The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing).
Yep, I edited my comment with additional Amazon elaboration, probably while you were responding, because they're the worst. Haha. They didn't refund me properly for an expensive returned item and ended up giving me a "one-time exception" for money they owed me. It's not only just frustrating and mindnumbing, it's like getting slapped in the face. Sort of like those robot patrol cops in Elysium. And the silent flagging you described is what happened with my DoorDash account.
We are heading more and more into a "computer says no" dystopia. How many times per day are we already told things like "the system won't let me do that", "I'm not sure why the system says that", "that's weird", "just wait and it'll sort itself out", etc.
We have however many lines of code running that has little proper encoding of domains and required knowledge, but the systems are treated as the single source of action and truth.
They have even been farming out R&D and testing to customers and unwitting participants, such as the self-driving car companies and even Apple with features like their fall detection flooding 911 call centers with false positives.
You might like the short film “Please Hold” for a more nuanced take.
In triage, my customer segment is one you'd want to save. At least thinking rationally as a business owner.
If you have ever worked in one of these move fast companies, you know that nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense.
Fundamentally, these companies are not set up with the right mission and the right incentives. Doing good by customers and employees is not a thing.
This is something that is at odds with my firsthand experience here, too. Your previous characterization:
> nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense
... also applies to them—i.e., large, inefficient orgs that have nothing in common with the move-fast approach. Slow companies are slow because their size and approach to hiring/retention means they're stupidly inefficient. They end up with ossified corporate and social structures that the defenders don't even understand. (Ones that aren't a form of redundancy or the result of other wisdom, but because tons of people in the org, including leadership, can't see beyond the end of the shift, let alone to the same quarter the next year, and can't be bothered to care, either).
I notice this all the time with software. I tend to keep hardware for 5-8 years, and by the end of that window, apps and websites start feeling sluggish. Of course they do: all the devs have modern hardware and don’t notice how crappy the experience is on old hardware. You can tell them, but they don’t feel the pain and their empathy is limited by how much it actually impacts the bottom line.
To me the reason uber sucks is clear. They alienated good drivers through excessive commissions. Lower them so better drivers not just desperate can provide their services.
I don't use ridesharing apps, is that just an exceptional price because it's NYC? There's no way I'd pay 50 bucks for what is a 15 minute bike ride, who can afford this?
It is aggravating when you can tell the company just has no idea how their customers use their service
But that was unsustainable so it's over now. Fortunately the old-fashioned taxis improved a little bit because of the competition, so the current situation is slightly better than before Uber started. I'm grateful to Uber for that.
Dogfooding can't ever stop. "Why is our product terrible?" Because you stopped dogfooding it, or maybe you never did to begin with.
What vendor does this, is it possible to correct one's profile? Also, is there any general redress mechanism?
The whole thing is strange since Uber and Grubhub dont have any real identification on you except phone/email/creditcard name -- is that even enough to do denied party screening and blacklist someone?
Also, anyone know the rationale to conduct denied party screening on food orders?
Can you fill in what that means? Why is the Middle East relevant and what is 'denied party screening'?