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Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

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Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#291

Post by nikdaheratik »

et-al wrote: post #219
andreasvc wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I'm saying is that if one wants to have the overwhelmingly warm service Americans expect in restaurants, we need to keep tipping. Except you do not give any argument for why that is the case, but just hand wavingly claim it. Why exactly wouldn't it work if tips were abolished, all the prices on the menu are raised to match the average income from tips, and salaries raised to make up for tips? I don't see why g…

Because customer service is draining. Because even when you get paid $75k, dealing with assholes still sucks. I'm gonna hand wave some more: most Americans when they think of good service beyond just being quick on delivery. Good service is about having a friendly conversation and building rapport with another person. It's may be weird for those of us with introverted tendencies, but this is Middle America with big s…

I disagree completely. For one thing, many McDs employees in countries with a higher minimum wage also have a better attitude, but there are also standout employees at McDs in the U.S. The issue isn't just that the workers at higher minimum wage places are paid more, it's that they are better employees because the managers there can't afford to hire a mediocre one (especially since it's harder to fire them), so they get good employees and train them. And the instances where I've had really good service from McDs in the U.S. are often cases where there's an economic downturn and you have alot of overqualified people taking that job as it's better than nothing.

Service in any restaurant is more a function of the kinds of employees you can attract (through wages) and the amount of training the manager puts into their staff. Tipping is only important in that it allows some restaurants to pay a fairly decent amount of money to attract higher quality workers for only a couple of nights when a straight wage would require a larger time commitment to get the same amount of money. However, a (necessarily higher) straight wage would also allow more workers the opportunity to make a decent full time living as a waiter or bartender, which means you could have really good servers even on less busy nights of the week, but fewer servers on the busiest nights as there's less flexibility in hiring and firing.

Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#292

Post by jsmith0295 »

riboflava wrote: post #70
ethanbond wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not obligatory to tip then it should be obligatory to pay people a living wage, in any context.

Living wage destroys the ability for people to make a little extra on the side with part-time gigs.

The term itself is sort of ridiculous as well, since most advocates for it want a $15 an hour minimum wage, which is nearly twice what I lived on for quite a while, and is far above the median purchasing power amongst all people. And to be blunt, most of the people I worked with for less than $8 an hour were barely worth what they were being payed then. At $15 an hour there is just no way they would be able to find enough employment

Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#293

Post by jsmith0295 »

riboflava wrote: post #70
ethanbond wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not obligatory to tip then it should be obligatory to pay people a living wage, in any context.

Living wage destroys the ability for people to make a little extra on the side with part-time gigs.

The term itself is sort of ridiculous as well, since most advocates for it want a $15 an hour minimum wage, which is nearly twice what I lived on for quite a while, and is far above the median purchasing power amongst all people. And to be blunt, most of the people I worked with for less than $8 an hour were barely worth what they were being payed then. At $15 an hour there is just no way they would be able to find enough employment

Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#294

Post by peteretep »

iamdave wrote: post #208
serge2k wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much 20% here it seems. Then they raised the minimum wage. So restaurants added a 20% service fee on to cover it. Okay, fine. That's actually the outcome I wanted. Except some places left the tip line. So now people still tip out of obligation. Never ends.

I'm curious where people stand on the "To Insure Proper Service" backronym? I've always bucked back on that by saying "Well, taking some sense of pride in your work, even if that work is bringing people their food and are enjoying the experience of your establishment should insure proper service, otherwise why not work elsewhere?" but I'm not sure that's a very charitable stance to take so I've been wondering what ot…

I find the poor spelling offensive

Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#295

Post by williamscales »

aianus wrote: post #222
alkonaut wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the case in every country I have ever been. If you read a travel guide for any country it might say that tips are usually given to taxi drivers, restaurant staff etc, but only in the US has zero tipping almost become equivalent to not paying the tab in full. Also, when I go to the US with 5-10 year intervals the norms for tipping seem to have always crept upwards.

> only in the US has zero tipping almost become equivalent to not paying the tab in full. Canada is the same way, do not tip 0% in Canada unless the waiter was abjectly rude or spilled something on you.

I find it strange that the same tipping norms exist in Canada as in the US, since, if I'm not mistaken, Canadian waitstaff are paid at least minimum wage. In the US, the fact that waiters are paid less than minimum wage and expected to make it up on tips is often cited to explain why it is so bad to not tip at all.

Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#296

Post by mark_l_watson »

mmanfrin wrote: post #3

Honestly I wish they wouldn't try to compete on price. Maybe I'm alone with this, but I'd rather not feel obligated to tip a driver because the ride is so cheap. Pay them a living wage, let me pay the exact fee, and let me not have to carry goddamn cash like I used to in the era of Taxis. e: Addressing common replies: "This is for people commuting already" -- okay, point taken; my point about Uber/Lyft still stands.…

I agree with you. I have used Uber when visiting San Francisco and San Diego and all 9 rides have been great, but the price seems low. We now know that they lost 1.2 billion dollars over a six month period. BTW, I have always used Uber in ride sharing mode, never exclusive. I don't mind cash tipping since I always travel with lots of small bills. The secret of good hotel experiences is handing out of modest tips to everyone who helps you, and including Uber drivers seems fair enough.

EDIT: re: hotel tipping: I tend to stay at the same hotels when I travel. Still, tipping maids and other helpful people should be done regardless of expectations of good service during future stays.

Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#297

Post by vegabook »

euyyn wrote: post #276
vegabook wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. But they've shown no staying power in any of their other long term initiatives. Google Fibre (halving staff). Self driving car (looking for investors/partners). Robotics (disinvesting). Google+ (firing the boss after 2 years). Glass (debacle buried under the carpet). Motorola (flipped for a few billion pronto and now struggling). Shopping (trounced by Amazon). Cloud? (for second place, Microsoft Azure is…

> they've shown no staying power in any of their other long term initiatives You actually can't find even one? :)

Well clearly they're brilliant at creating free platforms for advertising. They just seem to be poor at doing anything that requires explicit payment.

Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#298

Post by jsmith0295 »

gingerrr wrote: post #125
riboflava wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living wage destroys the ability for people to make a little extra on the side with part-time gigs.

You realize that "living wage" is only a price floor for labor, not a price ceiling , right? It is a guarantee that people are paid at a minimum the amount necessary to support themselves, with various definitions excluding or including that person's family situation from consideration. Instituting a living wage would in no way prevent you from working extra and being paid extra for that work. I'm inclined to believe…

It isn't a guarantee of that when you tie it to an hourly rate. Anyone who isn't delivering enough value after the rate hike is going to have their hours cut and is going to have a harder time finding a second job, which is something a lot of minimum wage workers have to do thanks to overtime pay requirements. I'm not saying this as some upper middle class libertarian either, I was still working these jobs just a couple years ago. A 40 hour or less work week for me would have kept me in that position nearly indefinitely. Yet raising the minimum wage much higher than it is now would price the people who are most in need of employment out of the labor market. I know you're probably likely to cite recent wage hikes in certain cities as evidence that this isn't the case, but those are areas where a dollar has a much lower purchasing power than it does in most of the country. A national minimum wage of $12 an hour would have made a huge number of the people I'd worked with at a minimum wage job a liability rather than an asset.

Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#299

Post by Zigurd »

Google is not "taking on Uber." An important point is that Google is not making money off the payments for the ride, which presumably all go to the driver.

For the driver that means defraying the cost of a commute in return for going a few minutes out of his way. True ride-sharing, not a gypsy-cabs-plus-reputation network. It's more akin to a transport-specific Splitwise than to Uber.

What Google gets out of this is a real-world model of on demand automated transport patterns, pricing, demand, etc.

Re: Google Takes on Uber with New Ride-Share Service

#300

Post by dTal »

gambiting wrote: post #150
robk wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because those old mincab services were TERRIBLE. Calling to book late at night with unknown arrival times and being forced to ask everyone at the party "hey what's the post code here?" wasn't fun. Bye bye Swiss Cottage Minicabs. I've not had a blanket negative from London drivers though. Some complain but most seem "meh" like moving from one job to another.

Yeah, every taxi/minicab company at any city in UK on Saturday night is like "sorry, there's a 2 hour wait" - and even if you do wait, nothing turns up. In the meantime, Uber is always instant, the longest waiting time I've ever seen with Uber was 10 minutes, even on the busiest time on Saturday night.

Not quite any city. Edinburgh taxi service is legendary - typically under 5 minutes wait time. Lord knows how.
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