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Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

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Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#51
post #26

Uber's handling of edge cases is...something. My wife is banned for life from Uber because after she was overcharged by a driver by $80 (for a five minute ride), and after Uber denied her dispute of the fraudulent charge, she flagged the fraudulent charge with the credit card company and got refunded via that route. I don't think a human was in the loop for any step of this process on Uber's end.

This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck. There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.

Disputing charges with a credit card is an interesting thing. It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally. That the merchant doesn't want to risk more money on serving such a customer in the future is perfectly rational.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#52
post #11

It's a bit terrifying that people on twitter seem to think this is an intentional product decision rather than a bug plus shitty automated support with no human in the loop. I guess if you keep setting OKRs like "5% lower support call volume" for years then at some point your reputational risk goes up because you've made it impossible to contact an actual human being.

Bugs like this happen sometimes. I used to work at Uber, here is what happens with bugs like this: - Some engineer will get paged, look at the incident, and eventually the root cause of the bug will be found. - The root cause of the bug will be fixed to prevent it from happening on new trips, new fare calc tests will be added, etc. - Engineers will identify which commit introduced the bug and which dates/trips are po…

And, on average, how many drivers/passengers are permabanned before any engineer is paged?

It might be a "bug' from uber's perspective. For we mortals they interfere with basic economic functions. When my grocery store overcharges me for something they can can push a fix to me within seconds. The customer service person doesnt need an engineer to see that potatoes shouldnt cost that much. And they are empowered to correct the error immediately, with cash in hand if necessary. Nobody at uber has such power.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#53
post #51
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck. There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.

Disputing charges with a credit card is an interesting thing. It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally. That the merchant doesn't want to risk more money on serving such a customer in the future is p…

Rational? Maybe for them. But when they refuse to help the consumer, it’s the customer’s right to issue a chargeback. That’s their purpose: to deal with bad merchants. Too many chargebacks can get you dropped from your payment processor. But when the merchant bans you to hide the fact that they suck (from the processor), that’s pretty messed up.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#54
post #11

It's a bit terrifying that people on twitter seem to think this is an intentional product decision rather than a bug plus shitty automated support with no human in the loop. I guess if you keep setting OKRs like "5% lower support call volume" for years then at some point your reputational risk goes up because you've made it impossible to contact an actual human being.

[deleted]

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#55
post #51
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck. There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.

Disputing charges with a credit card is an interesting thing. It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally. That the merchant doesn't want to risk more money on serving such a customer in the future is p…

Assuming the merchant is 100% honest and accurate, yes this is rational. If the merchant is error-prone and doesn't want their occasional erroneous (or intentional) overcharges affecting their relationship with credit services, it's also rational.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#57
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses deliberately plan for and rely on people like you making that distinction, even though you shouldn’t. Why should it matter? The consumer is fucked either way.

For the same reason that if some kind of Cordyceps-like brain-parasite were to infect a person and make them murder people, that wouldn't be that person's fault. Especially if the brain parasite could be removed, reverting their personality to normal. I wouldn't hold that against the person going forward (unless they for some reason actively pursued further brain-parasite infections as a general preference.) Companie…

You're missing the actually relevant case: the company hires evil individuals on a regular basis.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#58
post #56

People try to take any chance to make a villian out of big tech, it's just a damn bug people! They might not be the most decent "being", but the fact that this post is trending bothers me

A villain don't have to be evil, apathy that causes harm is enough.

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#59
post #3
post #2

Here are screenshots of the “service fees”: https://twitter.com/TheSofaaa/status/1399070201925312512?s=2...

Thanks for this; I'm a little confused since they still don't show the total accounting. One screen shows $11 total service charge, another shows $6 for Third-party fees (either way thats crazy Uber passes this cost on) There is a missing $5 they're not explaining

As someone who does uber eats for some side cash (I have a very small and fuel effecient car, so it actually works out gas wise for me), the 11 dollars was the total service charge. Uber then breaks it down by what they take (the first party part, not included), and any other fees are in a seperate Third party section. So from my perspective of 11 dollars total, with 6 for the third party (which they absolutely pass onto the driver), the missing 5 could be made up by the Uber first party charges.

Now I can't confirm this, I'm not on his account, and he hasn't posted it yet. But I would put a nickel on the other 5 bucks being paid directly to Uber. Which again, not uncommon.

Here's an example from a delivery I did the other day, I can get more screenshots if you want. But out of the 22 dollars the customer paid for the delivery, I received 5.61 before tip. The rest went to uber [1]

[1] https://imgur.com/a/WaNh692

Re: Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

#60
post #51
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck. There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.

Disputing charges with a credit card is an interesting thing. It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally. That the merchant doesn't want to risk more money on serving such a customer in the future is p…

maybe if chargebacks are so bad try to invest in better dispute resoluton processes
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