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The Uber Bubble

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Re: The Uber Bubble

#71

Post by darth_avocado »

rzz3 wrote: post #43
Barrin92 wrote: post #22

The piece is exactly right. Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. From a macroeconomic perspective this is terrible because turning taxi firms into countless of one man businesses provides no efficiency gains, it's basically reverse economic development. There is a version of Uber that actually makes sense. As a lean SaaS company that sells its so…

Despite all of the negatives, many of which I agree with, the legacy taxi industry really sucked for riders. Riding in a taxi feels dirty to me, to be honest. Old, ugly cars that never seem well maintained, having to actually call someone on a phone and tell them where to pick you up, often not accepting Apple Pay, Android Pay, credit cards. Rude drivers with no rating system to disincentivize it… It’s sad that Uber…

Legacy taxis were and still are a more expensive and inefficient business. Outside of airports and maybe cities like New York, hailing a taxi was a terrible experience.

The scale of Uber despite their shitty business model, allows them to have a lot more drivers constantly on the road than traditional companies. This allows for an quicker availability of a cab at a moment’s notice. Anyone remember leaving a party before Uber, calling a cab and then awkwardly sitting around at the host’s place for another half hour?

This also means a generational behavior change where more people use Uber, which in turn allows more continuous business for the driver and a cheaper ride for the consumer.

Uber can charge more (which they are doing now), fix their driver pay and still provide a cheaper and more convenient experience for the users.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#72

Post by novok »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #9

The real magic of Uber is that it allows drivers to convert the depreciation of their car into cash at a time and schedule of their own choosing. For the reasons discussed in the story, this may still technically be a net negative in the long term compared to driving a regular cab fulltime, but a) drivers find it far preferable to/cheaper than alternatives like payday loans, and b) many Uber drivers have multiple job…

Have you driven a cab before? Do you know for north america at least, the standard model is drivers are independent contractors and rent out the cars or the medallion license from medallion owners? Many medallion owners are not drivers themselves. Taxi companies are generally a collection of licenses, car rental, some branding and advertising and dispatch services. The angry taxi people you see protesting Uber or equivalents are more like the Canadian trucker convoy people who own their trucks than the actual typical poor long haul truck driver who doesn't own their truck.

Also whats worse about the taxi model is you often are paying on a monthly basis to rent the car, so every month you are something like $3000 in the hole and you have to keep on grinding hard before you could break even and then start making money for yourself. It's hard to take a vacation unless you want to take a month long one with no pay, which for most people who are doing the taxi gig, is not financially tenable.

Being a taxi driver SUCKS. At least Uber is an improvement because the fee system is done as you make money and you have way more flexibility as a result.

Everyone is upset that low end relatively unskilled labor pay & life sucks in general, and being upset with Uber is just one facet of it. Amazon warehouse workers & some restaurant workers are another group. In the past the media obsession was walmart workers and immigrant farm workers, which you don't hear about that much anymore but life still sucks for them.

Activists try to shove the responsibility of making the low-end labor life better onto the company that hires them, while ignoring what the real problem is the low-end labor life sucks in general, and if you made amazon and walmart and everyone else that is visible disappear, it's still gonna suck, because the problem isn't those companies per say, it's the entire global situation of being a low end laborer, and it's a situation that is properly covered by government than any specific company.

Governments don't want to pay for it although, especially in America, which is why you see this kind of focus especially in the USA, where they make employers create something approximating universal healthcare, benefits, etc vs collecting it through an equivalent tax and making it a universally provided benefit set. If it was truly a government responsibility, it could go multiple ways, such as reducing the cost of living by not making housing an investment asset and more a consumer good / capital business cost like in Japan and changing food regulations to heavily tax obesogenic & carcinogenic products, so the total national healthcare expenditure of the nation goes down and so on.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#73

Post by Sebguer »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40
BobbyJo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This destroys most of the value. Most taxi companies suck for reasons independent of their tech stack. None of which Uber fixes? Uber is a tech company. Arguing that it's better than taxis for non-technical reasons is a bit absurd.

> None of which Uber fixes? Did you hail or call taxis before Uber? The simple ability to see where your car is while en route was game changing. Add to that ratings, embedded payment (“credit card reader broken”) and dynamic pricing and you have a dramatically better experience.

You just described a bunch of advantages that would still exist if they simply licensed their tech to taxi companies.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#74

Post by colinmorelli »

sbarre wrote: post #61
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of which Uber fixes? Did you hail or call taxis before Uber? The simple ability to see where your car is while en route was game changing. Add to that ratings, embedded payment (“credit card reader broken”) and dynamic pricing and you have a dramatically better experience.

Balance that against the fact that most taxi drivers know the city by heart, including where there is construction, habitual traffic jam, and transit congestion.. I'll take a better drive-to-destination experience over being able to stare at my phone watching a car inch closer to me, or saving a few dollars when I need to get somewhere. A lot of part-time Uber drivers, especially in big cities, come in from the subur…

Interesting angle. My experience (in NYC) has been that while taxis most certainly have better knowledge of the city, Uber is by far more reliable in just getting me there. This is because of the key difference of Uber knowing exactly where I'm going in advance, and relaying turn-by-turn directions to the driver. Most of the time, the taxi driver knows the address or cross streets I'm going to. But when they don't, it's painful. I've never even been asked in a Lyft/Uber, though.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#75

Post by taylorhou »

rzz3 wrote: post #43
Barrin92 wrote: post #22

The piece is exactly right. Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. From a macroeconomic perspective this is terrible because turning taxi firms into countless of one man businesses provides no efficiency gains, it's basically reverse economic development. There is a version of Uber that actually makes sense. As a lean SaaS company that sells its so…

Despite all of the negatives, many of which I agree with, the legacy taxi industry really sucked for riders. Riding in a taxi feels dirty to me, to be honest. Old, ugly cars that never seem well maintained, having to actually call someone on a phone and tell them where to pick you up, often not accepting Apple Pay, Android Pay, credit cards. Rude drivers with no rating system to disincentivize it… It’s sad that Uber…

what's crazy is in this day and age, you'd think uber/lyft are available in most markets but last week, I had to go to Baton Rouge (LSU with 50k students is based there) and I was relegated to a beat up, cigarette smelling, local taxi because no uber/lyft's were available at the airport (due to storms and delayed flights).

Re: The Uber Bubble

#76

Post by sbarre »

ttcbj wrote: post #58
westcort wrote: post #35

My key takeaways: 1. Uber is actually a higher cost/less efficient producer of urban car services than the taxi companies it has driven out of business 2. Individual Uber drivers with limited capital cannot acquire, finance, maintain and insure vehicles more economically than Yellow Cab 3. Expenses other than drivers, vehicles, and fuel account for 15 percent of traditional taxi costs but Uber charges drivers 25-30 p…

These are all interesting points. However, I recently used Uber Premier twice in Miami, after not using any car service for two years, and the experience was excellent. It was fast, friendly, the car was nice, and I was happy with the price. For my use case, I am happy to pay more to get a better service, but it didn’t really seem that expensive. Both drivers had been doing Uber for a long time, which would be surpri…

> Both drivers had been doing Uber for a long time, which would be surprising if they were getting ripped off

Did you happen to ask if this was their full-time gig, or if they were doing it as supplementary income?

Re: The Uber Bubble

#77

Post by imtringued »

Barrin92 wrote: post #22

The piece is exactly right. Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. From a macroeconomic perspective this is terrible because turning taxi firms into countless of one man businesses provides no efficiency gains, it's basically reverse economic development. There is a version of Uber that actually makes sense. As a lean SaaS company that sells its so…

I am a bit confused here. This is a money losing company. Yes there has been some shift from labor to capital recently but overall investors are losing money here.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#78

Post by tmnvix »

barry-cotter wrote: post #47
Barrin92 wrote: post #22

The piece is exactly right. Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. From a macroeconomic perspective this is terrible because turning taxi firms into countless of one man businesses provides no efficiency gains, it's basically reverse economic development. There is a version of Uber that actually makes sense. As a lean SaaS company that sells its so…

This completely neglects the enormous gains to consumers of having cabs that (1) will actually show up if booked ahead of time (2) don’t discriminate by race/ethnicity (3) don’t take the long way round (4) always take cards instead of the machine being “broken” (5) will pick up and drop you off anywhere. Uber and their competitors are and were 100x better at getting drivers to follow the rules taxis were always meant…

I have had Uber drivers fail to show up multiple times. They appear to be heading to the pickup point but then park some distance away and just wait. It's very frustrating. I've never had that experience with a taxi service.

It's nothing to do with my Uber rating. I've since learned that it has something to do with a scam involving short/undesirable trips and cancellation fees.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#79

Post by emteycz »

justinpowers wrote: post #70
emteycz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk with the driver few times? I never had a Uber driver who said they would rather have a normal job. 500+ rides.

Selection bias…

So non-uber drivers don't want to be uber drivers and uber drivers want to be uber drivers? Or what? There was practically nothing else in common between each driver other than their desire to continue working with Uber as they do now. Where's the bias? 500+ rides (probably significantly more bcs I have two accounts) are large enough sample.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#80

Post by imtringued »

yywwbbn wrote: post #64
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. This is the entire gig economy/sharing economy in a nutshell. The platform puts most of the financial risk on the labor side (drivers owning the cars if you're driving Uber, owning the house if you're Airbnb'ing it, etc.) and simply taking a cut of each transaction. The platform owns nothing, the workers hav…

And with all this power these companies still somehow never manage to become profitable. It seem to that the consumer is benefiting the most in this situation because both the VC and labor keep having to subsidize him

It's kind of absurd. These companies are trying to build a moat in an industry with very little barrier to entry and regional compartmentalization. The only thing Uber has going for it is the network effect of being available across multiple cities and countries.
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