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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

#111

Post by jfrunyon »

icebergonfire wrote: post #88
acgh213 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> out of the 22 dollars the customer paid for the delivery, I received 5.61 before tip I am completely ignorant on how this works on the driver’s side, so I could be missing something here: Those 22 dollars the customer paid include whatever food you were delivering, right? Now, I’m sure the Food cost/Service cost split changes from country to country (I’m somewhere in the Euro zone)… but interpolating from those num…

> I’m having trouble conceptualizing how they are making any actual profit after expenses

They're not. They aren't profitable. They have never been profitable. They admit that they would not have been profitable even without COVID last year. They do not expect to be profitable until Q4 of this year - if you remove half their costs and their assumptions hold. They do not expect to actually be profitable (even on EBITDA) for even longer.

http://techcrunch.com/2021/02/12/will-ride-hailing-profits-e...

> in the meantime they (and their ilk) are pushing the traditional restaurant delivery network away since they cannot compete or price nor convenience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

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

#112

Post by ViViDboarder »

jfrunyon wrote: post #109
yuliyp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. That's not even remotely true. The merchant absolutely has the ability to dispute chargebacks.

Yes, but the bank takes the money immediately after accepting the chargeback. The merchant can provide evidence and dispute it to get their money back, but it is immediately withdrawn. And, if I’m remembering correctly, along with a fee.

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

#113

Post by Rebelgecko »

zapdrive wrote: post #95
sen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife’s Uber account (for both rides and food) is banned for life because she had a sleazy driver aggressively come on to her and when she went to get out of the car he said “I know where you live now” and drove off. She complained to Uber, they did nothing other than say “the driver left negative feedback on your ride” and her account got instantly banned. Follow up calls to them just said she “broke terms and con…

I'm not on any side, but I would love to make an observation. > she had a similar sleazy taxi driver years ago, who she complained about to the taxi company. He was fired immediately This actually scares me more than Uber banning your wife. I'm not saying you or your wife lied, but it's sad how just a complaint by a woman can ruin any man's life. (I'm assuming your wife didn't have any evidence and the taxi company j…

Presumably they watched the aforementioned video recording of his behavior before firing him

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

#114

Post by alkonaut »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #48

Obviously, the system shouldn’t be allowing negative fares to occur. Uber needs to eat the cost on those and provide some minimum payout floor for the driver. The driver posted more details further down in the thread showing some of the charges: https://twitter.com/TheSofaaa/status/1399070201925312512?s=2... Ironically, the negative balance appears to be due to regulatory fees applied haphazardly. This includes a $5…

A minimum net hourly pay would solve this. The floor shouldn’t be $0 but the minimum wage plus the driver’s costs.

That floor should also apply when idling.

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

#115

Post by leephillips »

stefan_ wrote: post #26
mullingitover wrote: post #23

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.

“Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck.”

Luck has nothing to do with it. That’s bad planning. Really bad.

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

#116

Post by specialist »

sen wrote: post #36
mullingitover wrote: post #23

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.

My wife’s Uber account (for both rides and food) is banned for life because she had a sleazy driver aggressively come on to her and when she went to get out of the car he said “I know where you live now” and drove off. She complained to Uber, they did nothing other than say “the driver left negative feedback on your ride” and her account got instantly banned. Follow up calls to them just said she “broke terms and con…

The house always wins.

It's past time to nerf these yahoos. Civilize them. Impose tort, fair and impartial judiciary, right to appeal, property rights, and accountability & transparency.

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

#117

Post by mullingitover »

gabereiser wrote: post #92
neeleshs wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say more? The risk of account locks seems very similar on any of the major cloud providers? A brief search shows similar complaints on AWS, for example.

Indeed. AWS has kicked customers off too. Never said they didn’t. I’ve heard more stories from people getting booted from GCP than AWS. By order of 10x it seems like. I’m sure someone’s been kicked off Azure too. Hybrid cloud with some on-prem backup solution is the only way to truly be cloud agnostic and protect yourself and your data from deletion due to a variety of issues. GCP kicked off a game developer (and del…

> What I’m saying is that if you’re a VP in charge of cloud strategy, make sure you have a solid DR plan should you intentionally or unintentionally run afoul of that providers rules.

Really all you need is a mediocre Plan A: don't run afoul of the providers' rules. It's not hard. AWS hosts a lot of content that's even more offensive than Parler, the thing that got Parler in trouble was they weren't able or willing to act on Amazon's demand that they promptly remove content that encouraged or incited violence. So if you're running a platform that hosts content like that, or you're breaking the law or generally breaking the pretty straightforward rules, yeah, have a Plan B, C and D ready to go at a moment's notice. Most of us aren't running things that cater to people who are into political violence or other liability-causing activities so it's not a thing we need to spend a lot of time and money planning for.

Only exception to this rule would be GCP or any other company that's widely known for atrocious service and capricious, random bans.

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

#118

Post by mullingitover »

howzitallworkeh wrote: post #71
mullingitover wrote: post #23

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.

Whether or not it is fair, people should be aware that chargebacks are a nuclear option, at least in the US. Sometimes they get hailed as a magic wand on consumer-advocate sites, but if you issue a chargeback with your bank, you should be prepared to completely sever relations with the vendor.

In my wife's case, Uber compounded the bad experience of a blatant overcharge by casually, automatically dismissing her when she flagged it with them, with no option to appeal to a human. Sloppy business practice built on sloppy automation. Permanently severing relations with them was a really easy call.

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

#119

Post by 3np »

strken wrote: post #76
malwarebytess wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it terrifying? It's accurate. A bug plus shitty automated support with no human in the loop is an intentional product decision. They could have humans in the loop. They could have human support. They could make bugs like this more easily remediable. But they don't. On purpose. To the extent that their "fare review process" and the app failed. Now it's going to be fixed by some PR person. Because it's still che…

I'm pretty sure that at no point did anyone sit down and say "let's charge drivers for trips". It's clearly the unintended consequence of real product decisions, but it's equally clearly not a new strategic direction to bill the supply side of the market. It's terrifying because it illustrates the lack of trust that the general public has in tech. Instead of "looks like someone's having a bad day at the Uber office,…

They had many years of time to address this class of issues, and sometimes it has consistently gotten worse, not better. Why would the trust not go down?

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

#120

Post by sen »

bkuehl wrote: post #87
sen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife’s Uber account (for both rides and food) is banned for life because she had a sleazy driver aggressively come on to her and when she went to get out of the car he said “I know where you live now” and drove off. She complained to Uber, they did nothing other than say “the driver left negative feedback on your ride” and her account got instantly banned. Follow up calls to them just said she “broke terms and con…

Wow, that's great to hear the taxi company stepped up, but I'm completely shocked by it! In the decade of taxi experiences prior to Uber/Lyft/ridesharing almost every taxi experience was absolutely awful. Driving erratically, on the phone, can't (or won't) take cards, won't take the route I said, literally kicking me and my spouse out of the cab and yelling at us for saying they needed to make a left turn instead of…

I've found the taxi drivers here to be really good. Most are older career-driver types who are really nice and know the city back to front, unlike the Uber drivers who are looking at their GPS more than the road or take wrong turns repeatedly.

I think location matters lots, the last city I lived in I avoided taxis at all costs because I found them to be more like you're saying... aggressive, clueless, dirty, etc.

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