201–210 of 424 posts
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> I tried Lyft the other day, but after they charged me $25 as an "authorization hold" without notification, I cancelled my ride and decided to stick with Uber. Note that Uber's auth charge is usually around $1. $25 may not be a significant amount for some, but it's non-trivial for a college student like myself. Most gas pumps authorize $100. Use a credit card.
not everybody has a credit card.
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Since when do hackers bleat about obeying laws and regulations? What happened to having a "we can do better" mindset? Has everybody wigged out and flipped their "I want a nanny state to protect me 24/7" bit? Hacker News is fairly progressive/authoritarian. The kind of attitude you describe can still be found on slashdot.
And as a leftist, Hacker News is very, very libertarian-leaning most of the time by nature of its general support for startup companies no matter what laws they break and its general dislike of laws and systems designed to protect people from the sociopathic entities we call companies. There's some dissent, but it's certainly not a progressive haven. This is one of those places where people will happily sit around an…
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Would the monopoly plan really work? Is there something that would prevent competition from reappearing when prices are raised? At least from customer perspective it would be pretty easy to use couple of apps and shop between different providers. For drivers this might be of course more difficult, since Uber can use contracts and other mechanisms to prevent them from working with other providers.
> "Would the monopoly plan really work?" IMO no. Others mention the network effect, and while it will certainly be a factor, I don't think it will be anywhere near strong enough to make the monopoly plan work. The network effect for Uber is really local - at the city level. An "Uber, but only in Austin" service can easily compete with a national-level Uber, since the vast majority of cab rides are taken within a user…
Not really. Uber customers only pay 41% of the cost of their rides. The rest is subsidized by Uber's investors. This is what allows them to compete with (read: severely undercut) taxi companies.
Local ridesharing won't have this massive advantage.
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From the same FTC page: Pricing below your own costs is also not a violation of the law unless it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses. In markets with a large number of sellers, such as gasoline retailing, it is unlikely that one company c…
The key part is " ...has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm ". That's not the case here. I don't see Uber creating a monopoly in any way. If they raise prices to unreasonable levels (i.e., more than people used to pay for regular cabs), people will go to Lyft, Juno, or the next ride-hailing startup. If there's no competitor remaining, new ones will show up. Or regular cabs will be…
Regarding your point about probability of creating a monopoly:
"Brishen Rogers, an associate professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law who has studied Uber’s effects on the taxi market, said traditional cab companies are clearly threatened by newer competitors, and he expects many more will go out of business as a result.
[Many] lenders, including Citibank, expressed concerns about the effects that “nontraditional ride-sharing companies” would have on the city’s traditional medallion-based business model. "
http://www.wsj.com/articles/san-franciscos-biggest-taxi-oper...
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That's a good question. As far as I know these losses are pretty epic, so it's somewhat uncharted territory. They're also not directly comparable to previous unicorns because of their cost structure. They also can't exactly amp up the website ads to cash in on advertising, like previous big losers who turned things around.
autonomous driving could potentially cut one of the main expenses (like the driver's fee), which could cut down prices even more, and probably get them enough of a margin to make them profitable. that's probably why it makes sense to dominate the market while they still can.
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To some degree, Juno's stated differentiator is being the best ride hail app from the drivers perspective by: - 50% of founder equity goes to drivers - 10% vs 20-25% cut of fares - no pooled concept (this may be purely because they're too small to support it, though it is also unpopular with drivers
Why do I care what the drivers like? I don't buy any other products or services based on the happiness of the workers. Uber still has the most drivers and the cheapest prices.
My understanding is that in mature markets, Uber is profitable. The issue is that it takes a few years to become profitable in a market and so it's extreme growth pushes out profitability on the whole for a few years
Not before destroying any competition with cripplingly low rates. That's the problem: I can't hail a goddamn taxi anymore, despite it being cheaper by any back of the envelope calculation for society as a whole.
How is it 'cheaper' to manufacture extra yellow cars and have them drive around aimlessly searching the streets for fares vs. hitching a ride with my neighbour who drives for Uber part-time with the personal car he'd have bought anyways?
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Wow, those are some great articles with interesting points. That paints a very grim and brutal picture for Uber.
I didn't see any comment about Uber's main advantage tho, which is a shame... 1. being able to scale supply to meet demand. In the traditional taxi model, the number of taxis and drivers are mostly fixed. during times of low demand more fixed costs brings more waste (cars driving around not making money) and in times of high demand represent lost profit (cars not capturing market potential). taxi company's can try an…
They also updated their own phone app to provide all the functionality of the upstarts, but with local staff to deal with problems.
Edit: http://www.taxiwars.org/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.0/