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FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

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Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#211

Post by bze12 »

I’ve found that apps like uber, coinbase, robinhood etc that offer subscriptions can opt you in somewhat unexpectedly because most people are accustomed to an IAP confirmation screen. They can bypass this due to the nature of their subscription, so one too many “continue” taps and bam you’re subscribed. They don’t display pricing so prominently either.

Happened to me with coinbase, I accidentally subscribed and got charged for 3 months. Luckily they were able to refund me since I didn’t actually use the service.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#212

Post by clort »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #184
nradov wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't fathom why so many customers voluntarily subject themselves to abuse by food delivery services. Overpay for cold, late food (which the driver might have already sampled). I mean I can sort of understand the use case for customers who are stuck at home due to illness or something. But I've seen plenty of young people in good health waste scarce funds on UberEats and similar services. Why? When I want tak…

Ordering my go-to meal at this restaurant down the block with Grubhub+ has $0 delivery fee and $1 "service fee". It takes roughly 4 minutes to go get it myself, assuming there's no line. $1 for 4 minutes is $15 an hour -- I value my time more than that. It's always here within 10-15 minutes. It's never been cold, and the bags are stapled shut, so I don't think the meals have ever been sampled. Plus it feels nice to b…

[flagged]

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#213

Post by eastbound »

paxys wrote: post #40

The latest dark pattern in all these apps is that they will mess up your order/ride and then "refund" you in the form of account credit. There's no way to actually get your money back. Trying to contact support results in an endless loop of help screens and chatbots. If you are able to figure out the magic combination of options that will get you to a support agent they will say "sure we will refund your money" but t…

I once had a 5€ surprise surcharge after a trip. Since Uber’s chatbots were a deadend, I brought up a full-on litigation against them (France). A month later, my litigation was closed and I received 5€ on my bank account.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#214

Post by leirjtliewjtl »

paxys wrote: post #40

The latest dark pattern in all these apps is that they will mess up your order/ride and then "refund" you in the form of account credit. There's no way to actually get your money back. Trying to contact support results in an endless loop of help screens and chatbots. If you are able to figure out the magic combination of options that will get you to a support agent they will say "sure we will refund your money" but t…

Silicon valley doesn't deserve credit for inventing this method. It's ancient. Back in the 90s Nintendo lost a suit for price fixing and somehow got the judge to let them "compensate" plaintiffs by giving them coupons toward the purchase of additional games. Comcast, AT&T, GM, Columbia Records, maybe the majority of Fortune 500 companies have done this. Tale as old as time. Silicon valley didn't invent shit.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#215

Post by McGlockenshire »

zippergz wrote: post #88
cameldrv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my biggest aggravation. They consistently underreport estimated pickup times. Dropoff times are essentially universally significantly later than the estimate before booking. It's things like this that make agents potentially exciting. So much of enshittification is wrapping an essentially good service in a crappy and misleading UI to drive extra revenue. If you can replace the lying UI with a more honest one,…

This is the same thing the food delivery apps (including Uber Eats) do. I have screenshots showing the estimated delivery time pretty consistently jumping up anywhere between 20% and 50% from what it shows on the initial screen to what you get once you've placed the order. And then often they don't even make that time estimate.

Dev turned doordash driver here. Let me tell you why those estimates are bullshit.

First, there are three different ways that orders can come in. 1) Tight integration into the POS system. 2) Through a separate parallel physical tablet. 3) Something spits out something on a printer.

There are opportunities with 1 and 2 to do some sort of feedback on how busy things are. I know for the tablet option that at least for some restaurants they are able to indicate how long the order will take.

But half the places I get to have no integration, they just put the ticket on the pile and it's done when it's done. A couple places that do this in particular also don't even start the order until the driver shows up, on purpose. The app will tell the customer I'll pick it up in 5 minutes no matter what. There's a chain that does prep work in front of the customer, but certain locations will not make pickup/delivery orders if there's anyone in line in the shop. I stopped doing deliveries there.

You'd also think that places with the potential for awesome metrics making pickup timing a breeze would be fast food chains, right? Nope. Not a single iota of smart integration whatsoever.

I've found that keeping customers in the loop as to what's happening with their deliveries ends up keeping them happy, even if it's gonna be slow. I suppose some things never change.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#216

Post by delusional »

mehlmao wrote: post #191
ryandrake wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are at the point where your only option left is a chargeback, that is a “burning the bridges” moment anyway. Why would you want to continue doing business with a company that treats you like that? I would be grateful to be banned: it means I don’t have to go to the trouble of canceling my account. I’ve had to do a handful of chargebacks and I don’t know or care whether they banned me: I would never voluntarily…

One reason you might still want to use them is that they used anticompetitive blitzscaling strategies and ran at a loss to prevent competitors from taking off.

That could have been a great reason to support legislation. Really quite a shame that nobody put that forward.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#217

Post by delusional »

ryandrake wrote: post #167
teeray wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing is that you can't even do a chargeback, otherwise you get banned. There is no recourse for the consumer. If this is their solution for fighting chargebacks, they should get banned from accepting Visa / MC / AMEX.

If you are at the point where your only option left is a chargeback, that is a “burning the bridges” moment anyway. Why would you want to continue doing business with a company that treats you like that? I would be grateful to be banned: it means I don’t have to go to the trouble of canceling my account. I’ve had to do a handful of chargebacks and I don’t know or care whether they banned me: I would never voluntarily…

I have a friend who had a bad experience with a company once. After drawn out fight for the equivalent of a months salary with lawyers getting involved and threats of collections, the company made a final statement. "We will refund you, but you'll be blacklisted". My friend was delighted, and responded to them as such. He thanked them, since now he wouldn't have to remember their name to avoid ever accidentally buying from them again.

He found a local contractor to do the job instead.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#218

Post by tuchsen »

McGlockenshire wrote: post #215
zippergz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same thing the food delivery apps (including Uber Eats) do. I have screenshots showing the estimated delivery time pretty consistently jumping up anywhere between 20% and 50% from what it shows on the initial screen to what you get once you've placed the order. And then often they don't even make that time estimate.

Dev turned doordash driver here. Let me tell you why those estimates are bullshit. First, there are three different ways that orders can come in. 1) Tight integration into the POS system. 2) Through a separate parallel physical tablet. 3) Something spits out something on a printer. There are opportunities with 1 and 2 to do some sort of feedback on how busy things are. I know for the tablet option that at least for s…

You're spot on, I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike on the weekends for exercise and the wait times are BS because everyone orders lunch/dinner at the same time and they're in essentially a random queue with everyone else who orders. Add to that multiple pick ups and drop offs and you've got a mess.

Talking to people really does help though, everyone wants to be more forgiving when you remind them theirs a human factor involved in getting the food to them.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#219

Post by ac29 »

dtnewman wrote: post #209
paxys wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going by that theory why doesn't Visa just jack up their prices by 10x? After all what are merchants going to do, not accept Visa? Turns out yes, that's exactly what they will do. Look at the number of business that don't take Amex for example for the same reason. Large companies especially have enough leverage to negotiate their own deals with credit card operators, like Costco does with Visa.

Costco is a bit different. If I don't have a Visa, i can pay with cash, personal check, or debit card. Sure, I'd prefer to pay with credit card, but it's not a huge deal for me to use a debit card there. With Uber, there simply isn't an alternative. If they don't accept Visa then i can't use a credit card (or most debit cards, since those go through the visa network too) and there isn't a reasonable way for me to pay…

> With Uber, there simply isn't an alternative. If they don't accept Visa then i can't use a credit card (or most debit cards, since those go through the visa network too) and there isn't a reasonable way for me to pay at all.

Uber takes Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay too. Any would let you use a bank account. You can also deposit cash into PayPal and I think Venmo as well.

Re: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

#220

Post by ggm »

During the early days of Uber, it was breaking Australian trade practices law in the regulated taxi industry. Uber told drivers it would give them financial backing, if taken to court.

I believe this was in itself, a significant departure from business ethics: It may be the regulations were bad, but inviting drivers to become scofflaw and offering them indemnity from payment in civil suit, feels like taking corporate lawfare into a new realm.

Quite aside from this disregard for Australian Business law, Uber was transfer pricing the profits from the taxi business into the USA. It operated at a loss in Australia, and exported a lot of revenue to the USA.

There was, and continues to be, many problems with taxi as a business, and the regulator was highly deficient. These problems relate to reliability, driver ethics, safety for women, minorities (things like drivers refusing to take seeing-eye dogs, and hassling solo women riding home) -I'm not blind to the failure here and I do not personally view this as "all regulated industries are worse than free enterprise" -the regulator just couldnt be bothered enforcing it's requirements.

The real problem was that the cost of a taxi plate rose over a 20 year period at 2-3 times the rate of inflation. Towards the end, a taxi plate was a $500k investment and was owned by many ex accountants, lawyers, doctors and the like as a massive capital gain, independently of the social utility of running taxi as a function. -This destroyed the real driver cooperative movement, and made restriction of entry to taxi a necessary economic forcing function: all attempts to add drivers deflated the capital value of the plate, and were opposed by the current owners.

When this was eventually liquidated (Dublin for example) the capital losses were extreme. A $500k plate could drop to $10k or less. A lot of people had life savings eroded, the industry collapsed. Brisbane wasn't much different. Canberra had this too.

London, cities with a high barrier to entry like "the knowledge" and the LEZ have different models. I don't know if Uber is in London.

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