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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

#81

Post by Marsymars »

dheera wrote: post #72
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.

Uber Support on Twitter: "Thanks for bringing this to our attention, @TheSofaaa . We believe this is due to a technical bug, which we are actively investigating. We apologize to you and any other drivers who may be impacted, all of whom will be fully refunded." It's kind of sad that these days the only way to get real support is to make noise on Twitter. And probably 95% of the time posts don't get that initial snowb…

I suspect it’s not really the public nature of Twitter that makes its responses better, it’s simply that internal procedures empower people manning social media to fix customer problems more effectively than the normal customer support channels.

I don’t have Twitter, but I have complained to companies via Facebook (which at this point I don’t notably use either, but still have an account) private messages, and have had my problem fixed efficiently after complete failure via multiple other methods of contact. (Those companies being Vodacom South Africa who kept sending me some customer’s invoices, and Uber Eats, which made a complete mess of an order in multiple ways.)

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

#82

Post by neeleshs »

gabereiser wrote: post #32
stefan_ wrote: 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.

The “Does your business run on GCP?” needs to be understood by every VP out there. If you are a software company, and a _cough_ security company, that’s all in on GCP, you don’t know what you are doing.

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.

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

#83

Post by dogsgobork »

davidhyde wrote: post #24

13.5 miles in 16 minutes. Including stopping? That seems a little quick. Perhaps it was an automatically charged speeding fine ;)

The map appears to show the route as being mostly highway, with the destination being the airport. Depending on the time of day it wouldn't be unreasonable for that to average to about 60mph.

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

#84

Post by judge2020 »

mullingitover wrote: post #29
stefan_ wrote: 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.

It certainly feels illegal to have the threat of a ban when you make a good faith report of fraudulent charges. A business could have a pattern of deliberate overcharges that they layer in with regular transactions with the knowledge that enough users will just give in and eat the fraudulent charge to avoid losing access to the service. If the business has run the numbers and found that it's a net gain in profits fro…

Regarding the dead sibling comment, it's never RICO.

https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...

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

#85

Post by tzs »

yuliyp wrote: post #51
stefan_ wrote: 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…

> It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab.

The merchant is stuck with more than the tab. There's also a chargeback fee, which can range from around $15 to several times that depending on who they use for payment processing.

> Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally.

Sometimes it means that the customer didn't even try to resolve the dispute. At one place I worked we always gave a refund when one was requested, with no hassle. Some customers, though, would not ask. They would go straight to chargeback.

I think that because some companies make it a major hassle to get them to issue a refund, some consumers try to do a chargeback first and only call the merchant if the bank requires them to try to settle the issue directly first.

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

#86

Post by choward »

Why is everyone so concerned that the earnings was a negative amount of money? Instead of being charged, the driver only got paid $0.01. Would that be okay? In a way the driver is still getting charged because the gas alone is more than that. If this is just one example, imagine all the drivers who don't get a negative earnings but end up spending more than they make. The real question is what number is okay and how do you calculate it.

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

#87

Post by bkuehl »

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…

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 right (we lived in the area and knew where we were going). I'm convinced that a taxi driver has to literally kill someone before any action will be taken against them. I've found that Uber/Lyft usually tends to side with the rider but, like you shared, that's not always the case. The mutual rating system is a net plus IMO. Every cab company is different I guess, but I will never set foot in a cab again out of principle.

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

#88

Post by icebergonfire »

acgh213 wrote: post #59
petee wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 numbers, I get the feeling that Uber must be subsidizing the service very heavily.

They don’t charge that much extra money to the customer, so I wonder where the profit is coming from.

I’m having trouble conceptualizing how they are making any actual profit after expenses, and in the meantime they (and their ilk) are pushing the traditional restaurant delivery network away since they cannot compete or price nor convenience.

I don’t have a conclusion for this train of thought, just a bit of shock here in the early morning.

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

#89

Post by dheera »

Marsymars wrote: post #81
dheera wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber Support on Twitter: "Thanks for bringing this to our attention, @TheSofaaa . We believe this is due to a technical bug, which we are actively investigating. We apologize to you and any other drivers who may be impacted, all of whom will be fully refunded." It's kind of sad that these days the only way to get real support is to make noise on Twitter. And probably 95% of the time posts don't get that initial snowb…

I suspect it’s not really the public nature of Twitter that makes its responses better, it’s simply that internal procedures empower people manning social media to fix customer problems more effectively than the normal customer support channels. I don’t have Twitter, but I have complained to companies via Facebook (which at this point I don’t notably use either, but still have an account) private messages, and have h…

Yeah that's true. I was at an acquaintance's party on the rooftop of a sleek, modern apartment building near Berkeley and a tile came loose and almost fell through the floor, opening up a void into some machinery that this friend could have easily fallen through and gotten seriously injured, but with quick reactions we saved them from falling through.

The acquaintance didn't care to do anything about it so I sent e-mails to their property management the next day, and got no response. I then shamed the property management co on their Facebook page in comments with photos of the void and that got a prompt response.

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

#90

Post by Marsymars »

pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #64
zaroth wrote: post #40

Another Uber bug I ran into a couple weeks ago. I had a long trip which I updated after departing to be a short trip. After getting out of the Uber I clicked to pay a 20% tip, and it paid it on the original (much higher) amount. Worked out to be almost a 100% tip. I called support, walked the very nice woman through what happened, she filed a bug report and reset the tip to a normal amount.

> I had a long trip which I updated after departing to be a short trip Bugs notwithstanding, if intentional, then that's a pretty scummy thing to do. Not all drivers are given the full details of the offer they are accepting (it's the norm not to have details), but some offers that drivers receive do include things like "guaranteed $X trip". So even if unintentional, someone would be getting screwed there (e.g. Uber,…

Many places have legislation that forbids taxis from discriminating based on trip destination.

If someone lives in such a place, Uber shouldn’t be allowed to incentivize one trip over another based on destination, so if a passenger circumvents any such incentives, the ethical problem really is not with the passenger.

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