It's like Uber are trying to shoot themselves in the foot with all the cost squeezing and profit seeking at the same time they're in a fundamental legal fight defining what they are.
You would think they would go in the opposite direction and pay people such good rates during this controversy, you could hold that up and say, "see? People are clearly much better under this system". But I guess not.
On a separate note, I will say that this is pretty expected in terms of how software errors go. Of course programmers at a company will be checking quite diligently that they're not overpaying through their algorithms. But underpaying? Only those who can't easily check your code are harmed by that one. It is a rare company that spends money and resources on verifying from their users' point of view that they're being delivered what was promised -- unless that company actively cares about the user.
I don't think they have a choice. UberEats is fundamentally unprofitable. If it was run profitably, the high(er) prices would drive a large portion of their customers away and into the arms of other "startups" willing to run at a loss or towards picking up the food themselves. Plus Uber can't pretend to be an early-stage startup anymore and their constant quarterly losses are starting to add up.
I'm still not convinced this new food delivery industry is viable without constant cash injections.
It's not hard to imagine them choosing to pursue Amazon-style vertical integration where they own the "restaurants" themselves. I put "restaurants" in quotes, because it'll almost certainly just be warehouse-style kitchens, where drivers skid up out front and grab food from heated tables, and you won't be able to dine-in at all. It would fill the same role for aspiring restaurateurs as food trucks do today: a startup cost, low-barrier to entry way to build out a brand, rapidly iterate menu-items, and begin building revenue to eventually secure a business loan to open a proper restaurant.
If UberEats can really squeeze both the drivers AND the restaurants, there's no fundamental reason that food delivery can't be done profitably - pizza companies have been doing it in almost all markets for decades.
Brick and mortar retail stores got eaten by Amazon warehouses, and it seems inevitable that many brick and mortar restaurants will eventually get eaten by a massive tech company as well.
Uber's burned 10s of billions in the hopes of becoming a few hundred billion dollar company. Would Uber 2.0 need to burn hundreds of billions in the hope of becoming a hundred billion dollar company?
Pizza chains and others who own their delivery process can at least set where they will deliver and tend to encourage bigger purchases to avoid delivery charges and hopes of fresher food.
I am going to assume the only type of agreement would be tighter integration with restaurants to the point the service name is hidden, as in contracting out drivers to particular restaurants but the difficulty there is guaranteeing a driver is always available. Basically an outsourcing for drivers. Restaurants get some filtering of drivers and drivers have a set number of stores with instant familiarity.
I found most of clients fell into two categories.
Poor and really should not be using the service. Middle of the day was to a lot of businesses/schools. Lunch tips were crap so I avoided that time frame.
How does this not stop this whole conversation in its tracks immediately? There's so much grandstanding about this, you and every other politician or upper middle class tech worker has their takes on how these poor drivers are being tricked into bad deals they can't understand and need the protection of full-time employment. But it's not a very good protection! There are a lot of downsides, and drivers simply don't want it, but for some reason a lot of people feel the need to force this change through anyway.
Our current labor system, and its default assumption that tying yourself to a full-time job with a large company is the only way you deserve to have stability, is just very clearly showing its flaws here. It's not compatible with gig economy work, why can't we look for solutions that drivers would actually want, and that would help every other independent contractor? Things like improving overall safety nets, so that everyone has health coverage and is covered in the case of things like disabilities even if they don't work for a large company.
Almost every take I read on the pro-AB5 side of this argument seems more focused on punishing Uber the corporation for some perceived moral failing, than on actually helping the drivers. It's quite bizarre.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2020/08/19/wil...
But that's the wrong question.
The better question is: What percentage would want to be either full-time or part-time employees?
I would imagine the percentage would be much higher.
When classified as part-time employees, they'd have much of the same flexibility they currently enjoy, but they would at least be covered under minimum-wage laws, same as part-time workers who work at McDonald's or the grocery store.
If Uber/Lyft don't think it's financially viable to offer its workers the same bare-minimum protections that a McDonald's worker gets, then I don't see how it can claim to be a non-exploitative business.
Because that doesn't include the number of people who would want to be ride-share/delivery drivers but don't because they can't be employees.
That pool could have 99% people who want to be employees, but only a small number them (17% of current drivers) keep driving despite their preferences.
Too bad they didn't ask questions like "do you want to deal with independent contractor taxes" and "do you want to set your own hours" and so on, to drill down into why they liked the independent contractor status.
Maybe the solution is to force ride share companies to truly act as matchmakers, where they show passengers and drivers the book and collect a small fee for completed transactions rather than using opaque pricing to maximize their take from both sides of the transaction.
The main case here is about requiring employee status or employee-like basic standards of workers rights for the drivers, even if they don't work full time for a single company but (for example) five hours for Uber followed by three hours for Lyft on the same day.
Workforce moving to the 'gig economy' does not by itself justify abandoning the basic standards and protections from exploitation that our society has decided long ago to afford for even the poorest and most vulnerable workers. There currently are legal loopholes that enable the 'gig employers' to skip these standards. That's a bug, not a feature - it should be fixed.
I wouldn't say it's rare. Companies that do this are very open to lawsuits but also bad press, and that's the thing all companies hate - having to make public statements and ultimately fix the issue, isn't worth it to any business at scale. The DoorDash tipgate was hugely embarrassing for them, and Uber has also been very publicly ridiculed in the past that the the last thing Dara wants is anymore bad press.
I have gotten a check from the CA Treasurer on a few occasions because I didn’t check some box and take a tax deduction that I was entitled to. Not a company, and certainly if I underpaid the state would come after me to be made whole. But some organizations do work both ways.
Uber's argument that they are not employees is based on the concept that they only a platform facilitating a connection between drivers people who need rides or in this case deliveries. But if the contractors are truly separate entities, then Uber by controlling the cost of the ride/delivery, is fixing prices.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/legal-problem-could-crash-ube...
I am not aware what the current status of legal rulings for or against Uber in this regard, but I believe my point still stands.
Under or overpaying on trips is more of an interest to those engineers trying to optimize marketplace efficiency. Meal delivery businesses have as much of an interest in not underpaying as doing so reduces supply availability and therefore reliability and they have also an interest in not overpaying as that reduces profitability. The ultimate goal is optimal pricing in a three sided market to maximize liquidity as the business model does best when you optimize for volume of transactions. Maximizing liquidity amortizes fixed costs over more transactions. This applies as much to the meal delivery companies as to the restaurants involved.
At the end of the day, distance driven is very imperfect as you have issues like poor GPS signal and in cities you have the dilemma of urban canyons and tunnels. Also, drivers don't always take the suggested route. At vehicle speeds, it's hard problem to solve due to time between GPS pings. Another issue besides GPS inaccuracy is clock inaccuracy, especially with round-trip times between server and client and client and server aren't always symmetrical, especially on cellular networks, and this messes up all sorts of clock synchronization strategies. The peanut gallery on HN is seriously underestimating the complexity of measuring distance using GPS. It's pretty darn good when conditions are ideal, but when they aren't, good luck.
Another question is the magnitude of the underpayment in the 21% of trips. Are we talking about 1-2%, 5-10%, some other deviation? If it was something like 1-2%, we should all be amazed. Gage repeatability and reproducibility matters.
If they can snare people into driving for them, there are material switching costs for workers, and 'underpaying' on some level is actually something they can get away with.
At the 'low end of labour' workers generally have zero power, much less during covid, so it's not a 'marketplace' in the more broad sense. If it was, we wouldn't even need minimum wage laws, or Medicare for employed people etc..
If the technical challenge is 'insurmountable' then they need to figure something out: minimum guarnatees etc. , even over the aggregate, as you say.
This could also be an "unintentional-intentional" bug, meaning its presence was just an accident -- but that the company has chosen to prioritize its engineering resources addressing issues that improve its revenue, rather than decreasing it.
2. I could see a company with various ethical lapses like Uber not prioritizing an unintentional bug for a speedy fix.
3. In the intentional scenario, it'd be a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing (popularized by Superman 3 / Office Space). Easier to get away with than a public rate cut, with the downside of bad PR if you get caught.
The interview seems to indicate it's an aggregate underpayment across all trips. The tool is available for examination if you are truly skeptical.
edit: also, you seem to have made your account just to comment on this thread. what's up?
For example, this makes no sense:
"I had this one delivery that was an hour-and-a-half long and I got paid $16 and I thought, 'There is no way that's right,'" Armin Samii, an unemployed computer scientist who has been working Uber Eats on the side, told Salon. "I looked into it and found out that Uber paid me for a one mile delivery instead of a four mile delivery. Of course it's all made worse because I'm on a bike and they don't account for that, but that's a separate issue."
A 11 mile hill climb of Mount Hamilton with 2700 of elevation gain takes me about 1.5 to 2 hours to do. A straight hill climb which you would only find in cities like Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro is like the worst case scenario. A 4 mile trip in pretty much any major city should be maybe 20-25 minutes with stop signs and traffic lights. Not saying there wasn't an issue with that trip, but this makes no sense.
I have worked a lot with this stuff in my career, so I'm inclined to want to see the data myself so I can try and reverse engineer what may have happened.
Furthermore Armin Samii appears to have worked for a direct competitor of the company he's criticizing while developing this.
(a) I thought the whole point of these apps was to simplify things for the user. I just want to know how much I pay in total, upfront, as I'm selecting food. Include taxes and delivery fees in a big fat "this is what you will pay" display on the screen and I'll be a 10X happier user. Delivery apps were a great opportunity to axe the complexities of tipping culture and they screwed it up IMO.
(b) They ask you for tips before they even dispatch your food, which makes zero sense to me. Tips are supposed to be "extra" based on the quality of service, so how are you supposed to blindly give 10% or 15% without even having received service? (I always put 0% when ordering and up it to 10-15% on delivery OR give cash tips, which is how things have always worked before the age of apps, but it's cumbersome to do that.)
Just like in a restaurant: maybe your default tip is 25%, but great service bumps that up, and bad service bumps it down. You go in expecting to pay 25%.
My expectation of apps is to get rid of these artifacts of the past. In most other parts of the world prices are given to you upfront, no tips necessary.
Not only that, but Uber asks you before you even check out if you want to give 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, or a custom amount. Considering I haven't gotten my food or service yet, how the hell am I supposed to know? I don't want to deal with this decision. You tell me how much I'm supposed to pay and just present me one number. I'll hit "buy" if it fits my budget.
Uber got rid of cab driver run-arounds, they can get rid of tips in the same way and just ask for a fair price upfront. As a customer I would find up-front, no-tip pricing a MUCH better UX.
So I immediately tipped the person on the phone £45
How ridiculous does that seem?
https://www.salon.com/2020/08/20/programmers-say-uber-eats-i...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ubercheats/pkdblhe...
Overpayments are much less frequent than underpayments, and regardless: when someone accepts a trip, who knows if they did it because they thought "that amount sounds fair" or thought "that amount given the distance shown sounds fair." The only fair thing for Uber to do here is to rectify all underpayments, and let the overpayments stand.
Further: just because Uber couldn't find a route as efficiently as the extension could doesn't mean it was an overpayment. The extension uses Google Maps. If the driver used Uber Navigation to navigate, and Uber navigation was twice as long as Google's - is that really an overpayment?
For the second part I agree, but without seeing outlier, maybe in some cases google couldn’t find the best route, compared to the app.
PS: all this stats used Google Maps shortest path or best path?
I’d say that Uber’s wide reach is valuable, the fact that they likely exist in the city you’re visiting, the fact that they likely have enough cars to pick you up in under 5 minutes. These are valuable things that don’t come from individual drivers or small taxi companies, but rather from big aggregators.
For uber is good that wide reach, for the end user not so much.
Costco is valuable to me because it saves me time from having to research products and supply chains. I could go to aliexpress.com, but I don’t because I’d rather spend my time in other ways.
If I land in a foreign country, I could spend time researching taxi companies, or I can save time and pay Uber/Lyft a premium if I already trust them.
As a seller, a middleman (or broker) can save me time by discriminating against buyers I don’t want to waste time entertaining.
Anyway, interesting to see that that wasn't an isolated incident when it comes to Uber the company.
The only mileage tracker that matters is the vehicle odometer on a stock vehicle with stock diameter tires with most of its tread. You'd need a device connected to the vehicle via ODB2 where you can press a bunch at the start and end of each trip.
They're no worse than your run of the mill tech company, so I suspect something odd is going on. I dislike corporations in general and want to see them play fair, but Uber changed the way I live life, and I'm constantly worried bureaucrats and angry business/tech nerds are going to regress us back to the taxi stone ages. We're just one law away from having to go back to hailing a cab with our thumbs and trusting their internal GPS.
In short, they are all of the evils of a short-sighted "tech" company in one package.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-d...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/29/labor...
So media should stop reporting on possible bad actions by Uber?
Excess coverage or not, the media exposed discrimination and harassments at Uber that led to the company changing for the better.