Did they find something else? The only people I know who do or maybe did this are those who can’t find other work or they it’s a second gig on top of working already. The reason for the second group is despite popular belief, there are two many part-time jobs out there asking for full-time availability. I had this problem when I worked while going to college but not via work-study.
Yeah in my area there was almost no delivery before these place showed up. In Eugene there was a local one called Pony Express but their fee was pretty simple. It was like 4 dollars for the first restaurant, another 2 for a second pick-up and then some sort of minimum. But… they delivered all around U of O, lots of students who like to eat out.
Aaaw, so the moving people around works okay but it’s the food delivery that is just failing miserably. I still… question the math when it comes to wear on a car, insurance like the good one not the one that will likely deny when they find out that is commercial driving, and maintenance on that.
I am not sold on the gig economy as a whole, but I can certainly get behind the idea that pieces of it are worse or just not maintainable compared to others.
After watching Nomadland, I now know Amazonis in this space with Amazon Campforce although it’s a bit different, more like seasonal work travelers.
I’m not sold either. By the way how is Nomandland, I know (virtually) some early semi-retirees who’ve done this?
I think Uber is basically just a better taxi service, and you are paying someone to take you from A to B. I think lots of uber drivers are kidding themselves as too how much they make for the reason you say. but once they become experienced I think they can make $~15/hour. The deliver services fail IMO cause of the extra stop to the restaurant.
It’s also the expectation: we expect to pay a certain price for a taxi; it’s not something folks use regularly. But a 50% markup on a meal is something different, altogether.
I thought Nomadland was more engaging than I expected it to be. It’s not a movie I would typically pick, but it showed up on page and it has actors in it I really like, I mean this is a movie all about the acting who are pretty good at keeping things going and getting me to care about all those involved. And then finding out it was based on a book and some of the employers, Amazon, and other sites are real as are a few of the events kind of surprised me. The reasoning behind why people “choose” that lifestyle was portrayed as mostly tragic which fits in with the people I have also known who tried or sometimes threaten to do this sort of life. It’s a good reminder that the gig economy, the no where to land sort of thing is not reserved just for the 20-30 group entering a poor economy.
It’s low budget, but it rarely felt lacking to me. I say rarely because there are some public spaces i think would just have a heck of a lot more people moving around them if the budget was large, but that’s about it.
Our taxi service here cost me about same amount to go 10 miles here as it did almost 20 hours somewhere, and it was an old unfortunate vehicle. We don’t have the weird licensing thing that like NY does, but the services were not good and these independent contractors have to like rent the car from the company and earn back the money in fairs… they can actually lose money while working which seems insane. It’s one business taking advantage of workers competing with another business doing something similar.
When I interview for my work oh about 5-6 years ago, the company would not reimburse anyone for using Uber or Lyft. I wound up using a town car service one time and taxi the other. Now it sounds like they prefer anyone traveling to use them.
Couple of class actions* filed against Uber in the UK today, presumably by drivers.
It’s odd timing, as Deliveroo just won a case against its drivers around unionisation. But I’m assuming these have been in the works since the Supreme Court ruling against Uber.
Technically not class actions, as the claimants are identified, but there are thousands of them.
I hope not either. I also hope that isn’t because of the rating of the rider. my only guess is there could have been a Surge and that’s slowly returning to normal. results may have varied on a search only a minute or two apart.
At least, I’m hoping that is what it was.
It’s mainly because of COVID that they are so busy right now. As mentioned elsewhere, my wife is changing jobs. During her downtime she’s driving for Doordash. The pay (to the driver) is very, very minor. She calculated she’d have to hustle probably 10-12 hours for $200 right now, and it would probably be closer to $150. And before someone says, “but that’s still $15 an hour,” note that is prior to gas being paid for and it is 1099 pay I believe, meaning you still need to pay taxes on it at the end of the year.
The movie used mostly real people except for the named actors you see as the leads. We watched it and were awed with the beauty of the locations paired with the stark reality that everything they are doing there is actually a real thing. People living out of vans, migrating for work. It’s … crazy.
I recently used a website to find a parking spot in San Francisco. I did it from my work Macbook, and from my home Windows computer. Same home network. Same exact time. The prices quoted from the Mac were higher (the cheapest $7 spots on Windows were $9 on the Mac).
So maybe the phone on the left is an iPhone and the phone on the right is an Android?
But, it’s Uber, so it’s probably the obvious thing.
Uber is a bezzle (“the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it”). Every bezzle ends.
Uber’s time is up.
Uber was never going to be profitable. Never. It lured drivers and riders into cars by subsidizing rides with billions and billions of dollars from the Saudi royal family, keeping up the con-artist’s ever-shifting patter about how all of this would some day stand on its own.
Right. I’ve worked for a business that was losing lots of money while it continued to try to be a high-growth “startup”, that once it stopped spending oodles of money on acquiring new customers and creating new business lines, and settled down to spending the minimum needed to service its existing customers, turned out to be comfortably profitable. I don’t think there’s much reason to think that Uber can’t do this. Of course its always possible they blow themselves up before recognizing reality.
My vague recollection is that on a per ride basis, their ride sharing and food delivery businesses are profitable, at least pre-pandemic. What makes it unprofitable is the oodles of money spent on capture—a cost which presumably goes away or slows down at some point (ala Netflix). At least that’s the model that investors are relying on.
Well, number 1, leave the research and development of self-driving cars to someone else with oodles of money. And number 2, quit blowing cash on so many execs/corporate. We’re talking about an app that helps get personal drivers to a customer. They have a large amount of backend for just that.
Just me, but everyone with a macbook pro could eat a big fat one and be happy with their low cost and low powered alternative.
Uber has offices all over the world. They also have a large sales team. I dunno, I haven’t figured that out either.
But they have more locations than the company I work for, which actually manufactures multiple products and sells them globally. In my very unknowing opinion, they seem top heavy compared to what they actually do.
The profit margins for taxi services rely on scarcity. That’s why cities control the number of taxis, to limit availability and drive up demand to levels that fund the underlying infrastructure costs, i.e. the cars and maintenance and insurance. Uber only works by offloading all of that cost onto the drivers, which is not a sustainable model.
If customers keep paying once they raise their prices to account for the externalities they currently offload or subsidize, sure. But by then, it’s not going to be cheaper than a taxi.
