This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
For drivers, the results are unpredictable and too often unfair. Data obtained by the Star shows Uber Eats’ platform can offer two food couriers different wages for the exact same trip.
Labour advocates charge that the app collects data on driver behaviour and can use it to decide who it can pay at a lower rate, allowing the company to pocket the difference and boost its revenue. This concept is widely referred to as algorithmic wage discrimination.
Wild
Wage discrimination sounds like a fancy way of saying wage theft.
Yep, it's just when they only do wage theft on the most disadvantaged employees that are the least likely to sue them or quit as a result.
Par for the course based on Uber's history. I stopped using them in lieu of a local/community app...which is honestly absolute garbage, but it is essentially completely pass-through and free for my local area restaurants to use.
I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people's needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.
If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.
This would be a really good fit for federation I think.
As a software engineer I'm down to help out on this, free of charge.
I'm a developer too, and I appreciate the offer very much, but I'm not really in a situation where I could work on something like this. It's just an idea though, anyone could run with it.
It shouldn't be a massive surprise. The whole platform exists as a way to circumvent minimum wage laws for drivers while taking a massive slice of restaurant profits.
No hygiene inspections either, half the places listed aren't even restaurants or takeaways, it's just in somebody's house...
Time to change your name from Patel to Smith
I hear the smallest violin Everytime I hear about UberEATS executive complain about the company not being profitable.
I know GrubHub is bad too but I typically only pay a small fee of 3$ for their service and a tip of 20% to the driver.
Yet UberEATS usually includes a $10-15 UberEATS fee which the employee sees none of. Yet "oh no UberEATS is not profitable, oh no my 3rd yacht isn't big enough"
Tipping culture caused this mess, meritocracy bullshit
I only use eats if there's a solid promo, and then I pick up the food myself. They don't get the fee, I don't have to tip, and I get the deal. A lot of time the price per item is cheaper on pickup too. Their fees are absolutely ridiculous, and they are just a middleman. They for sure are losing money on me.
How much did the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, earn last year?
The awful part is, even without tipping the driver the food is drastically more expensive. The restaurant takes an extra cut, The delivery service takes an extra cut. This person's delivering your food practically for free and the meal is already sit down restaurant price.
Just one note, restaurant prices go up because uber eats charges a percentage based fee for each menu item. So, restaurants need to up the prices on the app just to make the same amount of money. Just some good ol' under-the-table fuckery courtesy of Silicon Valley bastards.
In any case, when it cost me $20 more to get the meal through delivery, and f**** over a delivery person I've got a lot more incentive to drive 10 minutes to pick up food.
My wife and I ran the numbers and, in our area, Uber Eats was pulling in about 1/4 to 1/3 the cost of the meal between charges to the restaurant and the customer. We were discussing opening a non-profit delivery service in our area. Turns out it's pretty hard to do.
Uber eats is such a scam. When these new VC companies come on the block offering things that are to good to be true I am constantly saying "we shouldn't support this unsustainable vc funded business, once they have market share they will have killed the competition and then they will raise their prices"
So many places used to deliver at reasonable prices but after years of uber delivering at way cheaper rates they stopped. Now uber delivers at $10 more.
Yeah I liked the idea of Uber at first because taxis have been shitty for a long time and Uber was shaking up that industry.
But then I learned that Uber wasn't making money and immediately realized that they were just looking better than taxis for as long as they needed to to drive them out of business so they can be even worse, while providing even less than taxis companies do. At least taxi companies have a relationship with their drivers while Uber was just a platform for connecting anonymous riders with almost as anonymous drivers and handling the financial aspect of it (so that they control it all as middlemen with control of the wallet).
So now I just use taxi services when I need a ride (while cursing the state of mass transit in North America and GM plus corrupt politicians for their role in making this like this).
Similar story with hotels/airbnb, though they've made it even worse because they are affecting the housing market itself rather than just the luxury service of staying somewhere while away from home.
Many reports of landlords evicting their tenants so they could turn their homes into airbnbs... Disgusting
I will never use uber so long as I shall live.
This must be that innovation which is making the world a better place that these tech parasites keep gushing about.
I was just commenting on a thread about public transportation (there's none where live) and someone commented that they're moving to micro transportation by just buying a $3 Uber every time they need to go somewhere. Even if uber is only taking $1 of that, $2 isn't paying someone to drive you somewhere. Uber drivers should make at least $30/hr.
I haven't done the math but if you don't drive that much, did it beat their yearly costs (maintenance/insurance/gas)? Honestly that scheme is wild but makes total sense for a customer because not having to deal with car maintenance and insurance seems like a good tradeoff. I wonder when the dominos are all gonna tumble for these driving companies
I don't know where the person who commented that lives, but you can't get an Uber five blocks for under $10 around here. If I was that close and walkable I'd just walk. I do know uber is losing drivers locally though because they don't pay enough, certainly not enough for people to maintain their cars. It's predatory employment at this point, and it is becoming normalized.
I took one recently and found out Lyft was taking the ride at a loss. (They must average out the rides). I needed to drop my vehicle somewhere for maintenance, called a Lyft and it was something like 5.42 before I added a tip. I asked the driver when it had gotten so much cheaper and he said he had been doing well and checked and was getting paid $9 before tip for the ride. Told him I was giving him $10 for going out of his way as a tip, and the app actually wouldn't allow me to tip that much, I couldn't get above 9.58 or something. Anyways, slower areas they must be taking a loss to try to get more market in the area.
Also, Lyft has always been better for me when needed, Uber won't allow me to schedule a ride, so you have to wait till you want to leave, and in a slow area that just means... There might not be anyone. If I schedule it with Lyft for a set time I've never had an issue with that.
Buddy, I cant use that service in any good concience...
