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Uber Eats removes delivery fee for Black-owned restaurants
- kburman 6y agoWhat I don't understand how come ideas like this are generated and even passed by the management?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoManagement just doesn't have any particular skill at not generating flagrantly illegal ideas. I once saw a guy announce in a company-wide email that he was leading an initiative to help the recruiting team bucket incoming applications by gender. I strongly suspect that whoever approved this program is currently being yelled at by their legal department.
- bradleyjg 6y agoI don’t expect managers to know the law, I do expect them to check with those that do.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoAnd responsible managers do. Unfortunately, many others conceptualize legal as a department to help them fight the law rather than a department to help them follow it.
- jacobush 6y agoI don't think their move here is illegal. I think it's ill-advised, bad PR, will backfire and probably predatory on the group they are ostensibly trying to help. (Maybe even without them even understanding why.) That all said, I was almost going to downvote your comment, but it made remember how much Uber actually has made a business model out of breaking the law in every country they are active in. Move fast and break things became move fast and break the law.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoCan you go into more detail? I've seen other people hint at that perspective elsewhere in the thread, and I want to understand it, because right now it's just completely mystifying to me. Uber Eats is now charging people extra to order from some restaurants depending on the race of their owners; how is that not a straightforward violation of antidiscrimination law?
- jacobush 6y agoIt can be viewed as a kind of affirmative action. It’s a contested area but I don’t see Uber convicted over it but even if they were, I wouldn’t call it straightforward, but rather unclear.
- Orou 6y ago> I don't think their move here is illegal. This seems illegal to me, but I really don't know. What are the laws surrounding race-based company promotions/discounts?
- bradleyjg 6y agoHere’s the Unruh Act which applies in California: All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.
- Nextgrid 6y agoAt a previous employer I once received a company-wide email from their operations manager about "fixing" their TrustPilot score (which was low and totally justified) and how he was encouraging us to leave reviews with our opinions "as a user" despite us being employees (I raised concerns but those fell on deaf ears). I don't understand how an e-mail like that can even be written. Even if they don't follow through with the action, if that email were to leak it will become a (justified) PR disaster for the company (said company already had a PR disaster a few months before). I might expect a clueless intern to send it out, but not an experienced operations manager. Worse, none of the CS & marketing employees saw anything wrong with that and actually went ahead and posted reviews in their name.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lucasyvas 6y agoWhile a wonderful gesture, something about this feels a bit... tangential to the real issue to me in a way that's distracting. Am I off base here? It feels like it's leaning toward opportunistic.
- HaloZero 6y agoIt's virtue signaling 100% from a corporation. But w/e. I won't consider Uber to be "good corporate citizen" for it. But it helps a bunch of small restaurants in a time period where margins are tight so net positive maybe? At least they're putting money down on it vs just issuing some statement.
- derrick_jensen 6y agoKiller Mike had a documentary on Netflix (?) about black life in America, and mentioned that money flows out of the black community far faster than any other minority in America. If we assume that Uber is acting in good faith, which I have no reason not to believe, then what else can they do?
- denago 6y agoFeel the same way, curious how long the gesture lasts and where they end up accounting the loss
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoSomething can be both. And we can enjoy the bright side of it, while not being naive.
- searchableguy 6y agoI can only say - be very careful in how you approach these issues. Similar actions in india resulted in not so great outcomes from the government and corporations. And we are still stuck with the prejudice and discrimination - for some even greater than before.
- ThrowawayBandit 6y ago
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI respect what they're going for here, but an explicitly race-based discount seems very illegal.
- Yetanfou 6y agoI don't respect what they're going for here since what they're actually doing is trying to put a shine on their decrepit corporate image by virtue signalling.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwawaysea 6y agoThis seems racist in a very explicit manner.
- kepler1 6y agoWell, this is somewhat meaningful in that they do something that actually costs something. But the principle is wrong. And, will they do this for other minorities when they suffer discrimination at the hands of the state? How about poor people? "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tw000001 6y agoThe only surprising thing here is that the Twitter thread is (rightly) against this move. Twitter's algorithm seems to foster single opinion threads - I have a feeling it has to do with how they select suggested comments for users. I wonder if this only means that the first few people to comment had negative opinions, and things snowballed there? What a terrible social system - designed to exclusively foster single opinion "discussions" that serve to do nothing but masturbate egos and create a false illusion consensus....yet this seems to be the direction that most social media has taken and I can't help but wonder if this isn't seriously contributing to the breakdown of discourse in this country.
- devit 6y agoHow do they know whether a restaurant is "black-owned"?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alkibiades 6y agois it even legal to have explicitly race-based policies like this? could a company do the same thing for other race groups?
- atlantacrackers 6y agoExpect class action suits to follow. What if you are losing business as a restaurant because your competitors get free delivery?
- uniformlyrandom 6y agoThat's racist.
- sshumaker 6y agoA more useful definition from So you want to talk about race: Racism is any prejudice against someone because of their race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power. This definition is useful in the sense that it helps focus efforts on what needs to be addressed - systemic racism - vs trying to convince 100% of individuals to stop being racists in their day-to-day.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoThis feels a bit too vague still though, because from all we know about the restaurant/delivery ecosystem it'd be fair to describe Uber Eats as a system of power over all involved restaurants, right?
- Orou 6y ago> Racism is any prejudice against someone because of their race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power. The addition of "systems of power" to the definition of racism is a recent one, and it blurs the lines between "racism" and "systemic racism" as separate concepts by introducing power dynamics. Having clear definitions for abstract concepts is essential for people to understand each other and (hopefully) reach consensus. Redefining words so that they better suit certain ideological perspectives does not help that cause. It also casually implies that being prejudiced and discriminatory based on skin tone is fine, as long as you're discriminating "up", not "down".
- sshumaker 6y agoHere’s the argument from the book: how we define racism also determines how we battle it. If we have cancer and it makes us vomit, we can commit to battling nausea and say we’re fighting for our lives, even though the tumor will likely still kill us. When we look at racism simply as “any racial prejudice,” we are entered into a battle to win over the hearts and minds of everyone we encounter—fighting only the symptoms of the cancerous system, not the cancer itself. This is not only an impossible task, it’s a pretty useless one. Getting my neighbor to love people of color might make it easier to hang around him, but it won’t do anything to combat police brutality, racial income inequality, food deserts, or the prison industrial complex. So using “systems of power” in the definition enables more effective action to address it.
- newbie578 6y agoHow is this supporting the current situation, when this is a literal example of racism? People don't need or DESERVE special treatment, be it negative or positive, people deserve to be treated as equal. I don't understand why is it so hard to fathom?
- daleharvey 6y agoIt seems like you are finding it hard to understand what makes racism systemic, white restaurant owners are not an oppressed group, nobody is being racist against them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
- champagneben 6y agoAre black restaurant owners an oppressed group?
- sshumaker 6y agoBeing a person of color in the US absolutely means you are confronting systemic racism throughout your life. So absolutely, yes, compared to white restaurant owners. Example: If you are black, you are less likely to get a small business loan, and if so you are likely to get worse rates [1]. They also are encountering more resistance to accessing COVID-19 bailout funds [2]. These are just two examples specific to being a business owner, not to mention the systemic racism they face as individuals. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/16/black-owned-firms-are-twice-as-likely-to-be-rejected-for-loans-is-this-discrimination https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/16/black-owned... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/business/minority-business-coronavirus-loans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/business/minority-busines...
- mrcorona 6y agoPeople still seem unaware of these basic facts... And we've had black history month for how many years? The education system in America is truly lacking and it shows when it comes to the topic of race/racism which is a key part of our economic history and inextricably tied to the history and development of US capitalism.
- renw0rp 6y agohow is that not consider 'racist'?
- Nextgrid 6y agoThis is disgusting virtue-signaling from an awful company. If Uber really wanted to help the Black community (and other minorities) how about actually treating their delivery drivers (a lot of which come from low-class backgrounds and part of minorities) fairly with decent wages and benefits? How about a fair, transparent fee structure? As others have pointed out, the delivery fee is just one of many fees, the rest of which are conveniently hidden from the user and passed onto the restaurants which have no choice but to pay them because Uber Eats is one of a handful of delivery services and they're all equally scummy. How about decent customer service that plays fair when things go wrong instead of fobbing the customer off and hope they don't do a chargeback? (not many people do which is why they get away with it)
- Kaze404 6y agoUber has been sending me invalid coupons through SMS for over a year now. A couple months ago I got fed up with it and decided to contact support, and they refused to even engage with the subject. I think it takes a lot to provide customer service worse than Google's, and they somehow managed to do it.
- tmpz22 6y agoI recommend all users of Uber eats and co read some of the large subreddits for gig economy and uber eats workers on reddit. It’s pretty telling just how awful these companies are... and though it’s still relatively new these announcements for affirmative action are leading to a lot of pushback that some would identify as hurting the cause rather then helping it.
- guyfolx 6y ago"My country club allows anyone to join regardless of race. Just $100 a year for the membership and a one time fee of one billion dollars for the delivery of your membership card. Since white people tend to get sunburn on our course, the membership card delivery fee is waved for them."
- jungletime 6y agoIf anyone is interested, here's an interview with a human rights lawyer Robert Barnes, a man that has litigated wrongful death cases against police, and supreme court cases. Very pertinent, internal take on the courts, BLM, Antifa, police, Covid, and current cases before the supreme court. https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=4021 https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=4021
- lern_too_spel 6y ago"Human rights lawyer?" That's an "interesting" euphemism for a tax lawyer.
- jungletime 6y agoHe litigate a case of 8 1/2 month jailed pregnant women put in isolation. The without monitoring her. She woke up with a dead baby. Then the jailed doctored the records, pretending the baby died in the hospital. I think this qualifies.
- lern_too_spel 6y agoSource? His website certainly doesn't mention it. When I search for Shaye Marie Bear, the woman in the case you're talking about, Barnes does not show up.
- jungletime 6y agoHe talks about this case directly here. [2 hour :11 minute mark] https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=4875 https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=4875 Also, talks about his other case he settled, where a jailed prisoner wasn't given epilepsy medication, defecated on himself, was mistreated by the guards and died. [41-44 minute mark] https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=2460 https://youtu.be/6SSse90R72o?t=2460
- kirykl 6y agoActually Seems like predatory pricing targeting this one group to make these businesses unfairly dependent on Uber Eats in a monopoly grab
- searchableguy 6y agoA version of this is used in india to reduce wages. When you divide people into two big groups and compensate one - you create unequal net wage - and if there is not enough employment, one group hogs all the jobs while others have to significantly reduce their wages to compete. This is just capitalism in action.
- bww 6y agoSetting aside the obvious PR opportunism, how would something like this actually work? Does Uber currently collect data on the race of the people who own restaurants they deliver from? Is data like this publicly available somehow? Is this data something they're going to start collecting to facilitate this feature? Does that sound like data it would be good for Uber to have? Knowing what we know about Uber this all seems highly problematic.
- Nextgrid 6y agoI wonder how this will work from a legal point of view. This is a blatant, obvious example of racism, they aren't even attempting to be subtle about it.
- wutbrodo 6y agoIt's effectively affirmative action, and there's a long history of legal apologia for it. In the final analysis, the law is interpreted by humans, and if a class of violation (like racism) is popular enough, the system finds a way to excuse it with hand-waving.
- Nextgrid 6y agoWouldn't defending such lawsuits still cost a lot of money though, even if you end up winning?
- wutbrodo 6y agoMaybe, assuming that the lawsuits didn't get dismissed. Small companies don't have that much legal clout, and large companies are even more subject to the whims of the mob (through PR) as the justice system.
- mcculley 6y agoIn the United States, we have several legal mechanisms for categorizing ownership of businesses, including the SBA 8(a) Business Development program (https://www.sba.gov/category/business-groups/minority-owned https://www.sba.gov/category/business-groups/minority-owned) and the SBA Women-Owned Small Business Federal Contracting program (https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistance-programs/women-owned-small-business-federal-contracting-program https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan...). That's just for small businesses in general. When you look at purchasing entities such as the DoD and state governments, there are many such ways to identify ownership as belonging to a disadvantaged population.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoAs many others have said: 1. At least in the US, this is quite blatantly illegal. Uber Eats is not stupid, they know this. Whether you take the charitable view (Uber knows this but they wish to push back against historical and systemic racism) or the uncharitable view (this is a bare virtue signaling ploy), Uber Eats is betting they what they get from doing this is worth more than eventually having to stop or get sued. 2. Personally, as someone who strongly supports the BLM movement, I find this beyond stupid. It doesn't solve the problem at hand, and it just plays into the further division of society that the right wing has played so masterfully into fomenting.
- onetimemanytime 6y agoinsulting. Just wow. The nerve to exploit. That's why black people are killed by cops, delivery fees from UberEats. Good thing that is solved now
- davidf18 6y agoI think this should be permanent for Native Americans. White Europeans stole their land and killed many millions (often unintentionally with Smallpox). Manhattan where I live for example, if the Native American tribes retained ownership they would be very wealthy from the leases.
- nicc 6y agoAfter "fight fire with fire", through awful virtue signalling comes "fight racism with racism". Nice move, Uber!
- catalogia 6y agoI know it's just an expression, but that has always bugged me. Fighting fire with fire is a legitimate firefighting technique (controlled burns.) Red Adair even fought fire with explosions.
- siruncledrew 6y agoHow do companies find out personal details like race about who runs a business (and actually do it accurately)? Can they also find out things like religion or ethnicity? Whether it’s corporate data collection or users checking a box, it seems like a good intention that is primed for manipulation - which I guess some companies might gloss over as long as it benefits them.
- maest 6y agoWhat constitutes as "black"?
- anm89 6y agoHow is this not illegal given the Civil rights act of 64? This seems like a clear violation.
- jmull 6y agoComments here show a lot of people don’t really know what racism is. Now is an important time to learn, so please read. Racism if the belief that race is the basis for determining that one group of people is superior to another group. Specifically, it is NOT acknowledging that their are differences in the circumstances and opportunities people have based on race. Nor, necessarily, treating people differently based on acknowledging those differences. Regarding Uber Eats... this policy isn’t racist simply because it treats black-owned restaurants differently. Lesson over. The rest is just my opinion. Uber eats’ policy it is divisive. It’s also tone-deaf (how does this help black people in their struggle to be treated like everyone else?). And —- I can’t know for sure from the information I have —- but I suspect racism lead to this poorly conceived policy, because of how divisive it is and how condescending it feels.
- throwaay2222 6y agoI believe is immoral to pay someone more or give business advantages to someone based on their race or gender, or any other attribute. The policy should be more like, if you support black lives matter publicly then we will waive delivery fee.
- wutbrodo 6y agoWhile narrowly correct, this barely rises above the level of pedantry. As I'm sure you're aware, racism is in common use as a short form for "racial discrimination", of which this is uncontroversially an example. Unless you object to white nationalist separatists being called racists, on grounds that wanting a separate white homeland doesn't require any belief in racial superiority? (Or the more mundane form, people who want their neighborhoods to be their own race and oppose race-mixing) This isn't the fact-check "lesson" you think it is; it just pedantic apologia for racial discrimination that shows your own narrow understanding of the situation more than anything else.
- jmull 6y agoWow. No surprise racism is as strong and prevalent as ever. You will continue to be mystified and confused about why people are as upset as they are if you refuse to understand what the issue actually is. Let's just start with the first thing: the idea that white nationalists separatists do not view white people as superior is nonsensical on its face. > This isn't the fact-check "lesson" you think it is; it just pedantic apologia for racial discrimination that shows your own narrow understanding of the situation more than anything else. I am sad you see it this way. We've got a long way to go. Just try to open up your mind a little. I feel you have the potential or you would not have even responded.
- CyberDildonics 6y agoIt is interesting to see the responses here as opposed to this thread where pointing out that a company having diversity targets means they are explicitly not hiring based on performance (not just measuring who they have hired based on demographics of who has applied, and not mentioning race at all) ends up with multiple people agreeing that I'm a 'racist bad person' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433335 Reverse racism is a dull, simplistic and naive, and implementing it at the business level is illegal and likely unhelpful on a systemic level, not to mention that people don't spend their money based on the demographics of the company who made a product. Race also isn't the only protected class, no one seems to be mentioning women, people closer to retirement age or veterans. I would be more impressed if uber set up offices in poorer areas regardless of demographics or lobbied for schools to have more uniform funding regardless of their neighborhood. Maybe they could have small business courses at their offices or teach people about car maintenance.
- noxer 6y agoWhat if a white person is one of the shareholder of a restaurant run by blacks? /s
- onei 6y agoI don't get how this solves anything, regardless of the legal or racist accusations already discussed. The aim is to surface black-owned restaurants. But the solution is to remove the delivery for those restaurants. Do they have a filter for restaurants with no delivery fee? Are they also tagging the restaurants to make it obvious which are in this scheme? Secondly, how do you determine which restaurants qualify? Is it just applied to independent businesses or is it something larger chains can game as well? It seems full of holes at the foundation. The whole thing screams of a marketing department that think they should do _something_ to make it look like they're supporting protests but put in the tiniest amount of effort they could manage.
- dang 6y agoAll: I think it's time to note that semantic arguments about the word "racism" are always the same and always turn nasty in the same way. That makes them off-topic here, as are canned arguments in general: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22canned%20arguments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... They keep discussion stuck in superficial and uninteresting places, and that's the opposite of what HN is for. Curious conversation means exchanging new information. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jmull 6y agoI respect your need to moderate discussions. But there’s an effort to redefine racism to include any policy that acknowledges race, as opposed to the normal definition that holds a policy is racist if it promotes the superiority of one race over another. Semantic arguments are bad when they obscure and distract from the central point. But they are good when the distinction at issue is important to the issue at hand. In this case, the distinction is critical. In a world where widespread racism exists, but policies are not allowed to acknowledge race, then policy cannot address racism, thus it continues. > ...keep discussion stuck in superficial and uninteresting places... Sigh Leaves me with so little hope. I guess we get to go around and around again on all this.
- dang 6y agoSorry, and not to pick on you, but this is part of the going around in circles. People have been making the exact same points for literally decades. Combine that repetition with the superficiality and hair-triggerness of internet discussion, and we get a recipe for tedious flamewar, which is definitely off topic here. It's part of the general principle about canned arguments. Intellectual curiosity is all about diffs, and the diff between threads with canned arguments and threads without them is significant. The latter are much better.
- edanm 6y ago> Intellectual curiosity is all about diffs, and the diff between threads with canned arguments and threads without them is significant. Setting aside the context for this discussion: I really love your way of putting this. I've always looked at a lot of things that way - especially reading non-fiction books. I read a lot, so I usually only take a way a few key points from a book - but it's those diffs to how I viewed the world before that are the important part.
- mydongle 6y agoPerfect. Now racists can know exactly which businesses to avoid buying from, thus hurting their businesses.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- scarface74 6y agoI’m Black and I am very uneasy about this move. I can’t figure out why. I think I would be more comfortable if they had some type of “economic empowerment Zone” that just happened to cover majority/minority communities. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would just feel better to me.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]