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This is doubly ironic and amusing if you think about how Uber/Lyft were "disrupting" the existing markets. Well, market forces are at work: if Uber/Lyft provide

• tomjen3 6y ago
  Uber provides discoverbility, ratings and a feeling of safety.
  • bwilli123 6y ago
    A 'feeling' doesn't guarantee any more than that.
  • leto_ii 6y ago
    From my experience in many places drivers actually use multiple apps at the same time. This means that there's less and less of a distinction between the safety, ratings etc. of each individual app.
  • agloeregrets 6y ago
    Ratings is an easy to use and game feature (fun fact often harmful to drivers of color) that costs almost nothing to build. The feeling of safety was flatter Uber had a bunch of rapes that forced them to pretend that they cared, spend is very small on it.
• nabla9 6y ago
  App provides value, global brand has some value. There is absolutely no reason for ride hailing app to get 10-20% markup per ride. I suspect that after the competition really kicks in, Uber/Lyft must settle for 1-3% per ride or less.
  • aaxa 6y ago
    You could say the same with Just-Eat. In Denmark, I know they have a markup up to 15%, even though they have a lot of competition. So honestly, I am a bit sceptical if we will see a much lower markup. One might hope though.
    • nabla9 6y ago
      The dot-com bubble 1995-2000 included multiple delivery service companies. kozmo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com Webvan was once valued $4.8 billion.
      • ozim 6y ago
        So you expect that whole food delivery business will collapse? I don't see that coming because it is 2020 and we have: smartphones in every pocket, easy payments from those smartphones, it is super convenient to order via such platform, in the end lock downs basically mandate food delivery.
    • vmateixeira 6y ago
      In the UK, JustEat takes 30% of the order, same as UberEats, with 0 liability - if something goes wrong with the order, including problems with delivery time, driver taking a nibble, the restaurant just doesn't get paid. Deliveroo is a bit greedier and takes 35%. It's definitely not the lack of competition... it's just that the competition doesn't behave much better compared to them.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • yunohn 6y ago
        Interesting to hear that Just-Eat acts this way; Takeaway (Thuisbezorgd) has similar practices in NL. They take no liability on anything (delivery delays, food problems, missing items, etc). They have no customer care number, and take days to respond to emails. If anything goes wrong, they make you call the restaurant, and of course they redirect you back to Tkwy. In the end, you will receive no refund, none of the missing food, and have waited 1-3hrs for an order that should've taken <1hr. It's a horrible experience, but they get away with it because they have a near-monopoly. Uber Eats & Deliveroo have <25% of the restaurants on Tkwy.
• andrepd 6y ago
  Unfortunately there are two things being a barrier. One is advertising: for many people Uber is either the only app they know or the one they see as the "standard". " To uber" has even become a verb in many languages. Uber can spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on ads. The other thing is operating at a loss. A co-operative, almost by definition, will produce a service at fair prices for both customers and employees (market forces dictate the price to customers as with any company, and the co-operative structure means that profits go to labour -- you know, the people actually doing stuff and creating value). A private company with never-ending billions of cash can simply operate at a loss to out-price their competitors until they close and they have achieved an even more hegemonic monopoly in their space. At some point Uber was burning 300,000,000$ per month to subsidise artificially low prices. Of course, as non-profit seeking enterprises, co-ops are plenty restricted from accessing capital in the current economic system. Now the really interesting thing to me is how neither of these factors of advantage for private capitalistic enterprises is actually anything useful. Spending billions to drill your brand names into the brains of people is a net loss for society, distorting the market is favour of those with the biggest advertising budget, not those with the best product. In fact nearly all advertising is universally imoral in my opinion, but that's a different story. And burning venture money to artificially lower prices and further skew things is also obviously a negative.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  > Well, market forces are at work: if Uber/Lyft provide no additional value over drivers' work (and treat drivers as disposable assets), they themselves will get "disrupted" and the drivers will get rid of them We shall see if that ends up being the case. It's an open question to me. I could see this being as effective as Uber. But I could also see an industry association implementing some anti-consumer policies that make it less appealing than Uber. I'm also interested to see how the compensation model works out. It will be interesting to see if the cooperative pays out for idle/waiting for passenger time. It will also be interesting to see if they offer health coverage, PTO, etc. Or is the idea simply that they will give the drivers a larger slice of the earnings? A pure labor-price play? I have often wondered what you'd build in the ride-sharing space if you didn't have a profit incentive. One could imagine going full auction nerd and building an app where drivers and passengers are able to bid (automatically?) in an auction to see who gets whose time. Of course you'd lose price predictability. And that might cost you customers, and that might cost you volume, which you absolutely need to have a modicum of success in this space. An app that has only drivers or only passengers is not a useful app. How sick would it be if we had interoperability laws where the app could fall back to Uber if it couldn't find a better price in-app? I'm sure this would be against Uber's TOS today, but it would be a great pro-consumer feature.
  • beckingz 6y ago
    Just give it back to the taxi drivers to operate, but hold them to a higher standard of quality.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      TBH Uber has led to dramatically better consumer outcomes. Without them operating in the market, and given the power the taxi lobby seems to have over local lawmakers, I am skeptical that any taxi-only scenario will be good for consumers.
• sandworm101 6y ago
  I applaud the effort, but the problem with a collective is that they are, legally speaking, a soft target. Uber can afford to break laws, run at a local loss, and generally throw its weight around a new market. Cooperatives don't have such deep pockets. They will leave town as soon as a some local interest resists. They aren't going to survive multi-year fights with cities or organizations like the London cabs.
  • vivekmgeorge 6y ago
    Only for so long. Their stock price will suffer at a certain point. Not to mention the bad PR that come with it. The more of these that we see globally the harder it would be for them to run at a loss. As a CO-OP they can take growth slowly. They don't have the same investor pressure
  • patentatt 6y ago
    But can’t they just ride the coattails of the big players? Once they’ve lobbied their way in, shouldn’t it be pretty easy for the coop to just say they should be treated the same? For that matter, I always wonder why Airbnb still exists. Now that they’ve bulldozed all sorts of local regulations with their VC money, why wouldn’t a coop model work better for the actual landlords? Something akin to the MLS for real estate, for local operators of short term rentals.
    • zbyte64 6y ago
      Ostensibly yes because landlords would get a larger share of the surplus, but as long as capital writes regulations, entities that extract more surplus will be better able to change the rules. Just look at how much was spent in California to keep gig workers as contractors.
    • xsmasher 6y ago
      The little guy can ride the coattails as long as the behemoth allows it. The behemoth can get "safety" regulations passed that only the behemoth can satisfy- basically pull the ladder behind them.
  • deleted 6y ago