Sure, in some regions there is what basically amounts to a taxi mafia. But aside from that Uber/Lyft offer the definition of a gig economy where people on both end believe to be winning. Depends on the country, but in most countries it isn't the price sensitive choice.

Isn't this just describing a market? If I am trying to buy something (in this case a driver's services), I will first buy the cheapest?

There are some people that are loyal and don't mind paying slightly more. Or don't want the overhead of having multiple apps. Let them pay more.

This is essentially the same thing as coupons and sales. The people that take the effort to find and clip coupons and plan their shopping accordingly pay less. I don't bother so I pay more. I'm fine with this.

What is the bigger problem? Some democratic principle of everyone pays the same?

Again, Uber has 10% operating margins.

The mom and pop store making $200k/yr revenue selling physical goods gives regulars a deal because if their $100/mo spend goes elsewhere it is a demonstrably negative business impact, and there are 2 or 3 other mom and pop stores close by. The owner's kids also probably go to school with the regular's kids or there's some similar relationship. Plus, even if they wanted to maximize profit - they probably don't based on the previous point - they simply don't have enough data points to figure out how exactly to do it.

The multinational corporation has billions or tens of billions in revenue, tens or hundreds of thousands of locations, and so many data points they can test any price discrimination scheme they want and get data almost instantly. But this by itself isn't a problem (IMO, certainly some here would disagree). The root of the problem IMO is that there's no relationship. The manager of the location has no power, the district manager is in a city an hour away, the people making these pricing decisions live in another state or country, and they are judged on making the graph go up and to the right. Their bonuses depend on it, their livelihood depends on it.

In the mom and pop scenario, the customer interacts with someone whose livelihood depends on them being happy and has the power to make sure they are. With the multinational, they interact with someone who doesn't give a shit if they're happy or not, and has no power whatsoever, and the lowest person with power doesn't have any idea who they are and is actively incentivized to screw them.

The problem is most people don't know. In my country you can't change the price for a given person. So if you don't know it's done, you can't change your behaviour (like do legal actions).

They're fine with it because of the lack of real alternatives. There's effectively a duopoly with Lyft in most cities. Duopolies usually don't present every customer with at least some sort of solution that allows for both parties in the business transaction to gain value.

Which is why taxis were a regulated industry before some cokeheads in SV decided things needed to be "disrupted".

This sort of thing happens when you reach de facto monopoly status...

I’m not sure why we should presume people are “fine” with this just because it’s something that happens.

Plenty of things happen in this world that are not “fine” and make people upset, but continue to happen because of market forces, lack of reasonable alternatives, something being the “least bad” option, etc.

I think one of the most glaring issues is that Uber has established dominance in the category, which gives them power of their users and allows them to implement pricing strategies that are user-hostile with less chance of repercussions.

It is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44378508

If someone creates the same or better service at a more reasonable price, the consumers will switch. There is no vendor lock-in for Uber and no monopoly.

I don't see anything illegal going on here, just good old business.

Uber's price discrimination is opaque. Even if they aren't doing dastardly things with it, people don't like feeling ripped off. We have no way of knowing when we are.

1. The existence and mechanism of coupon programs is visible instead of secret.

2. They are not based on creepy individualized spy dossiers.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/clloc...

(Edit: annoyingly, the parentheses are part of the URL. I don’t know how to encode them to make HN’s link parser happy, so you may have to add them by hand if you follow the link.)

(Edit 2: fixed, duh--thanks @akovaski!)

But I suspect the false positives on this would be huge and if you felt so compelled could easily test while at your desk.

How would uber know? They can’t unless someone reports the driver or gives them a poor rating.

Which is a surprising viewpoint for those of us who don't have the safety concerns others may have but when you think about it, it makes complete sense.

Everyone hated taxis because they were so unreliable and unaccountable for scamming you outside of a few dense cities like NY.

Essentially Taxi drivers are the random strangers over the apps with ratings and reviews from other riders showing clearly.

That’s just what i could think of off the top of my head and i’m not a product manager at uber. Things are NEVER as simple as they initially seem.

Other thoughts:

- at uber’s scale, payment processing alone likely takes up quite a bit of compute server side. You could outsource this to a 3rd party, but it’s still an expense as you scale.

- how would a decentralized system work if something goes wrong during the ride? who does the customer call? Drunk driver, attempted rape, etc. list of things that can go wrong is long.

- your platform/app would need to be smart enough to know where all the “proper” ride share pickup spots are at every airport. Not trivial!

- how would you offer a feature to “reserve a ride” like uber does, if you only build an app that can find “nearby drivers”?

food for thought. :) All im pointing out is this kind of product needs to be a platform and is likely not cheap to run. It’s not 90% client side. Unless you literally just want to reinvent the taxi concept, in which case maybe the 90% client side approach is feasible.

Assume we're both drivers for Uber, you're willing to do a drive for $30 and I'm willing to do the same drive but not for less than $40. Is it unfair to me for you to take that job for $30, knowing that I won't get it? I'd argue it's not (even if you know I'm waiting for the price to go up), and if that's unfair it's hard to make an argument that it's unfair for Uber to run that system.