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The problem facing ride sharing and food delivery services is that you can only pick two out of these three
• Low prices
• Well paid drivers
• A profitable platform
The entire category pioneered by Uber is not a good business model. It only got so large as a category due to being subsidized by billions in venture capital.
@carnage4life this is just an abstraction of the old adage: Cheap, fast, good — pick two.
That's not a problem for ride share / food delivery services, that's a problem for ride share / food delivery businesses. A co-op could easily pick the first two without losing anything in the process.
@driusan @carnage4life I’m not sure you can even pick two. VC wasn’t just funding the Profits. They were using those billions to subsidize both of the other two as well.
@driusan @carnage4life I've been thinking about that a lot lately. especially mutual aid ride share. lack of access to transportation greatly limits access to many other things in my city with crappy public transit. i can't build rail infra but i absolutely can give folks rides to doctors appointments and elections etc.
@carnage4life One of my kids tried it for a while riding a bike (Boston, traffic), add, "they do not use their drivers efficiently". Single-category delivery means there's an evening rush, not much other work. It's too little work, plus the pay is marginal. "We could deliver other stuff the rest of the day." I pointed out that the goal of the business was to tell a story to VCs to extract their money, not to actually succeed as a business, treating labor as commodity is part of the story.
@dr2chase @carnage4life And the VC's business is to pass the bag to retail investors before the fairy dust wears off and the music stops.
Then retail can't sell but at a loss, and the slow burn to bankruptcy begins.
"The entire category pioneered by Uber is not a good business model. It only got so large as a category due to being subsidized by billions in venture capital." True - and also (in Europe at least) breaching the spirit, and in many places the letter of public and employee protections.
@carnage4life VC-funded lunch.
@carnage4life they bet on self-driving, right? So they were planning on 2 not being a consideration.
Also, food delivery took off during the height of the pandemic. As more people went out it declined.
The fourth thing is “anything to anywhere” — when restaurants handled their own deliveries they had smaller delivery areas. And a delivery fee! (Plus tip!)
Less customer choice but more small businesses and less traffic.
@carnage4life It also requires a permanent servant class who are desperate enough to work in delivery.
These ideas, and many other “gig economy” schemes are not, in fact enabled by tech. They’ve existed for ages elsewhere in the world. I’m most familiar with India, chaiwalla, the tiffin system, etc.
The essential enabling component everywhere? Economic inequality.
@carnage4life Part of me will ALWAYS believe Uber was a sting operation to catch perverts which somehow spiraled out of control.
@carnage4life I occasionally get some food delivered from a specific downtown restaurant. 8 miles away, a 20-minute drive in good conditions, no opportunities for a delivery in the other direction. Between mileage and time, there's no way this should cost less than $20 in ideal conditions (minimum wage, no waiting), but the nominal delivery fee offered on the ordering web site is far far less than that. I end up paying that fee and giving an extra $20 in cash to the driver.
@carnage4life A major frustration of mine between ridesharing and taxis is that ridesharing for me has consistently offered a far superior experience. Online booking, price and timing transparency, payment convenience, it really feels like taxis need to step up their game in terms of user experience.
@jbqueru That’s interesting. I have found that in my large city, taxis are faster and materially cheaper than Uber/Lyft. The tech is as seamless as the ride share apps. No joke ride share costs between 20 - 200% more than a taxi.
We were talking about this with a taxi driver and he told us about the delta between what a taxi driver makes from a ride vs a ride share driver (for the same trip) and the taxi makes easily 3x the ride share income - the rest “goes to the app”.
@carnage4life @vincent Probably why Dominos heavily invested in their own delivery infra
@carnage4life This is a fairly common "race to the bottom" scenario. It's why anti-trust exists. It's why employee protections exist. It's why consumer protections exist.
@carnage4life my understanding is the business model is fundamentally extraction: use up poorly paid drivers to shake down rubes for cash, then abandon the area when it stops being habitable.
Kinda like oil.