When the current gig economy implodes (not if), things will get uhhh interesting. 36% of American workers are part of it, and as far as I know (please tell me if I’m wrong), Uber’s problems aren’t unique amongst gig startups. That’s not to say that gig employment is going away; just that these black holes for cheap capital will collapse in on themselves. For instance Amazon and Walmart are both extremely profitable and have a sizeable gig workforce. That is here to stay, and will eventually grow to encompass many many more currently salaried jobs.
Yeah, deliveries and stuff. We're so doomed and broken that lot of elderly rural people depend upon Wal-Mart gig workers to get groceries and medicine.
Even if Uber does collapse, they're pushing and funding Prop 22 like legislation in other states now. With so much of the economy seemingly made up of gig workers now, I'm sure Amazon and the likes are more than welcome that Uber is doing the dirty work and taking the hits.
After all, who really gets screwed in the end? Uber's only real costs are at the backend with devs and such, who I'm sure will be fine if the company goes insolvent. The investors from the beginning will have made out by now. The ghouls at the top of the company will get their severance packages and pats on the back, before moving on to another silicon valley VC scam
they’re pushing and funding Prop 22 like legislation in other states now
This is gonna be Uber's biggest contribution. Along with pushing back the conversation on sustainable public transit by at least a decade.
And they let the bad PR attach to the Uber brand that they intend to kill off. You hate to see it.
Uber's goal has always been to spread a contractor-model to every part of the job sector. Nothing else and nothing more. It was only a ride share service, because it was the easiest sector to disrupt.
I don't understand why it wouldn't be profitable....they just need the app and other people's cars right?
Every ride is essentially partly subsidized by Uber's VC money because the entire economy is moviepass.
im always really interested in reading articles about how screwed up the economy is, from before 2020. if things were that bad before the worst pandemic in a century, we're definitely fucked now
Can't access the article, can you rip it from the site or summarize it?
https://archive.is/UcVLi
(found this by searching the URL on archive.is)
This is what happens when there's too much capital in the economy - it has to go somewhere. Traditionally, market failures would wipe out the dumber or smaller investors but now that everybody is too big to fail you end up with horseshit like this.
Yeah, I still can't wrap my head around the concept fully but this concentrated idle wealth willing to bankroll players until they submit entire industries seems like a consequence of tendency of the rate of profit to fall. There's gotta be some precedent of this kind of behavior before, perhaps the gilded age?
Previously, you could have major war suck up dead capital and destroy useless firms and capital stocks. You could also just conquer some other country as a market for goods and a way to extract cheap labor and resources - now everything is hooked into the global capitalist market other than a few scattered tribes in the Amazon or on the Sentinal islands. They also never had to contend with a worsening climate crisis that threatens the entire world at the same time.
The goal is to annihilate the market by flooding it at a loss (because you're the player with the deepest pockets), then raise prices and get exclusive contracts when you're the only player left.
Essentially they aren't charging enough in order to intentionally undercut cabs and public transit. A huge portion of the cost of a ride does go to the driver's pay, and the margin isn't enough to cover their overhead. AND a lot of the drivers still make almost nothing after factoring in vehicle maintenance, gas, etc.
They still undercharge so much investors pay part of the layout to drivers, even when paying drivers less than they spend to work. They do this because they would have to charge so much people wouldn't use Uber to cover the cost of providing the service.
I still don't really understand why this is the case. Cabs are an existing, profitable business model. Why is it impossible for uber to price rides such that they're just "cabs with a convenient app"?
They would lose the majority of their customers. Cabs are so expensive people only use them if they absolutely have to.
If they lose the majority of their customers, they lose the majority of their drivers because drivers won't be as willing to wait on standby when they rarely get rides. Which means they won't be able to provide rides reliably, which makes just calling a cab company, who has a depot of cabs and drivers waiting for customers a more appealing option. In theory Uber would still be cheaper, but not that much cheaper, and a cab would be much more reliable. So nobody would use Uber anymore.
Part of the appeal of Uber is that it is cheaper than local cab companies (outside of “surge pricing” hours)
Taken together with all that has been written, what Uber's investors expect is that Uber will eventually overtake every existing cab alternative other than Uber and become a monopoly over transport. They can't do so by just offering a more convenient alternative. They need to squeeze out the competition, as aggressively as they can.
Yeah, I do understand that what I described isn't uber's business model, I just don't understand why it's not something they can fall back on. But I think @furryanarchy 's answer is good.
Yeah. The logic here is very thin. Uber is a glorified dispatcher. It needs drivers, so it spends substantially on promotion and recruiting. And it needs a reputation, so it spends to vet the drivers it recruits. And it needs a system, so it spends on web hosting and app dev/support.
But after that? They're just taking a vig off your labor for the service of routing you customers.
They aren't any less profitable than any traditional black car service.
Why the fuck does Twitter keep changing its browser site to make it impossible for non-users to read
Yeah I did go there but I also wanted to read replies
Fuck these fuckimg social media sites I don't want a goddammit account
:very-intelligent: And yet you have a hexbear account, curious!
so you'll enter your phone number and other personal information and sign-up :)
Tl;dr the world's shittest cab company does Hollywood accounting to seem like they're ok.
Don't Google and Facebook make most of their money off of user data and advertising, which basically turns out to be pretty much worthless?
Reading stuff like this is enlightening and I appreciate it.
Its also like watching a horror movie full of standard tropes that you're spending the entire time watching and screaming at the TV, DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR!, DON'T GO INTO THAT HOUSE!, PICK UP THE AXE THAT'S ON THE FLOOR!. Shit gets exhausting after awhile.
:heart-sickle:
That's a funny thing to read in a business paper about a company that is losing 38 cents on the dollar. I mean, I love public goods that have no market case – health care, education, transit – as much as the next commie, but these are not "proven in the marketplace."
I'm pleasantly surprised to learn Cory might be a comrade. I remember following his blog years ago, but back then he seemed like a lib just like I was.
We live and we grow, and thank goodness for that. Years ago I was an enlightened centrist.
