For drivers, the results are unpredictable and too often unfair. Data obtained by the Star shows Uber Eats’ platform can offer two food couriers different wages for the exact same trip.
Labour advocates charge that the app collects data on driver behaviour and can use it to decide who it can pay at a lower rate, allowing the company to pocket the difference and boost its revenue. This concept is widely referred to as algorithmic wage discrimination.
Wild
Wage discrimination sounds like a fancy way of saying wage theft.
Yep, it’s just when they only do wage theft on the most disadvantaged employees that are the least likely to sue them or quit as a result.
Par for the course based on Uber’s history. I stopped using them in lieu of a local/community app…which is honestly absolute garbage, but it is essentially completely pass-through and free for my local area restaurants to use.
I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people’s needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.
If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.
This would be a really good fit for federation I think.
As a software engineer I’m down to help out on this, free of charge.
I’m a developer too, and I appreciate the offer very much, but I’m not really in a situation where I could work on something like this. It’s just an idea though, anyone could run with it.
It shouldn’t be a massive surprise. The whole platform exists as a way to circumvent minimum wage laws for drivers while taking a massive slice of restaurant profits.
No hygiene inspections either, half the places listed aren’t even restaurants or takeaways, it’s just in somebody’s house…
Time to change your name from Patel to Smith
Had a colleague that did it as a side gig and no matter how many times I told him to do it, he always refused to do the calculation to figure out how much he was making after expenses.
Living in denial is the only reason we aren’t already eating the rich.
That and fear of imprisonment
I was going to do it as a side hustle, but then I found out that I would have to change the type of car insurance I have, and my rate would go up. If I didn’t and had an accident while delivering, my insurance company would 100% deny all claims - assuming they found out I guess. I wasn’t willing to risk it , and the higher premium cost made it unprofitable.
Honestly, I’m surprised insurance companies don’t actively pursue this. Like doing a side gig such as this would very easily increase the possibility of claims because you’re on the road, so financially speaking it would make sense for them to try to partner through those delivery apps or Research into whether someone is doing it professionally on the side.
Then again I guess it is more financially Justified for them to just milk your insurance money up until the point that you get into an accident and then deny your claim there for being a gig worker
externalizing costs. vehicle maintenance, insurance, wages… it’s all a ruse to get anyone else to pay their overheads without realizing it.
That’s the foundation of the entire economic model imposed on the plebs.
If you are not exteacting, you are not winning.
bike time
Must be nice to live somewhere you can bike without high probability of death.
Let me be 100% clear. People who commute on bikes in my area are dead. Or they gave up because of a near death experience. I have lived here 18 years, I have seen one regular bike commuter. He caused major traffic backups, which was his safest option, at least they knew he was there. He lasted three weeks. I hope he’s not dead. You can not commute on a bike everywhere.
Even in places with good infrastructure and generally non-murderous drivers it still gets very sketchy.
The majority of drivers just havent ridden a bike since they were 3, and just don’t understand that you’re part of the traffic, as though you can magically just slip around between all the cars.
American drivers believe that they can kill people with cars and they do get away it a lot. Wouldn’t want to ruin their lives
Cool cool cool cool cool
A lot of couriers in my area are also using ebikes now. At least in winter, it seems like even more than regular bikes.
How much did the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, earn last year?
I hear the smallest violin Everytime I hear about UberEATS executive complain about the company not being profitable.
I know GrubHub is bad too but I typically only pay a small fee of 3$ for their service and a tip of 20% to the driver.
Yet UberEATS usually includes a $10-15 UberEATS fee which the employee sees none of. Yet “oh no UberEATS is not profitable, oh no my 3rd yacht isn’t big enough”
Tipping culture caused this mess, meritocracy bullshit
I only use eats if there’s a solid promo, and then I pick up the food myself. They don’t get the fee, I don’t have to tip, and I get the deal. A lot of time the price per item is cheaper on pickup too. Their fees are absolutely ridiculous, and they are just a middleman. They for sure are losing money on me.
Best to just call it in. Even for pick up, all these online providers take a huge cut, eating the profit margin from the people actually making the food you like.
I try to only use online orders for restaurants that have their own website cart. I do sometimes resort to the big ones when I’m busy / lazy, but I make a point to try to make sure the actual restaurant gets my money, because I want them to survive and keep making me tasty food.
The awful part is, even without tipping the driver the food is drastically more expensive. The restaurant takes an extra cut, The delivery service takes an extra cut. This person’s delivering your food practically for free and the meal is already sit down restaurant price.
Just one note, restaurant prices go up because uber eats charges a percentage based fee for each menu item. So, restaurants need to up the prices on the app just to make the same amount of money. Just some good ol’ under-the-table fuckery courtesy of Silicon Valley bastards.
In any case, when it cost me $20 more to get the meal through delivery, and f**** over a delivery person I’ve got a lot more incentive to drive 10 minutes to pick up food.
it’s okay you can say fuck.
Voice dictation censors, getting to the setting is a pain, I use dictation for work a lot so it’s better for you to be imaginative them me to screw up and get in trouble.
Yeah, it would suck if you’re ever referring to the fuck Tory manager
My wife and I ran the numbers and, in our area, Uber Eats was pulling in about 1/4 to 1/3 the cost of the meal between charges to the restaurant and the customer. We were discussing opening a non-profit delivery service in our area. Turns out it’s pretty hard to do.
Oh yeah, they’re going to want to see some serious reason why you shouldn’t be paying tax.
It’s a lot easier to start an SCorp or an LLC in the US. Starting the corporation’s not horribly expensive either
Since you’re not selling the product, you probably just need to pay the tax on The money they pay you to do the pickup. You need to start it more like a postmates where they ask you to go pick up the order they placed at some shop. But then I suspect you would have timing issues if you have a limited staff. You couldn’t just place the order and then wait a unlimited amount of time for it to show up.
Then there’s that daunting problem of when the store screws up the order. Because they always screw up the order.
But you’re still going to have to deal with labor laws, You’re going to need bonding, a CPA, advertising, presumably a web presence and software maybe across platform cell phone app. These are all things that get easier as the company gets bigger but are rather daunting it small scale.
I guess it’s kind of a tough business to break into. Owning my own car, I could place an order, drive to McDonald’s pick up the food and come back for pennies. Obviously that 30 minutes is my time but it’s time I would spend not making money else wise. Because I’m already spending a couple hundred a month on a car, it’s not worth very much for me to pay someone to bring me food. But at a livable wage, plus someone else’s maintenance, that’s probably $7 to $10, assuming there’s a limited number of orders they can pick up at once in a small area.
Uber eats is such a scam. When these new VC companies come on the block offering things that are to good to be true I am constantly saying “we shouldn’t support this unsustainable vc funded business, once they have market share they will have killed the competition and then they will raise their prices”
So many places used to deliver at reasonable prices but after years of uber delivering at way cheaper rates they stopped. Now uber delivers at $10 more.
Yeah I liked the idea of Uber at first because taxis have been shitty for a long time and Uber was shaking up that industry.
But then I learned that Uber wasn’t making money and immediately realized that they were just looking better than taxis for as long as they needed to to drive them out of business so they can be even worse, while providing even less than taxis companies do. At least taxi companies have a relationship with their drivers while Uber was just a platform for connecting anonymous riders with almost as anonymous drivers and handling the financial aspect of it (so that they control it all as middlemen with control of the wallet).
So now I just use taxi services when I need a ride (while cursing the state of mass transit in North America and GM plus corrupt politicians for their role in making this like this).
Similar story with hotels/airbnb, though they’ve made it even worse because they are affecting the housing market itself rather than just the luxury service of staying somewhere while away from home.
Many reports of landlords evicting their tenants so they could turn their homes into airbnbs… Disgusting
Which means it’s financially viable to compete with them again using their own drivers. Uber just trained an entire sector on delivery driving which is a larger pool of labour places can now draw from. And they can start by talking in person to the drivers who conveniently come directly to their business every day.
No because after uber cornered the market uber raised the bar for what kind of fuckery is acceptable. Takeaway shops would do normal prices plus a $10 delivery fee. Now they can double their prices and have contractless uber drivers manage all their deliveries.
I will never use uber so long as I shall live.
This must be that innovation which is making the world a better place that these tech parasites keep gushing about.
I was just commenting on a thread about public transportation (there’s none where live) and someone commented that they’re moving to micro transportation by just buying a $3 Uber every time they need to go somewhere. Even if uber is only taking $1 of that, $2 isn’t paying someone to drive you somewhere. Uber drivers should make at least $30/hr.
I haven’t done the math but if you don’t drive that much, did it beat their yearly costs (maintenance/insurance/gas)? Honestly that scheme is wild but makes total sense for a customer because not having to deal with car maintenance and insurance seems like a good tradeoff. I wonder when the dominos are all gonna tumble for these driving companies
I don’t know where the person who commented that lives, but you can’t get an Uber five blocks for under $10 around here. If I was that close and walkable I’d just walk. I do know uber is losing drivers locally though because they don’t pay enough, certainly not enough for people to maintain their cars. It’s predatory employment at this point, and it is becoming normalized.
I took one recently and found out Lyft was taking the ride at a loss. (They must average out the rides). I needed to drop my vehicle somewhere for maintenance, called a Lyft and it was something like 5.42 before I added a tip. I asked the driver when it had gotten so much cheaper and he said he had been doing well and checked and was getting paid $9 before tip for the ride. Told him I was giving him $10 for going out of his way as a tip, and the app actually wouldn’t allow me to tip that much, I couldn’t get above 9.58 or something. Anyways, slower areas they must be taking a loss to try to get more market in the area.
Also, Lyft has always been better for me when needed, Uber won’t allow me to schedule a ride, so you have to wait till you want to leave, and in a slow area that just means… There might not be anyone. If I schedule it with Lyft for a set time I’ve never had an issue with that.
Where can you take a $3 Uber? If I took an Uber to my next door neighbor’s house it would be more than $3.
That’s what I was saying too. Maybe somewhere with much lower wages and cost of living.
Buddy, I cant use that service in any good concience…
I feel like you gotta go out of your way to make so little money doing this. If they actually did it correctly there would be no article to write. Not saying they would get rich but there’s no way they did this honestly.
Spoken like someone who’s never done delivery work in their life.
I delivered pizza from high school through college. And now I own 2 business that we use third party delivery at. I can assure you literally no one makes this little on these apps even the people who are illegals and doing profit sharing with people with legal accounts make more.
Many of the food couriers I worked alongside were young international students struggling to earn an income while they make their way through school. Others were refugees or undocumented workers, navigating precarious lives.
I honestly wonder if pretty much all of the surge in illegal immigration over the last 5 or 6 years comes down to Uber Eats.
Given you need proof of residence, proof of registration and insurance, and a valid driver’s license (and valid itn or SSN) to do it, the article writer is either entirely making that part up, or the far right is correct in the absolute ridiculously improbably widespread unreported, unnoticed identity theft required for that to work.
Working for uber eats is a a choice.
Uber Eating your mum is a choice.
That isnt the point. Also is the US famously lacking in social safety nets and appropriate methods of bettering yourself are generally paywalled? So an unemployed person with no in come hs very little choice in getting work and have to take what they can.
Boot licker.
Removed by mod
Bootlicker spotted
