The latest dark pattern in all these apps is that they will mess up your order/ride and then "refund" you in the form of account credit. There's no way to actually get your money back. Trying to contact support results in an endless loop of help screens and chatbots. If you are able to figure out the magic combination of options that will get you to a support agent they will say "sure we will refund your money" but that is still only going to your app account. The last time I had an issue I literally had to ask them 3 times "I want you to confirm that you are refunding my credit card the amount it was charged" for them to finally agree to it. It is crazy what they can get away with.
The worst thing is that you can't even do a chargeback, otherwise you get banned. There is no recourse for the consumer. If this is their solution for fighting chargebacks, they should get banned from accepting Visa / MC / AMEX.
Another sketchy practice: if you get Uber Cash through a card like Amex, when you go to use it the price for the ride is automatically $15-$20 more than someone who doesn’t have an Uber Cash balance.
I’ve checked this side by side with colleagues at the airport getting ride quotes to the same hotel. When you have Uber Cash they will quote you more. You can find numerous Reddit threads on the topic as well.
Surge pricing in theory incentivizes more drivers to operate during peak times, reducing wait times for passengers. If you’ve used these kinds of apps in regions where they aren’t popular, it can be quite common to not have anyone pick up your fare.
If you could bid up the price, you would be more likely to incentivize any idle drivers to pick up your fare. A driver might not be willing to get out of bed for a $10 fare, but the same driver might be willing to get out of bed for a $30 fare.
Going by pure economic theory "dynamic pricing" actually benefits both buyers and sellers in a marketplace. There are plenty of cases where it makes sense – lunch menus at restaurants, grocery store coupons, retail bargain bins, dollar menus, happy hour deals, senior/youth/student discounts, even surge pricing in Uber & Lyft. Of course like with every aspect of economics how something is implemented matters a lot more than how it sounds on paper. Especially in the case of rideshare/food delivery, where the middleman has all the data and makes all the decisions.
Wouldn't perfect individualised dynamic pricing mean that the seller (Uber in this case) would get to capture the entire consumer surplus? Is that good?
Yes but also that some people would be getting a service that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. But there’s little/no incentive for a pure seller to do that, although for a marketplace like Uber there is more possibility for that, in order to maintain liquidity on the other side of the transaction. I listened to an interview where Uber CEO Dara K note there is always an incentive pool, and based on the market it is either riders or drivers who are getting the incentive money at any given time.
Prices are always dynamic in every business. The only difference is in how frequently the price changes.
If you take your idea to the logical extreme then you're essentially arguing for permanently fixed prices. This is one reason why it's sometimes impossible to get a taxi in places where the rates are fixed by government edict.
I don't think we're referring to the same concept. Dynamic pricing implies charging two different concurrent customers different prices for the same good or service. The only place you can see this now are basically reward/promo/point programs, which while also gross (basically, making transactiobs cheaper for the rich) at least seem to have some proponents.
You are thinking of price discrimination, which is a subcategory of dynamic pricing. Changing prices based on time of day, current demand, tiers/SKUs or really anything else is also collectively dynamic pricing.
I would probably call this "charge discrimination", which gives a clear indication which side of the party is empowered with this concept.
Still, wildly volatile pricing is also an excellent reason to avoid taxi apps. Why politicians have no desire to rein them in is baffling. I guess the stock market is really all that matters at the end of the day....
In theory surge pricing should bring more drivers into the area making the service better for riders. Not sure how much that actually works out in practice though without data only Uber really has.
I remember the days when Uber prices from SF to anywhere on the peninsula would suddenly spike exactly a minute or two after each Caltrain departed. If you just missed the train you paid a lot more.
And then the many times that Lyft violated the triangle inequality in pricing: Ride from A->B followed by a ride from B->C was often cheaper than a direct ride from A->C, if you knew how to pick B correctly. I once confused the hell out of a driver when I got out and got back in the same car at some nondescript spot.
I have lived in this state for 5 years. Lyft works great!
The full story is I requested a ride to an Air Force base and the driver was not able to take us there due to restrictions at the base. We requested the driver drop us off at a restaurant just outside of the base. The ride we were on was cancelled, a new one created, and calculated as if we were originating at our point of embarkation at the same time all of this happened. Which happened to be during surge pricing.
I tried support for weeks. I was in an endless loop of scripts and going nowhere. At the time, the extra $200 or so charge was a significant amount for me so I charged it back with my card. The card had no issue with this but every time I try signing into Uber, they insist I pay them the remainder of their error from years ago.
I don't think I've ever used Uber. Have used lyft a few times, just to support a relative 'underdog' compared to Uber. Never had a problem. Probably less than 10 rides in the past 3 years though, so I'm possibly not a huge data point.
If you are at the point where your only option left is a chargeback, that is a “burning the bridges” moment anyway. Why would you want to continue doing business with a company that treats you like that? I would be grateful to be banned: it means I don’t have to go to the trouble of canceling my account.
I’ve had to do a handful of chargebacks and I don’t know or care whether they banned me: I would never voluntarily do business with them again anyway.
One reason you might still want to use them is that they used anticompetitive blitzscaling strategies and ran at a loss to prevent competitors from taking off.
I have a friend who had a bad experience with a company once. After drawn out fight for the equivalent of a months salary with lawyers getting involved and threats of collections, the company made a final statement. "We will refund you, but you'll be blacklisted". My friend was delighted, and responded to them as such. He thanked them, since now he wouldn't have to remember their name to avoid ever accidentally buying from them again.
He found a local contractor to do the job instead.
Can confirm. Issued a successful chargeback after they bait and switched the Uber 1 subscription promising $5 for every late delivery only to revoke that portion weeks later.
Support would not refund the yearly subscription despite an obvious change to the economic terms of the subscription and so a chargeback was issued which the credit card company agreed with.
Ransomware screen now on the account to the effect of "Pay $100 Immediately To Regain Your Account" with no transactions possible unless the ransom is paid.
I’ve won every single charge back and yet to get banned. I’m sure it happens but I’m also sure it’s something companies threaten to reduce them since it’s basically an automatic fee they pay. It also hurts their rates if they have a higher rate of chargebacks.
Who is Visa / MC / AMEX going to side with? The company that gets them hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year or a random account holder? It doesn't really matter who is right or wrong.
This tidily demonstrates the value of a competent regulatory authority. The payment processor (i.e. card provider) should be even more afraid of the regulator than they are of potential lost business.
Would be nice, except that consumer protections were anyways an afterthought in this country and we just elected a government with an explicit goal to kill them entirely.
I agree about the current government. However, we do have examples of muscular regulatory schemes and infrastructure in this country's past: CFPB and Dodd-Frank are recent good examples. Both could also have been stronger, of course.
For individual chargebacks and small scammy merchants, sure. Uber meanwhile processes $40 billion worth of transactions a year. There is zero chance they are facing any kind of "discipline" from credit card operators. At that volume they write their own terms.
Going by that theory why doesn't Visa just jack up their prices by 10x? After all what are merchants going to do, not accept Visa? Turns out yes, that's exactly what they will do. Look at the number of business that don't take Amex for example for the same reason. Large companies especially have enough leverage to negotiate their own deals with credit card operators, like Costco does with Visa.
Costco is a bit different. If I don't have a Visa, i can pay with cash, personal check, or debit card. Sure, I'd prefer to pay with credit card, but it's not a huge deal for me to use a debit card there.
With Uber, there simply isn't an alternative. If they don't accept Visa then i can't use a credit card (or most debit cards, since those go through the visa network too) and there isn't a reasonable way for me to pay at all.
> With Uber, there simply isn't an alternative. If they don't accept Visa then i can't use a credit card (or most debit cards, since those go through the visa network too) and there isn't a reasonable way for me to pay at all.
Uber takes Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay too. Any would let you use a bank account. You can also deposit cash into PayPal and I think Venmo as well.
You are drastically underestimating the value and control that the processor networks bring.
Wells Fargo might underwrite the credit on my credit card, but I would immediately cancel that line of credit if it wasn’t accessible through the Visa network.
The value of a credit card isn’t just the line of credit, it is the near universal and frictionless acceptance as a method of payment.
CC companies have little choice. Laws in EU give right/priority to the customer, and the burden of proof to the company. Now, imagine pissing 1 million Europeans, and them all going to their banks and file a complaint. And Uber (or any other vendor) be hit by 1 million claims that they have to fight for one-at-a-time.
Visa / MC are also under monpoloy FTC scrutiny. They've kept out all competitors in he usa, supposedly by threating not letting you accept Visa / MC if you accept anyone else. In places like Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Mayalsia there are tons of competitors. And because of the competition the fees are much lower to try to lure merchants as well bonuses for consumers.
Additionally for past year or so they have always consistently charged me higher than what they quote originally.
I jump through the hoops to get a "refund" of the difference through automated support workflow. Ofcourse never real money -- just a credit applied to account or so they say.
That credit can never be seen or verified because wallet screen is always down for maintenance or whatever.
There is no email trail or anything else where you can prove you are owed an x amount of credit.
That credit never gets applied to a future ride.
Excellent "growth hack" I guess.
I have done screen recordings of this support workflow shenanigans a few times. Never had the energy to fight it till closure. I know the kind of duplicitous run around the support is going to give me the first five times I raise this.
Earlier this month Uber sent me an email that they “discovered that [I was] charged for an additional period of Uber One membership after [I] contacted customer support. This was because [my] scheduled payment was already in process before [my] cancellation request was received.” I knew they must have gotten in trouble with a regulator because the incident they’re referring to was 2+ years ago.
How did they rectify this issue they “discovered”? They gave me Uber credit…
I still can't fathom why so many customers voluntarily subject themselves to abuse by food delivery services. Overpay for cold, late food (which the driver might have already sampled). I mean I can sort of understand the use case for customers who are stuck at home due to illness or something. But I've seen plenty of young people in good health waste scarce funds on UberEats and similar services. Why?
When I want take-out food I just call the restaurant to order, then get in my car (or on my bike) and pick it up myself.
The last part is the answer for your question: they just don't want to get in their car if they can pay someone else to do that job for them. It's the same reason people pay for cleaning services.
Ordering my go-to meal at this restaurant down the block with Grubhub+ has $0 delivery fee and $1 "service fee". It takes roughly 4 minutes to go get it myself, assuming there's no line. $1 for 4 minutes is $15 an hour -- I value my time more than that.
It's always here within 10-15 minutes. It's never been cold, and the bags are stapled shut, so I don't think the meals have ever been sampled.
Plus it feels nice to be able to stay in sometimes.
These apps make the majority of their revenue from dense urban areas where people don't own cars. No one is driving across New York or San Francisco or to pick up their dinner.
Umm, no, there are 4.6 million people living in the SF metro area and twice that in New York. I can assure you very few of them are within walking/easy transit distance of good restaurants. And most have responsibilities that don't let them get out of the house for dinner. If an hour of your time is more valuable to you than $5 then why wouldn't you order food delivery?
Umm, no. If you're not living in the SF city limits then you almost certainly have a car. And the tiny fraction of Bay Area residents without a car aren't the ones keeping UberEats in business.
The last time I checked I just had to pay 1,50€ extra compared to ordering directly with the restaurant. The delivery itself is free with Uber One. Getting your food delivered for 1,50€ seems pretty cheap to me.
I've tried a few times (whenever somebody sent that sort of gift card my way), and it was always >$10 in explicit fees, plus all the menu items being silently marked up 20%.
Mind you, that's still not exactly "expensive" for delivery [0], but I can make better food both faster and cheaper than waiting, I can pick it up and actually use an insulated bag faster than waiting for delivery, and pretty much any other food strategy at least guarantees I'll actually have the expected meal and not have to waste my time with customer support (or money if I decide it's not worth the hassle).
[0] Imagine you're a driver, you incur $3 in actual expenses, the delivery takes 15min, and they have to wait 15min for the food to be ready (this is the thing that makes pizza delivery more efficient -- as soon as you get to the store there's another pizza waiting). Suddenly that's a $14/hr gig without any benefits and where you need to purchase a special insurance on top of things, assuming the only part Uber keeps is the 20% fee they're scamming you out of. Beyond that, you're at a much higher risk of bodily harm than doing something like construction, and if those aren't good drivers I don't really want to be encouraging more of them to be on the street, especially with time pressures (and if they are skilled ... that's less than McDonald's pays even before you factor in benefits).
What’s the threshold for getting banned? I’ve done a few chargebacks against Lyft since they removed all forms of customer support and haven’t gotten banned yet.
Yea, whenever I think “Uber” I associate it with a work culture[1] full of partying, alcohol, gambling, cocaine, sex in the office, sex at company retreats, misogyny, sexual harassment, cocaine-fueled sexual harassment... you know: all the things we normally associate with a respectful, trusted, and principled business!
The answer to that problem is not giving them more money. They’re going to use that money to try to drive competitors out of the market and lobby for laws which harm riders and drivers.
There are lots of places in the US where if you don't have a car your only reasonable options are an Uber/Lyft or calling a cab that may or may not arrive.
Don't be intentionally obtuse - even for people living in a place with public transport as encompassing as say NYC, you _need_ some form of ride-sharing service eventually in day-to-day life. Being banned from the duopoly of ride-share services is a life-altering thing to happen.
though the commenter might have been obtuse to say that banned from the duopoly of ride-share services is a life-altering thing to happen is quite mad. I live in a city and have never used a ride-share service. out the pool of another dozen friends/co-workers 10 of them seldom-to-never use it (we are all in 40's / early 50's). so most definitely not "life-altering thing"
Have you ever considered that perhaps others conduct themselves differently?
I live in a small city. When I travel, I generally have to be at the airport or train station between 4 and 530 AM. Uber put the taxis out of business, so the choice is Uber, Lyft, wasting a half hour and alot of money parking, or trying to find a black car service.
I was in Rome for business. The choice is Uber or the local cab hailing app, which the cabs don’t always respond to, and the cabbie frequently tries to ripoff a dopey foreigner.
Heh, Rome!! The meter wrote €40, the taxi driver asked for €60. He tried verbal-aggression and threatened to call the police. I took a photo of the meter and asked him to please call the police, I will show them the photo and tell them that he threatened me. He took the €40 and went his merry way.
Once upon a time (around 2005-2006) I had a colleague whose father was a taxi driver. He (the colleague) was openly telling us that every cabbie cheats. Once in a blue moon you find an honest one, or one whose cheating-meter-subsystem is broken.
Cabbies and barmen. My family owned bars, my grand uncle always said he would fire honest bartenders, because there’s no such thing, and he’s too smart to work for him. :)
> even for people living in a place with public transport as encompassing as say NYC, you _need_ some form of ride-sharing service eventually in day-to-day life
Not really. You can say this about smaller US cities, but NYC is absolutely a city where the >90% percentile of people can live without the daily use of a car.
(The simplest reason for this has nothing do to with car ownership or desirability per se: it's because of NYC's food delivery happens by bike or moped.)
This is a strawman if I've ever seen one. The person you're responding to said literally nothing about "daily use of a car". The point was that you need rideshare at some point in your life, which is a point you failed to respond to. There are trips, even in NYC, where you'd be severely inconveniencing yourself by not using rideshare, which makes it a tough calculus to choose between $20 and being banned from Uber for life.
Interesting (in Canada), if my order is wrong I just click the item that is wrong and the chatbot automatically refunds me either on my card or via a credit, and often gives me an extra $5 in credit for my trouble, wonder what account flag I have you don't.
In my experience, in Australia; you don’t get to select the item that was wrong, and simply get a refund on the cheapest item.
Seems the vendors are catching on, with orders often dramatically wrong without any consequence. This is pure speculation, however.
I also found vendors would often substitute items out of stock with those of a lesser value, but write a semi-cute message on it. Nothing like buying some fancy cola, only to get a can of coke and a love letter..
Endless chatbot and help option loops; I gave up, and refuse to use their services - though use was rare anyway.
I've never had any of these problems at all with uber eats, probably part of why I use it so often. I click "help with a past order" and the first option I get is "my order was wrong" if I click it, it presents me with my order and everything I paid for and asks me what to pick that is wrong, it then asks for a photo if it's a larger $ item (unless it's missing) and then it asks me if I want a refund via card or credit, and as I mentioned, it typically gives me a credit for the trouble.
Super interesting to me we have such different experiences. Maybe because I have UberOne?
Silicon valley doesn't deserve credit for inventing this method. It's ancient. Back in the 90s Nintendo lost a suit for price fixing and somehow got the judge to let them "compensate" plaintiffs by giving them coupons toward the purchase of additional games. Comcast, AT&T, GM, Columbia Records, maybe the majority of Fortune 500 companies have done this. Tale as old as time. Silicon valley didn't invent shit.
I once had a 5€ surprise surcharge after a trip. Since Uber’s chatbots were a deadend, I brought up a full-on litigation against them (France). A month later, my litigation was closed and I received 5€ on my bank account.
> If you are able to figure out the magic combination of options that will get you to a support agent they will say "sure we will refund your money" but that is still only going to your app account.
The worst part is I have never figured out a way to spend any of my Uber credits. I have hundreds of dollars in Uber credits I've accumulated over the years, and I regularly use Uber, and yet have never spent any credits.
When you choose your payment method in the ride selection screen you should be automatically using credits (unless those credits are for something specific, like Eats, or something else).
I'm able to see this in my Uber app today (set a destination, then at the bottom of the screen is a row for payment options, clicking that will show you Uber balances (uber cash), payment methods, and vouchers) and am located in the US.
If you are not seeing this, I'm thinking you need to reach out to support via email and have a long (probably frustrating) conversation.
I do not see this, it always direct-charges my Amex. The only credits I get auto-spent are my $15/monthly Amex credits. Definitely will reach out to Support at some point (whenever I get fed up and have time to burn, probably while sitting waiting to board a flight).
Okay, are you able to at least see your vouchers and other credits? I currently have a $5 credit applied from a cancellation dispute so I think it should be working for all credits.
During the early days of Uber, it was breaking Australian trade practices law in the regulated taxi industry. Uber told drivers it would give them financial backing, if taken to court.
I believe this was in itself, a significant departure from business ethics: It may be the regulations were bad, but inviting drivers to become scofflaw and offering them indemnity from payment in civil suit, feels like taking corporate lawfare into a new realm.
Quite aside from this disregard for Australian Business law, Uber was transfer pricing the profits from the taxi business into the USA. It operated at a loss in Australia, and exported a lot of revenue to the USA.
There was, and continues to be, many problems with taxi as a business, and the regulator was highly deficient. These problems relate to reliability, driver ethics, safety for women, minorities (things like drivers refusing to take seeing-eye dogs, and hassling solo women riding home) -I'm not blind to the failure here and I do not personally view this as "all regulated industries are worse than free enterprise" -the regulator just couldnt be bothered enforcing it's requirements.
The real problem was that the cost of a taxi plate rose over a 20 year period at 2-3 times the rate of inflation. Towards the end, a taxi plate was a $500k investment and was owned by many ex accountants, lawyers, doctors and the like as a massive capital gain, independently of the social utility of running taxi as a function. -This destroyed the real driver cooperative movement, and made restriction of entry to taxi a necessary economic forcing function: all attempts to add drivers deflated the capital value of the plate, and were opposed by the current owners.
When this was eventually liquidated (Dublin for example) the capital losses were extreme. A $500k plate could drop to $10k or less. A lot of people had life savings eroded, the industry collapsed. Brisbane wasn't much different. Canberra had this too.
London, cities with a high barrier to entry like "the knowledge" and the LEZ have different models. I don't know if Uber is in London.
This is my biggest aggravation. They consistently underreport estimated pickup times. Dropoff times are essentially universally significantly later than the estimate before booking.
It's things like this that make agents potentially exciting. So much of enshittification is wrapping an essentially good service in a crappy and misleading UI to drive extra revenue. If you can replace the lying UI with a more honest one, and then do a fair and automatic comparison between Uber and Lyft, a lot of the annoyance goes away.
This is the same thing the food delivery apps (including Uber Eats) do. I have screenshots showing the estimated delivery time pretty consistently jumping up anywhere between 20% and 50% from what it shows on the initial screen to what you get once you've placed the order. And then often they don't even make that time estimate.
An accurate estimate isn't really possible with the food delivery business model. Couriers will have 2-3 orders, so if you are order 1 or two, there is a new variable that enters the equation after you purchase the food. They obviously add other items on a similar route, but wait times and such are fairly random). Of course they could do 1 order to 1 driver but that would double the labor costs (sequential orders would be 2-3 deliveries per hour max per courier, vs 4ish when optimized).
Then they shouldn't charge for faster delivery. It just doesn't make any sense. Like i'm 95% sure in most cases you don't actually get a car faster and they just take your money and provide no marginal value (granted, I only use the apps about every other month). How else could they consistently offer multiple price tiers regardless of availability? I'm not claiming fraud necessarily, but I also can't imagine how you could offer it without committing fraud. At some point you're just lying ("estimation with negative effort" as a friend calls it) about car etas to drive the perception of value.
That doesn't explain why the delivery consistently jumps 30% to 50% as soon as you hit the confirm button and they process your payment. If they were giving an honest estimate, you'd expect a gradual increase in the estimate as the delivery person showed up 2 minutes late at point A, then 5 minutes late at point B, then 10 minutes late at point C, etc.
The Uber Eats delivery time estimates are a lie, plain and simple. Once they have your money in hand, they'll shamelessly admit to the lie, which is why the estimate jumps instantaneously.
also, you would expect to at times get over-estimated wait times. but my experience is always underestimated by about 20 minutes. so consistently, in fact, that I suspect they have a very good idea of the true time and then subtract 20 min from it.
Uber could provide a range or a point in the middle, but it seems like they just estimate the best case scenario and then it's usually not the best case.
Dev turned doordash driver here. Let me tell you why those estimates are bullshit.
First, there are three different ways that orders can come in. 1) Tight integration into the POS system. 2) Through a separate parallel physical tablet. 3) Something spits out something on a printer.
There are opportunities with 1 and 2 to do some sort of feedback on how busy things are. I know for the tablet option that at least for some restaurants they are able to indicate how long the order will take.
But half the places I get to have no integration, they just put the ticket on the pile and it's done when it's done. A couple places that do this in particular also don't even start the order until the driver shows up, on purpose. The app will tell the customer I'll pick it up in 5 minutes no matter what. There's a chain that does prep work in front of the customer, but certain locations will not make pickup/delivery orders if there's anyone in line in the shop. I stopped doing deliveries there.
You'd also think that places with the potential for awesome metrics making pickup timing a breeze would be fast food chains, right? Nope. Not a single iota of smart integration whatsoever.
I've found that keeping customers in the loop as to what's happening with their deliveries ends up keeping them happy, even if it's gonna be slow. I suppose some things never change.
You're spot on, I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike on the weekends for exercise and the wait times are BS because everyone orders lunch/dinner at the same time and they're in essentially a random queue with everyone else who orders. Add to that multiple pick ups and drop offs and you've got a mess.
Talking to people really does help though, everyone wants to be more forgiving when you remind them theirs a human factor involved in getting the food to them.
They're just going to replace the engineers, analysts and designers. The same greedy MBAs and VCs are still going to be running it and the agents they deploy will reflect that. This is not a competitive market by any definition - huge information asymmetries and extremely low competition. We need to go back to either government sponsored monopoly with the appropriate regulatory models or we need to declare it a utility and set prices.
I find it a lot easier to just not use Uber and Lyft at all. It's so insanely expensive it's really only worth it if you need to get to or from the airport and all your social circle is at work. Otherwise it's easier and cheaper and generally less stressful to drive, walk, or take public transit.
I’d be way more excited about a functional consumer protection agency or actual antitrust enforcement than trying to beat a dark pattern with more dark patterns. Just wait til AI agent service providers get in on the regulatory capture game, politicians are cheap to buy these days.
I'd take that with a grain of salt. I've went through the process to cancel an uber one trial recently, and I would say it's not anywhere near "23 screens". Maybe the user in question got unlucky and got hit with all the A/B trials, and they're being super generous with what counts as a "screen", but the process was relatively painless.
Might be because of your location. Some governments like California have regulated these types of things with a law that says you must be allowed to cancel in the same manner you signed up.
I can, I’ve written a billing system before (unfortunately). There’s a lot of annoying math/edge cases and systems to sync between.
While I never implemented a restriction like this, it would have prevented a lot of weird bugs/customer support issues and kept the underlying code much simpler.
(Annoying math = time zones, prorations, discounts, billing cycle anchors, etc. see the “falsehoods programmers believe about X” series)
(Systems to sync between = internal DBs, billing APIs, payment processors, etc.)
I mean sure, I get it, but companies like Uber leave edge cases like that out when it hurts them (customers cancelling) but move heaven & earth to remove them when it helps them (I bet its easy to re-join within 24 hours of cancelling?).
I was part of a faith-based health sharing program for a few years. When it came time to cancel my membership, I had to call in and speak with a rep. I got past several rounds of retention attempts and succeeded in cancelling. The rep offered to pray for me before we ended the call and asked if I had any prayer requests. I mentioned something about getting over a bad cold and she said, “you know, one of the benefits that we offer—“
I felt a little bit bad about hanging up but mostly I was just mad.
This actually works reliably with quite a few companies, especially large ones with low marginal cost services. They will often have a standard script where they will offer anyone calling to cancel a large discount for 3-12 months. People can, and many do, call back at the end of each promo period to say they're cancelling and refresh the discounted rate.
For Uber? In the handful of times I've canceled uber one trials I've never seen this. It's always through the app. Not even the FTC complaint alleges this.
Are you in Cali? They have a state law that says "if you can sign up online you have to be able to cancel online".
I ran into this with a NYTimes subscription I tried to cancel. They detected I wasn't in a state with such protections and removed the cancellation options while not providing a way to cancel. Made things real hard to shutdown.
Presumably they're specifically referring to uber rather than the broader conversation about dark patterns in canceling. I, too, remember how hard it was to cancel ZipCar—I think I just ended up closing the credit account it was backed by because I couldn't successfully navigate the labyrinth of phone-based customer support to cancel.
The complaint has some screenshots starting at page 15, which I think is representative of the cancellation process I went through. If you're being super generous (ie. start counting from you first launched the app, and also scrolling down as a "screen"), I can count 9-10 screens. I'm not sure how you can get 23.
Just tell them you moved, that's why you're canceling, and you live nowhere near any of their other branches therefore it would be physically impossible for you to come in.
This works for me, and I have no qualms lying to circumvent stupid tactics like these. I have turned into a LIAR when speaking to customer service for stuff like this because it just makes me more sympathetic as a customer, even though it's insane and unfair that one has to do this as a sort of social hack instead of the business just doing the right thing.
Was in my local gym trying to set up a membership and someone was in there screaming that it’d be easier to “burn the gym to fucking ashes” than cancel the sub. Turns out the cancellations person was only there on a Tuesday at 10AM or something useless.
Worth noting that in the UK if you say « this is obviously predatory and isn’t going to hold up in small claims court » this requirement almost always disappears and they tell you that just this one time they’ll be nice and cancel from today.
Sirus wasn't bad, but it was still a call which is annoying.
The worst I've experienced was equifax. I signed up for a free trial to see where my credit sat and what was up, then cancelled. It was a phone call, 30 minute wait, and SUPER weaselly behavior in the call center script. Something to the effect of Them: "Hey we want to give you this free gift", Me: "Will that gift keep my subscription active?" Them: "yes". Repeated several times as they tried just a bunch of avenues to not cancel my account. I literally had to say "No, I just want you to cancel my account" or "Are you going to cancel my account" like 20 times. It took over an hour.
This isn’t just a dark pattern — it’s dark matter. The kind where it says 'cancel anytime,' but when you actually try, it throws up a screen like: 'Please proceed by faxing us from the moon.'
Uber is an interesting company in that they were always shady, but initially in ways that customers liked (somewhat illegal taxis ripping off their drivers, for below cost, subsidized lifestyle by VC).
They then flipped the "make a profit" switch and are now shady in ways customers dislike (ripping you the customer off).
I’m old enough when the VC model was “I dunno, ads?”, followed by “SaaS/cloud”, then “Uber for X” all of which proceeded “crypto” and “AI”.
A lot of it stacks now with “AI for X” running in the cloud funded by SaaS and/or ads. Just increasingly adversarial revenue models to turn customers into product (data) and/or hooked on forever recurring increasingly monthly spend.
Long gone the days of funding a piece of software customers purchase and use as long and as much as they wish.
UberOne is why I almost never use UberEats any more and instead use a local competitor.
Shortly after it was introduced it seemed every order of mine would get surprise delayed after pick up as the driver would have to first drop off a different order at >90° different direction from me, no doubt for the user who would get priority for being on UberOne.
I don’t order food often enough to justify a subscription, so I just switched to Mr D(elivery), a local South African company where the delivery time is at least almost always consistent. I also feel a bit better about less of the money leaving the country.
Similar to CA's requirement for online cancellations if a subscription is purchased online, there should be a rule that requires the same amount of steps to cancel as it takes to subscribe.
Yes it could still be gamed, but anyone who's worked on user funnels knows that every added step reduces conversion, so it would be self-balancing.
This is a good way to lose a sale. Like the person you are responding to said, I have done user funnel work and every step between the desire to purchase and completing the purchase is dropping users out the funnel. This is the idea behind retailers like Amazon introducing one click purchase. If someone has the impulse to buy you want to get as out of their way as possible.
I’m bearish on uber because despite all of these shady tactics they are still barely profitable at the current scale and with enormous tailwinds. Last quarter they made $770 million on $12 billion of revenue. It’s just a lousy business model and they are desperate to beat Wall Street’s ever inflated expectations each quarter.
Just recently, Uber (with some partner) started testing delivery robots in my (city) neighborhood. And I love Waymo, as much as I've been able to use them. Maybe automation will change the economics.
Also, IIRC, for many years, Amazon barely squeaked a profit. They wanted to be at the low end of the margins to capture market share. Once they got big enough, they increased their margins a little and started turning a big profit.
I think uber is different though. It hasn’t been founder led for several years and the current ceo was hired to cut out all r&d spend and maximize profits and revenue.
They report things like foreign currency transactions and stock based compensation as free cash flow.
The hope with uber is that they become an aggregator of AVs which belies an assumption that autonomous vehicles will essentially be a commodity. Or perhaps that AVs take much longer to become practical at scale than people think.
But one of the biggest red flags to me with this company is how they aggressively buy back stock and publicly announce that they believe it’s undervalued. You’re in the midst of an extremely competitive emerging market and your best idea for your cash is to… buy stock?
That's sad because I'm happy they exist. In a material way they've made my life better. I hope there always remains a nationwide app based taxi service.
Uber's sales reps convinced my company to sign up for a business account for employee travel. Soon we started noticing that advertised fares for the exact same ride were 20-40% higher when the business profile was activated. Now the guidance for employees is to always book rides using the personal profile and file for reimbursement. I'm convinced that Uber is only able to survive by scamming customers.
FWIW I used a business profile a few years ago because that's the only way to not use your uber gift balance (we couldn't expense gift balances), and didn't notice any discrepancy between personal and business rates for the base fare. Selecting "business" disables any promos, which is likely where the discrepancy is coming from.
The deals for any of these meal services are bullshit in my experience. There's a lot of hidden fees or minimum order amount stuff that isn't apparent until you get to the checkout, definitely not the great deal they have you believe you're getting.
We have a restaurant where I can order a $10 meal and pick it up myself. The same meal done through uber is $30. Everything has a percentage added and there's at least 3 extra "you used us" fees that get tacked on. All the menu items can have anywhere from a 20->100% markup. It's quite insane.
Uber Eats markets a 2 for 1 deal that I would have only ordered due to the deal. They always add both items when you take the deal to the cart, but they suddenly changed it. I didn't realize I had to manually add both, and only had one delivered. I called them up and they only refunded a portion, and not the whole thing without accounting for the fact that it was an opportunity cost for me. I would have just bought something else, or not at all. It's tin-foil hatting, but they coerced a purchase imho.
In my experience, when you’re within 24 hours or so of an upcoming renewal, you have to contact support to stop the renewal. And there isn’t a prominent way to contact support, because the contact form is hidden until you view a past order. That’s not really an edge case…
On another note, an actual edge case that happened to me is that I was in a different country when my Uber One was about to renew, but I had no way to cancel because the app kept geolocating me and displayed a UI specific to my visiting country. I got no Uber One benefits in that country anyway. So I had to send an email to stop renewal, and while I was waiting for a reply, I got charged. Support said they can’t refund me, and I ended up having to do a chargeback.
I’ve found that apps like uber, coinbase, robinhood etc that offer subscriptions can opt you in somewhat unexpectedly because most people are accustomed to an IAP confirmation screen. They can bypass this due to the nature of their subscription, so one too many “continue” taps and bam you’re subscribed. They don’t display pricing so prominently either.
Happened to me with coinbase, I accidentally subscribed and got charged for 3 months. Luckily they were able to refund me since I didn’t actually use the service.
Uber is worth a case study in absolutely horrendous customer service and borderline theft. I haven't used them since they stole $150 from me for an UberEats order I was 10 minutes late to pickup in a one hour window, stating that the pickup windows are firm even for non-perishable goods and failure to show up during the window is a forfeit without refund. They even fought my credit card dispute on the matter. Vile company.
Similar. Charged $150 for 2 bottles of wine that never moved off their shelf. I cancelled within the minute.
You'd think that given no services were actually rendered and no perishable items, it'd be an easy open-shut support case.
But, no, you see: "that automatically accepted order itself was the service rendered"
Cool. I took the L because I order food all the time. Hate them for it. I don't know what our alternative is. We all laughed at this company as they burned through billions a year to acquire us, and now it's a monopoly robbing us all.
Another dark pattern is consistently underestimating the time to be picked up by a driver. The estimate is always something like 3 minutes, but often the wait time is more like 7 minutes.
Same for Uber Eats. They estimate 25 minutes for a drop off, but it's often more like 45 minutes.
I’m disabled and rely heavily on food delivery apps and stopped using uber/postmates about a year ago. I somehow got tricked into paying $40 on a $6 order. I went back through the flow to see where I messed up, the screen did show my order amount that I expected, but after many many emails and messages with support, this discount didnt apply because I didn’t hit some “minimum” on the order, so they went ahead and charged the full amount (not what was displayed, or if it was, was done in an extremely dishonest/obfuscated way).
I am far from a novice computer/device user. you’re already making a decent amount of money off me and the slave labor wages you pay your workers, why try to aggressively milk every penny I have? I stopped using it after their joke of an outsourced customer support would not do anything but run me in circles. How much did losing my business cost them in revenue vs. the blatant petty theft in dark patterns would have gained? There has to be a day where all these user hostile apps triggers some response from people like “no, enough of this.”
For us the line for several of those companies was when we had several massively late orders where they lied and blamed the restaurant rather than the fact that they were trying to keep their costs down by underpaying drivers. I think the underlying problem is that companies like Uber pitched themselves as tech companies like Google or Facebook and locked in expenses like compensation at correspondingly high levels, but there just isn’t that much margin in food delivery or unlicensed cabs not matter how hard they squeeze, and it’s an inherently local service so they’re always vulnerable to competition in their most profitable markets.
I've long suspected these shady practices, and I'm relieved they're finally being exposed. Utilities and others aren’t far behind, sending invoices no reasonable person wouldn’t question.
Since 2019, I've relied on ride-shares and delivery services, consistently questioning their fee structures. During this time, I've spent an unconscionable amount on Uber and Uber Eats alone.
A big shame both to the ones running the show and the ones who trained them to think this is acceptable.
THANK YOU, FTC! Holy shit. I was enrolled in Uber One and cancelling it was insanely difficult. I was convinced they purposely made their support pages near impossible to navigate. Fuck Uber.
When arriving to new countries getting Uber from airport to hotel, different Uber accounts get different price quotes. Enough so, it is better to purchase a burner phone and get a sim card at the airport because the savings on Uber will cover the difference after a few trips. Nonetheless, Uber is 1000% safer and better than the taxi mafia.
> When customers try to cancel, Uber makes it extremely difficult. Users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel
Funny enough I had to take an uber today but it was taking too long so I wanted to cancel the request and call a taxi, I was asked 4 times if I wanted to really cancel, small things like that really do just inflict a little bit of pressure it’s a horrible practice. The fact that a company comes up with these dark patterns to squeeze every cent from you says everything you need to know about them.
I can't express how angry it makes me that I only had access to taxis for a couple years in the city before they were all pushed out and rates were jacked, screwing both the customer and the driver providing the value. It will take decades to reverse this course even if everyone has decent intentions, and shareholders rarely do.
Here in Italy I don't know if I hate more uber or the taxi drivers themselves. Most cities do not have uber because of them striking and paralyzing cities. Most taxi drivers will try to scam you if you are a tourist, will not take credit cards and will under-declare profits to avoid paying taxes. Taxi licenses are limited in number and re-sold between taxi drivers and new potential buyers. No new licenses are emitted because the government is scared of them.
They did have a local taxi app here that was reasonably popular and founded by a group of taxi drivers and was pretty liked by passengers and drivers.
Then they sold to a UK company, who sold to a German company, who recently sold to Lyft, each step along the way the new owner finding ways to make the service worse.
They did. But the model of uber was obviously designed to drive them out of business, damn legality and short term losses and devastation of the local community.
Well, now we're stuck at the airport waiting for a mob of cars to fight each other to transport us each as least efficiently as humans have figured out how to do. But at least we can stare at our phone while we wait to get fucked.
And this doesn't even touch the horror of the driving side
Meanwhile, my city is suing a local cooperative for "safety reasons" or some bullshit. I don't expect anything to ever improve at this point.
Now please investigate their teaser rates to get you to choose Uber as a transport option when they know your driver is vapor and/or will cancel then charge 3x congestion pricing on the next refresh when it’s too late to pick another option. Infuriating practices, and the drivers seem to keep getting screwed on the gigs.
I was always able to cancel very easily. I’ve done so many X free months of Uber One and it’s been so much easier than cancelling any number of other subscriptions (NYT has still been my worst experience on that front). I’m surprised to see that as a complaint tbh.
I use virtual credit cards for most of my subscriptions. If I can’t cancel via normal means, I cancel the card. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.
Can’t say whether this is the recommended method for all services but it works for me.
I tried that with my real card and it turns out that if you report a card lost/stolen and get a replacement behind the scenes your bank will still forward some transactions from the old card to the new one without having to update
Many years ago, I had an XBox 360 with a valid credit card attached. With a ten year+ gap of service, I then connected my account to a new Xbox. Somehow Microsoft was able to still use and charge a ten year old credit card account even though I have had many replacement cards in the intervening years.
I've had new credit / debit cards show up in the mail... and then vendors tell me they automatically updated my card info! What's the point in expiring a card if they can just get the new info automatically anyways?
When you request a new card you have to request that they don’t update merchants. Claim it was stolen or lost. Not all banks let you but most have this as an option when talking to a real person.
I know, its veering into court-politics- but is the FTC now "selectively active" as in, if the king deems your company out of favor for lack of tributes, it becomes active?
Here I assumed I just fat-fingered something when doing an Uber. I never sign up for the recurring charge stuff and recently saw the UberOne subby and canceled it.
I guess now I'll be a party to the class action and get a gift card in 10-12 years from this BS. Neat!
The latest dark pattern in all these apps is that they will mess up your order/ride and then "refund" you in the form of account credit. There's no way to actually get your money back. Trying to contact support results in an endless loop of help screens and chatbots. If you are able to figure out the magic combination of options that will get you to a support agent they will say "sure we will refund your money" but that is still only going to your app account. The last time I had an issue I literally had to ask them 3 times "I want you to confirm that you are refunding my credit card the amount it was charged" for them to finally agree to it. It is crazy what they can get away with.
The worst thing is that you can't even do a chargeback, otherwise you get banned. There is no recourse for the consumer. If this is their solution for fighting chargebacks, they should get banned from accepting Visa / MC / AMEX.
Another sketchy practice: if you get Uber Cash through a card like Amex, when you go to use it the price for the ride is automatically $15-$20 more than someone who doesn’t have an Uber Cash balance.
I’ve checked this side by side with colleagues at the airport getting ride quotes to the same hotel. When you have Uber Cash they will quote you more. You can find numerous Reddit threads on the topic as well.
This feels very illegal to me, but not a lawyer.
Here's a story today about this practice:
Bay Area traveler says Uber gift cards boosted fare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43751945
Send in a complaint to your state attorney’s general
I notice this with my Uber cash credit I get from my AMEX Gold card. The prices are always higher.
https://www.nysun.com/article/dynamic-pricing-at-major-groce...
The less they know about you the better. Good reason to not have Gift Cards inside of the applications.
I have heard a lot of people speak about dynamic pricing, but I have yet to hear any benefit to the consumer or society as a whole.
Basically any possible pitch for it is worse in every way than simple downward wealth redistribution.
Surge pricing in theory incentivizes more drivers to operate during peak times, reducing wait times for passengers. If you’ve used these kinds of apps in regions where they aren’t popular, it can be quite common to not have anyone pick up your fare.
If you could bid up the price, you would be more likely to incentivize any idle drivers to pick up your fare. A driver might not be willing to get out of bed for a $10 fare, but the same driver might be willing to get out of bed for a $30 fare.
Going by pure economic theory "dynamic pricing" actually benefits both buyers and sellers in a marketplace. There are plenty of cases where it makes sense – lunch menus at restaurants, grocery store coupons, retail bargain bins, dollar menus, happy hour deals, senior/youth/student discounts, even surge pricing in Uber & Lyft. Of course like with every aspect of economics how something is implemented matters a lot more than how it sounds on paper. Especially in the case of rideshare/food delivery, where the middleman has all the data and makes all the decisions.
Wouldn't perfect individualised dynamic pricing mean that the seller (Uber in this case) would get to capture the entire consumer surplus? Is that good?
Yes but also that some people would be getting a service that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. But there’s little/no incentive for a pure seller to do that, although for a marketplace like Uber there is more possibility for that, in order to maintain liquidity on the other side of the transaction. I listened to an interview where Uber CEO Dara K note there is always an incentive pool, and based on the market it is either riders or drivers who are getting the incentive money at any given time.
Well that's certainly AN economic theory, but it feels a little polyannish/unreasonably hopeful. Like most of american macroeconomic discourse.
The benefits will trickle down. You just have to give it time, then we will be living in a worker's paradise. Promise.
Where exactly does macro come into play here?
Prices are always dynamic in every business. The only difference is in how frequently the price changes.
If you take your idea to the logical extreme then you're essentially arguing for permanently fixed prices. This is one reason why it's sometimes impossible to get a taxi in places where the rates are fixed by government edict.
I don't think we're referring to the same concept. Dynamic pricing implies charging two different concurrent customers different prices for the same good or service. The only place you can see this now are basically reward/promo/point programs, which while also gross (basically, making transactiobs cheaper for the rich) at least seem to have some proponents.
You are thinking of price discrimination, which is a subcategory of dynamic pricing. Changing prices based on time of day, current demand, tiers/SKUs or really anything else is also collectively dynamic pricing.
I would probably call this "charge discrimination", which gives a clear indication which side of the party is empowered with this concept.
Still, wildly volatile pricing is also an excellent reason to avoid taxi apps. Why politicians have no desire to rein them in is baffling. I guess the stock market is really all that matters at the end of the day....
In theory surge pricing should bring more drivers into the area making the service better for riders. Not sure how much that actually works out in practice though without data only Uber really has.
I remember the days when Uber prices from SF to anywhere on the peninsula would suddenly spike exactly a minute or two after each Caltrain departed. If you just missed the train you paid a lot more.
And then the many times that Lyft violated the triangle inequality in pricing: Ride from A->B followed by a ride from B->C was often cheaper than a direct ride from A->C, if you knew how to pick B correctly. I once confused the hell out of a driver when I got out and got back in the same car at some nondescript spot.
I have lived in this state for 5 years. Lyft works great!
The full story is I requested a ride to an Air Force base and the driver was not able to take us there due to restrictions at the base. We requested the driver drop us off at a restaurant just outside of the base. The ride we were on was cancelled, a new one created, and calculated as if we were originating at our point of embarkation at the same time all of this happened. Which happened to be during surge pricing.
I tried support for weeks. I was in an endless loop of scripts and going nowhere. At the time, the extra $200 or so charge was a significant amount for me so I charged it back with my card. The card had no issue with this but every time I try signing into Uber, they insist I pay them the remainder of their error from years ago.
I won't go back and don't care one bit.
I don't think I've ever used Uber. Have used lyft a few times, just to support a relative 'underdog' compared to Uber. Never had a problem. Probably less than 10 rides in the past 3 years though, so I'm possibly not a huge data point.
If you are at the point where your only option left is a chargeback, that is a “burning the bridges” moment anyway. Why would you want to continue doing business with a company that treats you like that? I would be grateful to be banned: it means I don’t have to go to the trouble of canceling my account.
I’ve had to do a handful of chargebacks and I don’t know or care whether they banned me: I would never voluntarily do business with them again anyway.
One reason you might still want to use them is that they used anticompetitive blitzscaling strategies and ran at a loss to prevent competitors from taking off.
That could have been a great reason to support legislation. Really quite a shame that nobody put that forward.
I have a friend who had a bad experience with a company once. After drawn out fight for the equivalent of a months salary with lawyers getting involved and threats of collections, the company made a final statement. "We will refund you, but you'll be blacklisted". My friend was delighted, and responded to them as such. He thanked them, since now he wouldn't have to remember their name to avoid ever accidentally buying from them again.
He found a local contractor to do the job instead.
Can confirm. Issued a successful chargeback after they bait and switched the Uber 1 subscription promising $5 for every late delivery only to revoke that portion weeks later.
Support would not refund the yearly subscription despite an obvious change to the economic terms of the subscription and so a chargeback was issued which the credit card company agreed with.
Ransomware screen now on the account to the effect of "Pay $100 Immediately To Regain Your Account" with no transactions possible unless the ransom is paid.
I’ve won every single charge back and yet to get banned. I’m sure it happens but I’m also sure it’s something companies threaten to reduce them since it’s basically an automatic fee they pay. It also hurts their rates if they have a higher rate of chargebacks.
Who is Visa / MC / AMEX going to side with? The company that gets them hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year or a random account holder? It doesn't really matter who is right or wrong.
This tidily demonstrates the value of a competent regulatory authority. The payment processor (i.e. card provider) should be even more afraid of the regulator than they are of potential lost business.
Would be nice, except that consumer protections were anyways an afterthought in this country and we just elected a government with an explicit goal to kill them entirely.
I agree about the current government. However, we do have examples of muscular regulatory schemes and infrastructure in this country's past: CFPB and Dodd-Frank are recent good examples. Both could also have been stronger, of course.
If it becomes a systemic problem, the CC companies will absolutely drop merchants or entire industries.
CC companies, especially in the states, almost always favor the cardholder over the merchant.
For individual chargebacks and small scammy merchants, sure. Uber meanwhile processes $40 billion worth of transactions a year. There is zero chance they are facing any kind of "discipline" from credit card operators. At that volume they write their own terms.
What's Uber going to do to VISA if VISA honors the chargeback? Not accept VISA?
Your card provider needs to keep you happy far more than your card provider needs to keep Uber happy.
Going by that theory why doesn't Visa just jack up their prices by 10x? After all what are merchants going to do, not accept Visa? Turns out yes, that's exactly what they will do. Look at the number of business that don't take Amex for example for the same reason. Large companies especially have enough leverage to negotiate their own deals with credit card operators, like Costco does with Visa.
Costco is a bit different. If I don't have a Visa, i can pay with cash, personal check, or debit card. Sure, I'd prefer to pay with credit card, but it's not a huge deal for me to use a debit card there.
With Uber, there simply isn't an alternative. If they don't accept Visa then i can't use a credit card (or most debit cards, since those go through the visa network too) and there isn't a reasonable way for me to pay at all.
> With Uber, there simply isn't an alternative. If they don't accept Visa then i can't use a credit card (or most debit cards, since those go through the visa network too) and there isn't a reasonable way for me to pay at all.
Uber takes Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay too. Any would let you use a bank account. You can also deposit cash into PayPal and I think Venmo as well.
FWIW, "CC companies" are banks.
Visa/MasterCard/Discover/etc are little more than clearing houses.
Banks serve as both issuers (to the consumer) and processors (to the merchant), often times both.
You are drastically underestimating the value and control that the processor networks bring.
Wells Fargo might underwrite the credit on my credit card, but I would immediately cancel that line of credit if it wasn’t accessible through the Visa network.
The value of a credit card isn’t just the line of credit, it is the near universal and frictionless acceptance as a method of payment.
CC companies have little choice. Laws in EU give right/priority to the customer, and the burden of proof to the company. Now, imagine pissing 1 million Europeans, and them all going to their banks and file a complaint. And Uber (or any other vendor) be hit by 1 million claims that they have to fight for one-at-a-time.
Uber's been bitten by that sort of thing before, though last time [0] it was even more obviously their own fault.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/uber-loses-appeal-b...
Visa / MC are also under monpoloy FTC scrutiny. They've kept out all competitors in he usa, supposedly by threating not letting you accept Visa / MC if you accept anyone else. In places like Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Mayalsia there are tons of competitors. And because of the competition the fees are much lower to try to lure merchants as well bonuses for consumers.
I didn't know what a chargeback was till last few years when it became popular almost meme like. Probably lots of fraud there.
Same experience in India.
Additionally for past year or so they have always consistently charged me higher than what they quote originally.
I jump through the hoops to get a "refund" of the difference through automated support workflow. Ofcourse never real money -- just a credit applied to account or so they say.
That credit can never be seen or verified because wallet screen is always down for maintenance or whatever.
There is no email trail or anything else where you can prove you are owed an x amount of credit.
That credit never gets applied to a future ride.
Excellent "growth hack" I guess.
I have done screen recordings of this support workflow shenanigans a few times. Never had the energy to fight it till closure. I know the kind of duplicitous run around the support is going to give me the first five times I raise this.
Earlier this month Uber sent me an email that they “discovered that [I was] charged for an additional period of Uber One membership after [I] contacted customer support. This was because [my] scheduled payment was already in process before [my] cancellation request was received.” I knew they must have gotten in trouble with a regulator because the incident they’re referring to was 2+ years ago.
How did they rectify this issue they “discovered”? They gave me Uber credit…
I still can't fathom why so many customers voluntarily subject themselves to abuse by food delivery services. Overpay for cold, late food (which the driver might have already sampled). I mean I can sort of understand the use case for customers who are stuck at home due to illness or something. But I've seen plenty of young people in good health waste scarce funds on UberEats and similar services. Why?
When I want take-out food I just call the restaurant to order, then get in my car (or on my bike) and pick it up myself.
The last part is the answer for your question: they just don't want to get in their car if they can pay someone else to do that job for them. It's the same reason people pay for cleaning services.
Ordering my go-to meal at this restaurant down the block with Grubhub+ has $0 delivery fee and $1 "service fee". It takes roughly 4 minutes to go get it myself, assuming there's no line. $1 for 4 minutes is $15 an hour -- I value my time more than that.
It's always here within 10-15 minutes. It's never been cold, and the bags are stapled shut, so I don't think the meals have ever been sampled.
Plus it feels nice to be able to stay in sometimes.
These apps make the majority of their revenue from dense urban areas where people don't own cars. No one is driving across New York or San Francisco or to pick up their dinner.
If you live in NY or SF then you have multiple restaurants within easy walking / cycling / subway distance.
Umm, no, there are 4.6 million people living in the SF metro area and twice that in New York. I can assure you very few of them are within walking/easy transit distance of good restaurants. And most have responsibilities that don't let them get out of the house for dinner. If an hour of your time is more valuable to you than $5 then why wouldn't you order food delivery?
Umm, no. If you're not living in the SF city limits then you almost certainly have a car. And the tiny fraction of Bay Area residents without a car aren't the ones keeping UberEats in business.
The last time I checked I just had to pay 1,50€ extra compared to ordering directly with the restaurant. The delivery itself is free with Uber One. Getting your food delivered for 1,50€ seems pretty cheap to me.
I've tried a few times (whenever somebody sent that sort of gift card my way), and it was always >$10 in explicit fees, plus all the menu items being silently marked up 20%.
Mind you, that's still not exactly "expensive" for delivery [0], but I can make better food both faster and cheaper than waiting, I can pick it up and actually use an insulated bag faster than waiting for delivery, and pretty much any other food strategy at least guarantees I'll actually have the expected meal and not have to waste my time with customer support (or money if I decide it's not worth the hassle).
[0] Imagine you're a driver, you incur $3 in actual expenses, the delivery takes 15min, and they have to wait 15min for the food to be ready (this is the thing that makes pizza delivery more efficient -- as soon as you get to the store there's another pizza waiting). Suddenly that's a $14/hr gig without any benefits and where you need to purchase a special insurance on top of things, assuming the only part Uber keeps is the 20% fee they're scamming you out of. Beyond that, you're at a much higher risk of bodily harm than doing something like construction, and if those aren't good drivers I don't really want to be encouraging more of them to be on the street, especially with time pressures (and if they are skilled ... that's less than McDonald's pays even before you factor in benefits).
Right it’s expensive since, as a comedian describes it - you ordered a taxi for your hamburger.
If you pay by PayPal you will get your money back, some company tried to pull that account credit on me and PayPal had my back
Submit a credit card chargeback. They cannot charge you for a service not rendered
Then you can't use it anymore... that's kind of a problem when there's a duopoly in the rideshare space.
What’s the threshold for getting banned? I’ve done a few chargebacks against Lyft since they removed all forms of customer support and haven’t gotten banned yet.
Uber is likely a lot more aggressive banning people as that’s how they operate all aspects of their business
Uber was (and I have no idea if still is) the culture-bro and rape-do-nothing-about-it company. I never forget that when they come up in discussions.
Yea, whenever I think “Uber” I associate it with a work culture[1] full of partying, alcohol, gambling, cocaine, sex in the office, sex at company retreats, misogyny, sexual harassment, cocaine-fueled sexual harassment... you know: all the things we normally associate with a respectful, trusted, and principled business!
1: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/09/05/fascinating-revelations-...
The answer to that problem is not giving them more money. They’re going to use that money to try to drive competitors out of the market and lobby for laws which harm riders and drivers.
It's not a choice for many people, like, easily many millions in a city.
It’s the opposite in cities: you’re far more likely to have alternative options like taxis, transit, bike/scootershare, etc. than in rural areas.
Where exactly is Uber the only option?
There are lots of places in the US where if you don't have a car your only reasonable options are an Uber/Lyft or calling a cab that may or may not arrive.
That’s not what I was asking. I don’t even have Uber on my phone because in my experience the’ve been the worst for years so I don’t use em.
Thus being blacklisted by them seems like a non issue, unless there’s local monopolies somewhere.
In a city?
Cabs, busses, bikes, trains...
Don't be intentionally obtuse - even for people living in a place with public transport as encompassing as say NYC, you _need_ some form of ride-sharing service eventually in day-to-day life. Being banned from the duopoly of ride-share services is a life-altering thing to happen.
though the commenter might have been obtuse to say that banned from the duopoly of ride-share services is a life-altering thing to happen is quite mad. I live in a city and have never used a ride-share service. out the pool of another dozen friends/co-workers 10 of them seldom-to-never use it (we are all in 40's / early 50's). so most definitely not "life-altering thing"
Have you ever considered that perhaps others conduct themselves differently?
I live in a small city. When I travel, I generally have to be at the airport or train station between 4 and 530 AM. Uber put the taxis out of business, so the choice is Uber, Lyft, wasting a half hour and alot of money parking, or trying to find a black car service.
I was in Rome for business. The choice is Uber or the local cab hailing app, which the cabs don’t always respond to, and the cabbie frequently tries to ripoff a dopey foreigner.
Have you ever considered that perhaps others conduct themselves differently?
I have, the commenter I replied to hasn’t :)
Heh, Rome!! The meter wrote €40, the taxi driver asked for €60. He tried verbal-aggression and threatened to call the police. I took a photo of the meter and asked him to please call the police, I will show them the photo and tell them that he threatened me. He took the €40 and went his merry way.
Once upon a time (around 2005-2006) I had a colleague whose father was a taxi driver. He (the colleague) was openly telling us that every cabbie cheats. Once in a blue moon you find an honest one, or one whose cheating-meter-subsystem is broken.
Cabbies and barmen. My family owned bars, my grand uncle always said he would fire honest bartenders, because there’s no such thing, and he’s too smart to work for him. :)
geeeeez, you guys are making it sound like going to Rome is like going to ____ ( I don’t want to offend any City here… :) ).
> even for people living in a place with public transport as encompassing as say NYC, you _need_ some form of ride-sharing service eventually in day-to-day life
Not really. You can say this about smaller US cities, but NYC is absolutely a city where the >90% percentile of people can live without the daily use of a car.
(The simplest reason for this has nothing do to with car ownership or desirability per se: it's because of NYC's food delivery happens by bike or moped.)
This is a strawman if I've ever seen one. The person you're responding to said literally nothing about "daily use of a car". The point was that you need rideshare at some point in your life, which is a point you failed to respond to. There are trips, even in NYC, where you'd be severely inconveniencing yourself by not using rideshare, which makes it a tough calculus to choose between $20 and being banned from Uber for life.
I didn't see the "eventually" before "day-to-day." But I also quoted it, so this is a reading comprehension error on my part, not a strawman.
What do you mean? You can easily get by without ride share in NYC. Not everyone even has a cell phone.
Why would you want to keep using a service that takes your money and doesn't provide you with the service?
Interesting (in Canada), if my order is wrong I just click the item that is wrong and the chatbot automatically refunds me either on my card or via a credit, and often gives me an extra $5 in credit for my trouble, wonder what account flag I have you don't.
In my experience, in Australia; you don’t get to select the item that was wrong, and simply get a refund on the cheapest item.
Seems the vendors are catching on, with orders often dramatically wrong without any consequence. This is pure speculation, however.
I also found vendors would often substitute items out of stock with those of a lesser value, but write a semi-cute message on it. Nothing like buying some fancy cola, only to get a can of coke and a love letter..
Endless chatbot and help option loops; I gave up, and refuse to use their services - though use was rare anyway.
I've never had any of these problems at all with uber eats, probably part of why I use it so often. I click "help with a past order" and the first option I get is "my order was wrong" if I click it, it presents me with my order and everything I paid for and asks me what to pick that is wrong, it then asks for a photo if it's a larger $ item (unless it's missing) and then it asks me if I want a refund via card or credit, and as I mentioned, it typically gives me a credit for the trouble.
Super interesting to me we have such different experiences. Maybe because I have UberOne?
More likely because you have consumer protection laws.
Silicon valley doesn't deserve credit for inventing this method. It's ancient. Back in the 90s Nintendo lost a suit for price fixing and somehow got the judge to let them "compensate" plaintiffs by giving them coupons toward the purchase of additional games. Comcast, AT&T, GM, Columbia Records, maybe the majority of Fortune 500 companies have done this. Tale as old as time. Silicon valley didn't invent shit.
I once had a 5€ surprise surcharge after a trip. Since Uber’s chatbots were a deadend, I brought up a full-on litigation against them (France). A month later, my litigation was closed and I received 5€ on my bank account.
> If you are able to figure out the magic combination of options that will get you to a support agent they will say "sure we will refund your money" but that is still only going to your app account.
This is exactly what chargebacks are for
The worst part is I have never figured out a way to spend any of my Uber credits. I have hundreds of dollars in Uber credits I've accumulated over the years, and I regularly use Uber, and yet have never spent any credits.
When you choose your payment method in the ride selection screen you should be automatically using credits (unless those credits are for something specific, like Eats, or something else).
I'm able to see this in my Uber app today (set a destination, then at the bottom of the screen is a row for payment options, clicking that will show you Uber balances (uber cash), payment methods, and vouchers) and am located in the US.
If you are not seeing this, I'm thinking you need to reach out to support via email and have a long (probably frustrating) conversation.
I do not see this, it always direct-charges my Amex. The only credits I get auto-spent are my $15/monthly Amex credits. Definitely will reach out to Support at some point (whenever I get fed up and have time to burn, probably while sitting waiting to board a flight).
Okay, are you able to at least see your vouchers and other credits? I currently have a $5 credit applied from a cancellation dispute so I think it should be working for all credits.
During the early days of Uber, it was breaking Australian trade practices law in the regulated taxi industry. Uber told drivers it would give them financial backing, if taken to court.
I believe this was in itself, a significant departure from business ethics: It may be the regulations were bad, but inviting drivers to become scofflaw and offering them indemnity from payment in civil suit, feels like taking corporate lawfare into a new realm.
Quite aside from this disregard for Australian Business law, Uber was transfer pricing the profits from the taxi business into the USA. It operated at a loss in Australia, and exported a lot of revenue to the USA.
There was, and continues to be, many problems with taxi as a business, and the regulator was highly deficient. These problems relate to reliability, driver ethics, safety for women, minorities (things like drivers refusing to take seeing-eye dogs, and hassling solo women riding home) -I'm not blind to the failure here and I do not personally view this as "all regulated industries are worse than free enterprise" -the regulator just couldnt be bothered enforcing it's requirements.
The real problem was that the cost of a taxi plate rose over a 20 year period at 2-3 times the rate of inflation. Towards the end, a taxi plate was a $500k investment and was owned by many ex accountants, lawyers, doctors and the like as a massive capital gain, independently of the social utility of running taxi as a function. -This destroyed the real driver cooperative movement, and made restriction of entry to taxi a necessary economic forcing function: all attempts to add drivers deflated the capital value of the plate, and were opposed by the current owners.
When this was eventually liquidated (Dublin for example) the capital losses were extreme. A $500k plate could drop to $10k or less. A lot of people had life savings eroded, the industry collapsed. Brisbane wasn't much different. Canberra had this too.
London, cities with a high barrier to entry like "the knowledge" and the LEZ have different models. I don't know if Uber is in London.
Both Uber and Lyft's pay-to-not-wait is about as dark as I've encountered recently. It makes it extremely hard to get an reliable wait time.
Not to mention they don't refund you you when they fail to deliver the car on expected arrival.
This is my biggest aggravation. They consistently underreport estimated pickup times. Dropoff times are essentially universally significantly later than the estimate before booking.
It's things like this that make agents potentially exciting. So much of enshittification is wrapping an essentially good service in a crappy and misleading UI to drive extra revenue. If you can replace the lying UI with a more honest one, and then do a fair and automatic comparison between Uber and Lyft, a lot of the annoyance goes away.
This is the same thing the food delivery apps (including Uber Eats) do. I have screenshots showing the estimated delivery time pretty consistently jumping up anywhere between 20% and 50% from what it shows on the initial screen to what you get once you've placed the order. And then often they don't even make that time estimate.
An accurate estimate isn't really possible with the food delivery business model. Couriers will have 2-3 orders, so if you are order 1 or two, there is a new variable that enters the equation after you purchase the food. They obviously add other items on a similar route, but wait times and such are fairly random). Of course they could do 1 order to 1 driver but that would double the labor costs (sequential orders would be 2-3 deliveries per hour max per courier, vs 4ish when optimized).
Then they shouldn't charge for faster delivery. It just doesn't make any sense. Like i'm 95% sure in most cases you don't actually get a car faster and they just take your money and provide no marginal value (granted, I only use the apps about every other month). How else could they consistently offer multiple price tiers regardless of availability? I'm not claiming fraud necessarily, but I also can't imagine how you could offer it without committing fraud. At some point you're just lying ("estimation with negative effort" as a friend calls it) about car etas to drive the perception of value.
That doesn't explain why the delivery consistently jumps 30% to 50% as soon as you hit the confirm button and they process your payment. If they were giving an honest estimate, you'd expect a gradual increase in the estimate as the delivery person showed up 2 minutes late at point A, then 5 minutes late at point B, then 10 minutes late at point C, etc.
The Uber Eats delivery time estimates are a lie, plain and simple. Once they have your money in hand, they'll shamelessly admit to the lie, which is why the estimate jumps instantaneously.
also, you would expect to at times get over-estimated wait times. but my experience is always underestimated by about 20 minutes. so consistently, in fact, that I suspect they have a very good idea of the true time and then subtract 20 min from it.
Uber could provide a range or a point in the middle, but it seems like they just estimate the best case scenario and then it's usually not the best case.
The estimate is not really that accurate even when you pay the $4-5 more to be the first delivery.
Dev turned doordash driver here. Let me tell you why those estimates are bullshit.
First, there are three different ways that orders can come in. 1) Tight integration into the POS system. 2) Through a separate parallel physical tablet. 3) Something spits out something on a printer.
There are opportunities with 1 and 2 to do some sort of feedback on how busy things are. I know for the tablet option that at least for some restaurants they are able to indicate how long the order will take.
But half the places I get to have no integration, they just put the ticket on the pile and it's done when it's done. A couple places that do this in particular also don't even start the order until the driver shows up, on purpose. The app will tell the customer I'll pick it up in 5 minutes no matter what. There's a chain that does prep work in front of the customer, but certain locations will not make pickup/delivery orders if there's anyone in line in the shop. I stopped doing deliveries there.
You'd also think that places with the potential for awesome metrics making pickup timing a breeze would be fast food chains, right? Nope. Not a single iota of smart integration whatsoever.
I've found that keeping customers in the loop as to what's happening with their deliveries ends up keeping them happy, even if it's gonna be slow. I suppose some things never change.
You're spot on, I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike on the weekends for exercise and the wait times are BS because everyone orders lunch/dinner at the same time and they're in essentially a random queue with everyone else who orders. Add to that multiple pick ups and drop offs and you've got a mess.
Talking to people really does help though, everyone wants to be more forgiving when you remind them theirs a human factor involved in getting the food to them.
They're just going to replace the engineers, analysts and designers. The same greedy MBAs and VCs are still going to be running it and the agents they deploy will reflect that. This is not a competitive market by any definition - huge information asymmetries and extremely low competition. We need to go back to either government sponsored monopoly with the appropriate regulatory models or we need to declare it a utility and set prices.
I find it a lot easier to just not use Uber and Lyft at all. It's so insanely expensive it's really only worth it if you need to get to or from the airport and all your social circle is at work. Otherwise it's easier and cheaper and generally less stressful to drive, walk, or take public transit.
I’d be way more excited about a functional consumer protection agency or actual antitrust enforcement than trying to beat a dark pattern with more dark patterns. Just wait til AI agent service providers get in on the regulatory capture game, politicians are cheap to buy these days.
I'd take that with a grain of salt. I've went through the process to cancel an uber one trial recently, and I would say it's not anywhere near "23 screens". Maybe the user in question got unlucky and got hit with all the A/B trials, and they're being super generous with what counts as a "screen", but the process was relatively painless.
Might be because of your location. Some governments like California have regulated these types of things with a law that says you must be allowed to cancel in the same manner you signed up.
I mean, in my case, I was literally forbidden from canceling. I got a screen saying I couldn’t cancel within 24 hours after the monthly renewal.
Very clearly intended to combat “oh shit I need to cancel that one” when the charge shows up in hopes you forget again.
Pretty sure that’s straight up illegal in many jurisdictions
Uber is clever enough to know which jurisdictions and make it as annoying as as likely legally enforceable by state..
I'm trying to play Devil's Advocate, but I literally can't think of another reason they would do this.
I can, I’ve written a billing system before (unfortunately). There’s a lot of annoying math/edge cases and systems to sync between.
While I never implemented a restriction like this, it would have prevented a lot of weird bugs/customer support issues and kept the underlying code much simpler.
(Annoying math = time zones, prorations, discounts, billing cycle anchors, etc. see the “falsehoods programmers believe about X” series)
(Systems to sync between = internal DBs, billing APIs, payment processors, etc.)
I mean sure, I get it, but companies like Uber leave edge cases like that out when it hurts them (customers cancelling) but move heaven & earth to remove them when it helps them (I bet its easy to re-join within 24 hours of cancelling?).
What was the process?
In my mind it should be something like 3 or 4 screens/prompts max.
Account (1) -> Cancel (2) -> Are you sure (3) -> Why did you cancel (4).
I’ve literally experienced (not with Uber, probably around 2010):
1: Account
2: Cancel
3: Call this number.
4: Call number.
5: Welcome to Customer Service press… … …press 9 to cancel.
6: We need to confirm who you are. Give birth date, etc.
7: Are you sure?
8: Agent gets on the line.
9: Why do you want to cancel?
10: We are offering you a discount to continue and not cancel, how about that?
11: Cancel
12: Are you sure again? (This time for real)
13: Cancelled, but we are offering you a BIGGER discou… this is when I hang up.
I was part of a faith-based health sharing program for a few years. When it came time to cancel my membership, I had to call in and speak with a rep. I got past several rounds of retention attempts and succeeded in cancelling. The rep offered to pray for me before we ended the call and asked if I had any prayer requests. I mentioned something about getting over a bad cold and she said, “you know, one of the benefits that we offer—“
I felt a little bit bad about hanging up but mostly I was just mad.
Last time I tried to cancel a service (mobile phone, Three, in the UK) they offered me the service for 5£ (it's normally 20£ or more).
I should (pretend to) cancel more often!
This actually works reliably with quite a few companies, especially large ones with low marginal cost services. They will often have a standard script where they will offer anyone calling to cancel a large discount for 3-12 months. People can, and many do, call back at the end of each promo period to say they're cancelling and refresh the discounted rate.
Seems like a good job for a bot…
> I should (pretend to) cancel more often!
I used to do this with the cable company but they seem to have gotten wise to it. Last time I tried in 2020 they basically told me to pound sand.
Fortunately I got fiber now and got to tell them to pound sand instead.
>3: Call this number.
For Uber? In the handful of times I've canceled uber one trials I've never seen this. It's always through the app. Not even the FTC complaint alleges this.
Are you in Cali? They have a state law that says "if you can sign up online you have to be able to cancel online".
I ran into this with a NYTimes subscription I tried to cancel. They detected I wasn't in a state with such protections and removed the cancellation options while not providing a way to cancel. Made things real hard to shutdown.
Presumably they're specifically referring to uber rather than the broader conversation about dark patterns in canceling. I, too, remember how hard it was to cancel ZipCar—I think I just ended up closing the credit account it was backed by because I couldn't successfully navigate the labyrinth of phone-based customer support to cancel.
I'm saying in general. Dark patterns in general get more ridiculous than most people can imagine.
The complaint has some screenshots starting at page 15, which I think is representative of the cancellation process I went through. If you're being super generous (ie. start counting from you first launched the app, and also scrolling down as a "screen"), I can count 9-10 screens. I'm not sure how you can get 23.
Annoying, but doable. The biggest issue is the "you can't cancel within 48 hours" screen which is BS.
Still better than having to call
Or go in person, like many gym memberships.
Just tell them you moved, that's why you're canceling, and you live nowhere near any of their other branches therefore it would be physically impossible for you to come in.
This works for me, and I have no qualms lying to circumvent stupid tactics like these. I have turned into a LIAR when speaking to customer service for stuff like this because it just makes me more sympathetic as a customer, even though it's insane and unfair that one has to do this as a sort of social hack instead of the business just doing the right thing.
Was in my local gym trying to set up a membership and someone was in there screaming that it’d be easier to “burn the gym to fucking ashes” than cancel the sub. Turns out the cancellations person was only there on a Tuesday at 10AM or something useless.
I walked out before I became another victim.
I had to send a registered letter to hq.
yes and have to do 2 months before end of plan, and they’ll still bill you for the next full month
Worth noting that in the UK if you say « this is obviously predatory and isn’t going to hold up in small claims court » this requirement almost always disappears and they tell you that just this one time they’ll be nice and cancel from today.
Fuck onstar to hell for their shit, you HAVE to call and theres no way to digitally cancel.
Sirus wasn't bad, but it was still a call which is annoying.
The worst I've experienced was equifax. I signed up for a free trial to see where my credit sat and what was up, then cancelled. It was a phone call, 30 minute wait, and SUPER weaselly behavior in the call center script. Something to the effect of Them: "Hey we want to give you this free gift", Me: "Will that gift keep my subscription active?" Them: "yes". Repeated several times as they tried just a bunch of avenues to not cancel my account. I literally had to say "No, I just want you to cancel my account" or "Are you going to cancel my account" like 20 times. It took over an hour.
Unless I had to call to make the order in the first place I'd just chargeback at that point.
This isn’t just a dark pattern — it’s dark matter. The kind where it says 'cancel anytime,' but when you actually try, it throws up a screen like: 'Please proceed by faxing us from the moon.'
Uber is an interesting company in that they were always shady, but initially in ways that customers liked (somewhat illegal taxis ripping off their drivers, for below cost, subsidized lifestyle by VC).
They then flipped the "make a profit" switch and are now shady in ways customers dislike (ripping you the customer off).
Law of Conservation of Shadiness ~ A company does not get less shady over time, just shifts the shadiness to a different set of stakeholders.
ABNB similar...
> They then flipped the "make a profit" switch
This is literally the business model of most VC and public companies.
I’m old enough when the VC model was “I dunno, ads?”, followed by “SaaS/cloud”, then “Uber for X” all of which proceeded “crypto” and “AI”.
A lot of it stacks now with “AI for X” running in the cloud funded by SaaS and/or ads. Just increasingly adversarial revenue models to turn customers into product (data) and/or hooked on forever recurring increasingly monthly spend.
Long gone the days of funding a piece of software customers purchase and use as long and as much as they wish.
UberOne is why I almost never use UberEats any more and instead use a local competitor.
Shortly after it was introduced it seemed every order of mine would get surprise delayed after pick up as the driver would have to first drop off a different order at >90° different direction from me, no doubt for the user who would get priority for being on UberOne.
I don’t order food often enough to justify a subscription, so I just switched to Mr D(elivery), a local South African company where the delivery time is at least almost always consistent. I also feel a bit better about less of the money leaving the country.
Similar to CA's requirement for online cancellations if a subscription is purchased online, there should be a rule that requires the same amount of steps to cancel as it takes to subscribe.
Yes it could still be gamed, but anyone who's worked on user funnels knows that every added step reduces conversion, so it would be self-balancing.
"same amount of steps to cancel as it takes to subscribe"
I wonder... what if you artificially padded the signup process with feel-good stuff?
- screen: Did you know, <picture of Scarlett Johansson> Scarlett also uses this service?
- screen: Since you are signing up, we are adding a Free 10% off voucher for <stuff!>
- screen: Our customer Service Representative (attactive person) is always standing by!
etc...
- screen <n>: click [Yes] to sign up!
Someone’s gonna try interpreting that as actual keystrokes.
“We made you enter your name and address and password and credit card details. That’s 204 steps!”
This is a good way to lose a sale. Like the person you are responding to said, I have done user funnel work and every step between the desire to purchase and completing the purchase is dropping users out the funnel. This is the idea behind retailers like Amazon introducing one click purchase. If someone has the impulse to buy you want to get as out of their way as possible.
The current head of the FTC's first act was to kill that exact rule.
God I wish OnStar held that standard.
I’m bearish on uber because despite all of these shady tactics they are still barely profitable at the current scale and with enormous tailwinds. Last quarter they made $770 million on $12 billion of revenue. It’s just a lousy business model and they are desperate to beat Wall Street’s ever inflated expectations each quarter.
I wonder how automation will affect things.
Just recently, Uber (with some partner) started testing delivery robots in my (city) neighborhood. And I love Waymo, as much as I've been able to use them. Maybe automation will change the economics.
Also, IIRC, for many years, Amazon barely squeaked a profit. They wanted to be at the low end of the margins to capture market share. Once they got big enough, they increased their margins a little and started turning a big profit.
I think uber is different though. It hasn’t been founder led for several years and the current ceo was hired to cut out all r&d spend and maximize profits and revenue.
They report things like foreign currency transactions and stock based compensation as free cash flow.
The hope with uber is that they become an aggregator of AVs which belies an assumption that autonomous vehicles will essentially be a commodity. Or perhaps that AVs take much longer to become practical at scale than people think.
But one of the biggest red flags to me with this company is how they aggressively buy back stock and publicly announce that they believe it’s undervalued. You’re in the midst of an extremely competitive emerging market and your best idea for your cash is to… buy stock?
That's sad because I'm happy they exist. In a material way they've made my life better. I hope there always remains a nationwide app based taxi service.
I’m convinced I get more “deals” (temporary discounts) from Uber without Uber One/after canceling it, which offsets the benefits from Uber One.
I don’t see those deals on Uber Eats so it feels like the real value of Uber One is for heavy Uber Eats users.
PS. Worth going through the cancellation flow when you are up for renewal as they will probably offer you 50% off Uber One.
Uber's sales reps convinced my company to sign up for a business account for employee travel. Soon we started noticing that advertised fares for the exact same ride were 20-40% higher when the business profile was activated. Now the guidance for employees is to always book rides using the personal profile and file for reimbursement. I'm convinced that Uber is only able to survive by scamming customers.
FWIW I used a business profile a few years ago because that's the only way to not use your uber gift balance (we couldn't expense gift balances), and didn't notice any discrepancy between personal and business rates for the base fare. Selecting "business" disables any promos, which is likely where the discrepancy is coming from.
My brother did this for about 6 months. I can't remember exactly how but he was always getting cheaper meals than me on uber one. lol
It’s only worth it for Eats, yes. (I’ve had Uber One since 5 years)
The deals for any of these meal services are bullshit in my experience. There's a lot of hidden fees or minimum order amount stuff that isn't apparent until you get to the checkout, definitely not the great deal they have you believe you're getting.
It's markup on markup on markup.
We have a restaurant where I can order a $10 meal and pick it up myself. The same meal done through uber is $30. Everything has a percentage added and there's at least 3 extra "you used us" fees that get tacked on. All the menu items can have anywhere from a 20->100% markup. It's quite insane.
Anecdote:
Uber Eats markets a 2 for 1 deal that I would have only ordered due to the deal. They always add both items when you take the deal to the cart, but they suddenly changed it. I didn't realize I had to manually add both, and only had one delivered. I called them up and they only refunded a portion, and not the whole thing without accounting for the fact that it was an opportunity cost for me. I would have just bought something else, or not at all. It's tin-foil hatting, but they coerced a purchase imho.
>It's tin-foil hatting, but they coerced a purchase imho.
That's not what "coerced" means. "Deceived", maybe.
Finessed a sale through intentional misunderstandings
> Some users are told they have to contact customer support to cancel but are given no way to contact them
A company can save a lot of money by not handling edge cases.
In my experience, when you’re within 24 hours or so of an upcoming renewal, you have to contact support to stop the renewal. And there isn’t a prominent way to contact support, because the contact form is hidden until you view a past order. That’s not really an edge case…
On another note, an actual edge case that happened to me is that I was in a different country when my Uber One was about to renew, but I had no way to cancel because the app kept geolocating me and displayed a UI specific to my visiting country. I got no Uber One benefits in that country anyway. So I had to send an email to stop renewal, and while I was waiting for a reply, I got charged. Support said they can’t refund me, and I ended up having to do a chargeback.
Have an issue with my business listing on Google. They say I need to contact support.
There is no support. It does not exist.
Why do they do these things?
> Why do they do these things?
Because they can get away with it. Nestle has gotten away with killing nearly ten million children since 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestlé_boycott
Companies have no morality. Unless someone holds them accountable they're going optimize for making money.
Because 1) it's cheaper 2) fuck you, that's why.
But I get called all the time from Google saying my business listing isn't up to date! Google has fantastic, proactive support. (/s)
I’ve found that apps like uber, coinbase, robinhood etc that offer subscriptions can opt you in somewhat unexpectedly because most people are accustomed to an IAP confirmation screen. They can bypass this due to the nature of their subscription, so one too many “continue” taps and bam you’re subscribed. They don’t display pricing so prominently either.
Happened to me with coinbase, I accidentally subscribed and got charged for 3 months. Luckily they were able to refund me since I didn’t actually use the service.
But they paid the bribe!
"CEO donors who gave $1 million include Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Tim Cook, head of Apple; and Dara Khosrowshahi, head of Uber."[1]
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rich-people-and-corp...
Uber is worth a case study in absolutely horrendous customer service and borderline theft. I haven't used them since they stole $150 from me for an UberEats order I was 10 minutes late to pickup in a one hour window, stating that the pickup windows are firm even for non-perishable goods and failure to show up during the window is a forfeit without refund. They even fought my credit card dispute on the matter. Vile company.
Similar. Charged $150 for 2 bottles of wine that never moved off their shelf. I cancelled within the minute.
You'd think that given no services were actually rendered and no perishable items, it'd be an easy open-shut support case.
But, no, you see: "that automatically accepted order itself was the service rendered"
Cool. I took the L because I order food all the time. Hate them for it. I don't know what our alternative is. We all laughed at this company as they burned through billions a year to acquire us, and now it's a monopoly robbing us all.
Another dark pattern is consistently underestimating the time to be picked up by a driver. The estimate is always something like 3 minutes, but often the wait time is more like 7 minutes.
Same for Uber Eats. They estimate 25 minutes for a drop off, but it's often more like 45 minutes.
I’m disabled and rely heavily on food delivery apps and stopped using uber/postmates about a year ago. I somehow got tricked into paying $40 on a $6 order. I went back through the flow to see where I messed up, the screen did show my order amount that I expected, but after many many emails and messages with support, this discount didnt apply because I didn’t hit some “minimum” on the order, so they went ahead and charged the full amount (not what was displayed, or if it was, was done in an extremely dishonest/obfuscated way).
I am far from a novice computer/device user. you’re already making a decent amount of money off me and the slave labor wages you pay your workers, why try to aggressively milk every penny I have? I stopped using it after their joke of an outsourced customer support would not do anything but run me in circles. How much did losing my business cost them in revenue vs. the blatant petty theft in dark patterns would have gained? There has to be a day where all these user hostile apps triggers some response from people like “no, enough of this.”
For us the line for several of those companies was when we had several massively late orders where they lied and blamed the restaurant rather than the fact that they were trying to keep their costs down by underpaying drivers. I think the underlying problem is that companies like Uber pitched themselves as tech companies like Google or Facebook and locked in expenses like compensation at correspondingly high levels, but there just isn’t that much margin in food delivery or unlicensed cabs not matter how hard they squeeze, and it’s an inherently local service so they’re always vulnerable to competition in their most profitable markets.
I've long suspected these shady practices, and I'm relieved they're finally being exposed. Utilities and others aren’t far behind, sending invoices no reasonable person wouldn’t question.
Since 2019, I've relied on ride-shares and delivery services, consistently questioning their fee structures. During this time, I've spent an unconscionable amount on Uber and Uber Eats alone.
A big shame both to the ones running the show and the ones who trained them to think this is acceptable.
If you've regularly patronized these services isn't it you who's trained them to think it's acceptable?
THANK YOU, FTC! Holy shit. I was enrolled in Uber One and cancelling it was insanely difficult. I was convinced they purposely made their support pages near impossible to navigate. Fuck Uber.
When arriving to new countries getting Uber from airport to hotel, different Uber accounts get different price quotes. Enough so, it is better to purchase a burner phone and get a sim card at the airport because the savings on Uber will cover the difference after a few trips. Nonetheless, Uber is 1000% safer and better than the taxi mafia.
> When customers try to cancel, Uber makes it extremely difficult. Users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel
Funny enough I had to take an uber today but it was taking too long so I wanted to cancel the request and call a taxi, I was asked 4 times if I wanted to really cancel, small things like that really do just inflict a little bit of pressure it’s a horrible practice. The fact that a company comes up with these dark patterns to squeeze every cent from you says everything you need to know about them.
I can't express how angry it makes me that I only had access to taxis for a couple years in the city before they were all pushed out and rates were jacked, screwing both the customer and the driver providing the value. It will take decades to reverse this course even if everyone has decent intentions, and shareholders rarely do.
The taxi companies were dumb though. They should have embraced the internet and apps. I am still not sure how to even call a taxi in my town.
Here in Italy I don't know if I hate more uber or the taxi drivers themselves. Most cities do not have uber because of them striking and paralyzing cities. Most taxi drivers will try to scam you if you are a tourist, will not take credit cards and will under-declare profits to avoid paying taxes. Taxi licenses are limited in number and re-sold between taxi drivers and new potential buyers. No new licenses are emitted because the government is scared of them.
The situation is a complete mess here :/
They did have a local taxi app here that was reasonably popular and founded by a group of taxi drivers and was pretty liked by passengers and drivers.
Then they sold to a UK company, who sold to a German company, who recently sold to Lyft, each step along the way the new owner finding ways to make the service worse.
They did. But the model of uber was obviously designed to drive them out of business, damn legality and short term losses and devastation of the local community.
Well, now we're stuck at the airport waiting for a mob of cars to fight each other to transport us each as least efficiently as humans have figured out how to do. But at least we can stare at our phone while we wait to get fucked.
And this doesn't even touch the horror of the driving side
Meanwhile, my city is suing a local cooperative for "safety reasons" or some bullshit. I don't expect anything to ever improve at this point.
They should have embraced the internet and apps.
In some cities, they did, even before Uber existed.
But they still had to pay their drivers a living wage. Uber didn't, and people went with the cheaper fares.
Then there were no more taxis, and all the taxi drivers were making a third the money driving for Uber.
Glad to see this happen. As described in the article, I recently got signed up and charged for Uber One, despite having opened the app in weeks.
Now please investigate their teaser rates to get you to choose Uber as a transport option when they know your driver is vapor and/or will cancel then charge 3x congestion pricing on the next refresh when it’s too late to pick another option. Infuriating practices, and the drivers seem to keep getting screwed on the gigs.
Frequent Uber rider here and blissfully unaware what Uber One even is.
A welcomed development in these consumer subscription services.
I was always able to cancel very easily. I’ve done so many X free months of Uber One and it’s been so much easier than cancelling any number of other subscriptions (NYT has still been my worst experience on that front). I’m surprised to see that as a complaint tbh.
I use virtual credit cards for most of my subscriptions. If I can’t cancel via normal means, I cancel the card. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.
Can’t say whether this is the recommended method for all services but it works for me.
I tried that with my real card and it turns out that if you report a card lost/stolen and get a replacement behind the scenes your bank will still forward some transactions from the old card to the new one without having to update
Many years ago, I had an XBox 360 with a valid credit card attached. With a ten year+ gap of service, I then connected my account to a new Xbox. Somehow Microsoft was able to still use and charge a ten year old credit card account even though I have had many replacement cards in the intervening years.
I've had new credit / debit cards show up in the mail... and then vendors tell me they automatically updated my card info! What's the point in expiring a card if they can just get the new info automatically anyways?
When you request a new card you have to request that they don’t update merchants. Claim it was stolen or lost. Not all banks let you but most have this as an option when talking to a real person.
Yeah, you have to use something like Citi, Capital One or privacy.com and explicitly turn the card off.
Silicon Valley and all these VC funded apps have no soul or honesty. I left 5 years ago, and will never look back. Let them rot.
I know, its veering into court-politics- but is the FTC now "selectively active" as in, if the king deems your company out of favor for lack of tributes, it becomes active?
Here I assumed I just fat-fingered something when doing an Uber. I never sign up for the recurring charge stuff and recently saw the UberOne subby and canceled it.
I guess now I'll be a party to the class action and get a gift card in 10-12 years from this BS. Neat!
Buying a few million worth of Trump coins will make that go away.