how does this restaurant still have employees?

I may be wrong, dkgo, and I think you're a pretty smart feller when it comes to this sort of stuff but I think you're misapplying "businesses can pay employees what they want and the market will determine if it's fair" which is not the same as "a 'tip' is the same and not negotiable for every employee no matter what."

Because that latter thing sounds exactly like a wage to me.

Uber is very up front with their pay structure. It's shocking that drivers are stupid enough to continue to drive for them despite them getting raked over the coals. I wonder what their turnover is? It must be insanely high since nobody is making any money or at least nobody is quickly realizing that after taxes, fees, and maintenance/depreciation to their car that the net value is very minimal from driving. It'll take a little while but drivers will catch on and prices will go up. They'll probably end up being somewhere near what taxi drivers are currently charging, maybe slightly less.

Just tip your uber drivers. You'll make their day, I promise.

Capone, people sign up to drive because they are thinking they'll make 50k/yr with their own hours out of their own car. Uber leads them to believe that. I didn't believe that, but did believe I'd be able to make a decent amount of money on my own time without a huge hassle.

I found totally the opposite. Most drivers I've talked to at length say the same, in my area. I'm skeptical about its viability long term.

The costs of depreciation and maintenance on a car are not glaringly obvious and with no disrespect to uber or cab drivers I don't think this would be something they fully consider.

Also

Uber is getting a 50k fine for every UberPOP driver that gets caught here. Seems like a drop in the bucket but the fine used to be 'only' 10k so at least they are ramping up the financial hurting.

Eh, I don't know that stupid is the right term. I didn't have to set an alarm clock for six months and was able to pay my expenses.

I am curious about this, but could you explain what UberPOP is, and where "here" is, and who "they" are?

Yeah I mean I do it 3-4 hours a week. Wife can't bother me about how much I spend on golfing. It's a win win win.

chill: Completely flawed analogy. A better analogy is this restaurant says to employees "we're going to pay you this ****ty wage, and btw, tipping isn't allowed in our restaurant." For whatever reasons, employees decide to work there. They then have no basis to say it's ****ty for the company to promote a policy that they were 100% clear about all along. As I've said multiple times, there is no shortage of ****ty things Uber does, but being consistent about no tipping on Uber is not one of them.

See above, J. And I guarantee you I am way more familiar than you re: how ****ty Uber is. They are really a pretty evil company.

Uber has definitely been ****ty and deceptive about getting people who are not the savviest math/finance/budget people to believe their claims of how much money they can make, and getting them to often make some very poor financial decisions to drive for Uber. And then making changes after the fact that make things even worse. They have tons and tons of ****ty business practices. My only point has been that the tipping thing is not one of them. Every driver signing up with them should be 100% clear about the fact that you don't get tips driving for Uber. That's all.

As for their viability, it has little to do with the current state of their operations in many markets, where they definitely have long-term unsustainable models focused on customer adoption, market share, and network/capacity buildout over all else. Ride-sharing service is just the first piece of their transportation/logistics network, and what you see as Uber today has little to do with what Uber will look like in a few years. I don't really care to discuss this point, though, there's a ton of research/analysis on all that stuff available. Here's one piece on just the ride-sharing component, there are many others on logistics/delivery/etc opportunities. http://abovethecrowd.com/2014/07/11/...l-market-size/

You haven't said any way in which my analogy was flawed; you just presented things as they are to the employees, I presented an analogy to the way things appear to customers.

I'm sure a fair amount of the 20-something Uber drivers had their car paid for by their parents. So they don't think about or care about the depreciation of the car.

My understanding is that most Uber cars were fashioned together quickly from the remains of homeless men who died of starvation.

My friend's Dad drives for Uber. He is mostly retired and does it 3 or 4 days a week, usually 6am-11am. Lives in Green Bay, population is a little over 100k. Has no trouble finding customers.

He likes it a lot. He enjoys being able to work when he wants, and has had no problems with passengers.

I've heard a lot of people complain about the cost of depreciation on their vehicle. Can someone give an estimate of how much they think they're losing per mile driving? I'm gonna need to see some solid evidence before I'm convinced this is a raw deal.

I have always wondered why taxi companies don't just create an Uber-like app themselves. I Uber quite a bit but I wouldn't mind taking a cab, most of my trips are in the $10-$15 range and it usually wouldn't cost me much more to take a cab. My main reason for picking one over the other is that I can just push a button instead of having to make a phone call. Is the technology and means really not available to cab companies to do this?

I recently went to the dealership where I purchased my 2013 Dodge Avenger. I bought it new at ~18,000. I had roughly 52,000 miles on it and they appraised it at $10,xxx. They cited the reason it was so low because they've discontinued the Avenger, they didn't mention the mileage. No idea what the value would have been if the odometer read 25,000.

Uber is just ridiculously cheap. I have that 20% card the guy mentioned earlier and calling an Uber is between 30%-40% cheaper than a normal cab for me here.

I'm going to start tipping my drivers if I have cash. This sounds brutal. I always knew part timers had it better than full timers but minimum wage is way below what I thought they were making (though I'm guessing they do better than min in NYC)

This article provided a lot of information http://citypaper.net/uberdriver/

Guess I didn't really understand how much driving a car you already own costs.

Just to point out the obvious, at no point have jmakin and El Diablo been in anything but agreement itt.

There was the minor thing about "tip included" vs "no tip needed" but otherwise you are saying the same thing.

Yes, I'm aware of that, but he feels he needs to press the point of me saying uber is a ****ty company because of x reasons. I suspect it's because he likes using it and doesn't want to feel like his drivers are being taken advantage of.

He's just been walking it back since. I don't really care at the end of the day one way or another, and I am a massive hypocrite by using the service, but riders have no ****ing clue how ****ty drivers have it, and drivers are so terrified of repercussions (many have no other income or are between other jobs or are doing it to supplement some other ****ty job) of talking ****/complaining about their job and receiving bad ratings that they'll put on a cheery persona. I quickly realized this, got "deactivated" for hardly any reason at all, talked my way up a few managers, gave one long **** you email and called it a day.

AFAIK they reinstated me a little while later but my insurance is out of date and I won't drive again. The app is a piece of **** for drivers too.

Chill: how much do you think taxi drivers make?

Tx: yep. Uber is terrible for most people doing it for a living, but can be great for people doing it for some extra money and just cherry-picking hours.

J: wtf are you talking about dude? I haven't walked back anything. I've been 100% consistent from the start saying uber is a ****ty company that is ****ty for drivers. Please show me where I said otherwise or stfu.

Waterfall: flywheel.com

What reason did they give you for being deactivated?

Hi El Diablo,

What are some of the s***ty business practices of Uber?

My rating had fallen somehow despite being a consistent 4.93 for months. I had driven very little to not at all for a while.

Eventually they realized they made a mistake but i was too pissed off to continue with them further, I was already unhappy.

El D, lol.

Not using a binary rating system (for the drivers) is pretty bad as well.