The city has just 39 licensed cab drivers.
What about Uber Eats and Doordash and the others? Do they have to comply with the new minimum wage or shut down too? Hoping they can make a decent wage.
Uber was forbidden from setting up where I live but Uber Eats is a thing here.
I guess there is going to be a split on this in terms of what people think. Obviously ride share drivers would love this, and since the only time I’m in Minneapolis is when I’m on business, it’s my company footing the bill, not me.
However - if it was me footing the bill, I’m sure I’d be much less inclined to take a Lyft/Uber. However, ending ops over this is stupid, because there will be people that will pay for it, business or personal. Let the market decide what’s palatable.
Everyone’s wallet is shrinking due to the rampant inflation over the past several years, and if you’re a full time ride share driver, it’s hard to cut even with the rising costs all around. Even before the inflation was hard. Vehicles don’t run on hopes and dreams and need maintenance.
I’m a driver in another state/city but if I lived in Minneapolis I’d be loving this.
Why?
I drive uber, empower (a service launched in my market) and I’m building my own service. Getting uber and lyft kicked out of town will do amazing things for the industry and the drivers and riders. Regional services will pop up and this will help filter out the drivers who know how to run a business and act professionally and those who shouldn’t be self employed and customer facing.
I’m on track to pull 6 figures in the next year or two. I’m currently in the process of upgrading to an EV, later this year we will be buying my wife a phev mini van for her to main and I’ll use it for business if needed as well as for road trips.
But it’s a tactic, right? They could still make money, if a bit less, by operating in Minneapolis. But they can put pressure on residents to try and get it repealed by stopping, and try to send a message to other cities.
No, they barely make money as it is
Lyft is losing money, Uber is barely profitable
As a whole, yeah, but top-line losses don’t mean each ride makes them less profitable. My understanding was their margins are slim enough they need a lot of rides to subsidize their fixed costs, so fewer rides means less profit, not less loss.
If Uber is actually profitable, stopping operations in Minneapolis really should make them less so. If this isn’t them taking a small loss now because they believe they’ll avoid a bigger loss later, I can’t make sense of it.
Yes, they could make a very tiny profit from a decently sized city, but then it might encourage other cities to follow suit.
The costs are not all fixed, covering another city means paying more support agents, having people signing up local drivers, etc. so after this change it might not even be profitable after all
That’s my point though?
If costs like support agents that scale with rides make the rides unprofitable, their business model is upside down. Especially for Uber, I’m counting costs that scale with rides with costs per ride, vs infrastructure and truly fixed costs. Maybe they’re so close to breaking even per ride that raising costs depresses demand enough to make them unprofitable, but it seems a lot more likely they’re doing this to send a message first and foremost.
Uber is making way more money than they let on. They got caught stashing millions over seas. They and lyft both take over half of the transaction on average and have reduced their support teams to mostly bots and people who can barely read.
Millions? That’s almost as much as they make in a day
Tell us you don’t understand gross revenue versus net profits without telling us.
Uber increased the cash on hand by 139M in the 4th quarter, so they definitely make more than a million a day net profit
Wouldn’t it be great if our wages were keeping up with inflation.
Bye, Felicia!
The shitty gig companies decimated the taxi industry, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see things like drunk driving tick up, especially come winter.
I hope the city can incentivize something new to fill the void. And hopefully they can also put guardrails around it so drivers and passengers don’t get screwed.
The industry got decimated due to being worse than the apps. The apps 100% exploit drivers, but let’s not act like calling a cab was such a good experience 20 years ago.
The apps weren’t profitable. They sold rides for less than it cost them, which killed the industry. That’s what all disruptive companies do, sell for an unprofitable price and have investor money make up the difference.
Taxi companies could not compete. How could they? It didn’t matter if they were good or bad. There was no chance to compete because they all went out of business.
Again, the apps didn’t win because they were better, it’s because they didn’t allow competition. In a sane world they would have had to have made a profit, and the taxi companies would have made their own app, and things would be pretty much equal across the board. But that never happened.
Again, the apps didn’t win because they were better, it’s because they didn’t allow competition.
I rarely ever took cabs or other such transport because they’re universally dodgy as fuck. Apps made it convenient and accountable, thus succeeded.
Honestly, it was both, plus a third thing.
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Uber/Lyft pay like shit and run at a loss.
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Cabs almost universally sucked. Nobody wanted to use one outside of somewhere like NYC; and only then because parking sucked so hard driving yourself is an even shittier option than the shitty cabs.
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In places like NYC, the government over regulated cabs so hard the medallions cost into the 6 and 7 digits of dollars. Out-competing that simply involved…not paying 7-digit sums of cash just for the ability to work as a cabbie…
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As expensive as a cab is, and as frought with corruption as the cab industry is, at least you can be relatively sure you are safe because they have fleet vehicles and actual requirements and regulations for hiring drivers.
Yeah no. Taxis are dodgy and often thieves with low to zero accountability.
I stopped riding in cabs after the umpteenth time of getting pressured to pay in cash instead of credit card or being told the “meter was broken” and I had to pay a flat rate.
Ridesharing has a lot of problems but they’re a much better customer experience.
I’ve had shit service and terrifying experiences no matter what cunt was behind the wheel. This talking point, probably invented by an advertising company doing PR for the taxi industry, needs to fucking die already.
100%
American cabs fucked passengers. Gig companies fucked drivers.
I recently said “fuck it, I’ll take a cab from the airport cab pool.” It was like immediately time traveling to a differently shitty moment in history. The cab smelled like it was made out of Newport filters and ass, and when we got to my home, the guy refused to take a credit or debit card.
Dude was picking up people from the international terminal, where they were often landing without local currency, then he would tack on a trip to the bank, with the meter running.
He had Master and Visa card stickers on his car.
That’s when you refuse to pay, not your fault their card reader is “broke” and they didn’t inform you when you got in. They can get fucked, they tried pulling this shit on me before. I straight refused to pay cash.
Yeah, that’s what I did. I said, you can take me to the bank for free, or I can not pay you.
After arguing with me he then relented and one of these magically appeared.
Man I have not seen one of those credit card carbon copy machines in a long time! It’s funny current credit cards will not work on them since they don’t have any raised numbers
And at least Lyft is sending emails to customers making it sound like paying a decent wage makes their business model unsustainable.
Which is weird because what’s their overhead? They run an app. 99% should be going to drivers.
Card fees, keeping it updated, onboarding drivers and doing checks, accounting for fraud, employees, advertising. 99% is a silly figure to request.
They have to pay hundreds of millions a year bribing politicians across the world!
Yeah, apps that offer a live service across the globe 24/7 definitely run themselves. It’s just a silly little computer, after all. Totally.
You’re right even though you’re getting down voted.
Doesn’t make Uber or Lyft any less shady of a company but so many people have no idea of the overhead it takes to “run an app”. They think that it’s just some computers talking over the Internet that they pay 100$ a month for and not the possible 100’s of thousands of dollars they pay monthly for the infrastructure to support those apps.
It’s not an offline game that someone can just download and play, it’s a live service that is running, plus all of the data whether financial or otherwise that is being stored on multiple levels of backups not to mention the security infrastructure that needs to be maintained etc etc etc.
That being said, I’m not defending these companies in the slightest, but for someone to just say “run an app” is a massive understatement.
It is already unsustainable, they are losing money
We support a minimum earning standard for drivers
Is that why they spent millions to defeat a law in CA that would have clarified that their employees are in fact employees and should be covered by minimum wage laws?
I have to wonder how hard it would be to build some kind of open source platform to compete with these companies. Then the drivers will be free to set their own rates and this rent-seeking behavior can be undermined.
I have to wonder how hard it would be to build some kind of open source platform to compete with these companies.
I’d have to imagine that the answer to that is “really damn hard”. Look at any Lemmy instance and see how hard it is just to create and maintain an open source “comment section for the internet” platform; now imagine managing thousands of financial transactions on that platform, processing background checks, establishing some sort of trust and security team, and people’s livelihoods depending on that all working reliably all the time.
There’s a reason why only VC-backed companies have managed to get off the ground in this space; it’s hella expensive for a bunch of volunteers to manage.
That’s why emails come from a no-reply address. You need the media to draw attention to the bullshit. Good luck with that.
“we don’t want to pay min wage” -billionaire run companies who cannot pay people competitively with taxi services 10 years ago.
Good riddance.
Fuck Lyft. I stopped using them after I dropped my phone in a ride and it took the idiot customer service agent FORTY FIVE MINUTES to reach out to the driver. They kept asking me to login to my account to verify it was me, but I couldn’t because it kept sending the 2FA code to my phone… Which I didn’t have. The agent wasn’t able to comprehend this.
Minneapolis should make public transit free for a few* months, to encourage folks to use that instead. Golden opportunity.
public transit?
For the areas it covers, Minneapolis has a pretty good public transit.
its pretty cool you can go from home to work to the store and back home without ever going outside. lifesaver in some of the harsh cold winters
