Uber/lyft pricing models are extremely unfair. They "purchase" marginal rides and marginal driver hours using bonuses and meaning those bonuses go towards riders and drivers who are the most price sensitive, like a mom who only drives if the money is good. But for the driver who drives 10hrs rain or sun, they rarely get bonuses because their hours are static.
If driver A needs to be incentivized to drive, and Uber needs more drivers, they should have to pay more. If driver B is driving no matter what why would Uber pay them more if not for retention or something?
You're basically penalized for treating uber/lyft as a real job and having loyalty, ie. getting paid less for the same amount of work. You don't think that's unfair?
It's a bidding system. If nobody accepts a ride at $X, the offered price increases to $Y. Does Uber have a responsibility to maximize its employees' (in the general sense, not getting into the employee/contractor distinction) earnings? Does your boss or their boss have a responsibility to get you as much money as possible?
Assume we're both drivers for Uber, you're willing to do a drive for $30 and I'm willing to do the same drive but not for less than $40. Is it unfair to me for you to take that job for $30, knowing that I won't get it? I'd argue it's not (even if you know I'm waiting for the price to go up), and if that's unfair it's hard to make an argument that it's unfair for Uber to run that system.
Uber invented a particular form of algorithmic wage discrimination; if its drivers are picky about which rides they accept, Uber will slowly raise the rates to entice those drivers—until they start accepting rides. Once a driver does accept a ride, "the wage starts to push down and down at random intervals in increments that are too small for human beings to readily notice". ...
As anyone with a technical background knows, "any task that is simple, but time-consuming is a prime candidate for automation". This kind of "wage theft" would be tedious and expensive to do by hand, but it is trivial to play these games using computers.
Technically you're right - it's price discrimination. But it's aimed at the workers, not for them.
Drivers who treat Uber like a real job and show up consistently end up making less than those who only drive when it’s lucrative. That’s not illegal, but it feels exploitative, especially when it's driven by opaque algorithms.
Imagine your salary dropping just because you showed up every day. Wouldn’t feel fair, would it?
I get what you're saying, and I agree that's how it feels but that doesn't necessarily mean that's how it is.
I guarantee you there are companies in the US right now paying their full-time employees who work 40+ hours less than they pay consultants who are also writing code who are working 30, 20, even 10 hours a week or less. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're taking advantage of their employees (though they may well be). Everyone agreed to do the thing they're doing knowing exactly what the terms were.
If I agree to do a job for $X that is otherwise "not exploitation" by whatever metric we choose to use, it doesn't suddenly become exploitation if I could have gotten 2X or 3X to do the same job.
You do though. The sibling comment's LWN link shows that if you don't accept rides, the price you're offered for rides increases.
Edit: I'd love for this to be another thing to add to the list of reasons why Uber sucks. But this specific thing seems pretty normal and what absolutely any company would do in a similar circumstance.
That part is completely opaque to the user. It's at best a dark pattern, but really it just takes advantage of a certain group of people who depend on ridesharing for primary income.
And btw, the no one really knows the exact mechanism thru which you get bonuses cuz its a model trained on many inputs. Not accepting rides is just one part of the equation.
If I were trying to run an ethical pricing model, I would give bonuses to anyone driving in surge/prime hours; I wouldn't limit the bonuses to people that I think would drive in those hours cause that's bs
