Page 5: Schultz: My Top Ten Ride-Sharing Complaints
9. No Shady Tactics to Pad Profits
This is another area that Uber drivers sadly excel at. They have the ethics of cabdrivers – maybe because many of them were cabdrivers and, in substance, still are cabdrivers.
Uber drivers will do things like call you ahead of time and ask you where you are going. If they don’t like your destination, they will ask you to drop the ride and lie to you that you will not be charged for it. I have had this happen all the time with a call me and asked my destination. Other times, if they do not want to pick you up they will drive away from you and hope that you drop the ride yourself so you are penalized instead of them. It turns into a test of wills as to who will wait the longest. [Tip: If it is clear they are not coming back, you might just open up your Lyft app and use that service instead without canceling the Uber ride.] I think they sometimes do this because they do not want to miss out on surge pricing they think is about to kick in.
10. Robots Will Inherit the Earth
Don't think that because of all this griping that I am an unfeeling man. Indeed, I feel for all these drivers (at least the honest ones that are U.S. citizens). This leads to my final complaint.
This might not be such an easy complaint to correct. The drivers’ personal situations give me a sense of impending doom for them. Many of them have led interesting lives in the past and were successful in their fields. Still, each time I get into and Uber or Lyft car I size up the driver and wonder what he or she will be doing in five or 10 years when Uber and Lyft transition to self-driving cars. In case you did not know, that is their big game plan. Currently, Uber (and probably also Lyft) lose money on every ride. (Uber loses a tremendous amount of money every quarter.) They are trying to get market control for the day when they can replace the drivers with robots. This is much like Amazon.com’s strategy.
So I wonder what are these drivers going to do when this happens? Will all of the immigrants in the big cities go home? (Fine by me.) Will they open Middle Eastern restaurants? Will they go on welfare? What about all of the native born drivers? Many of them had real jobs before those jobs outsourced or their industries imploded. None of them seem near retirement age. What will they do?
Well, I guess that’s not our problem. We could kill ourselves worrying about other people’s problems. We’ve got plenty of our own problems. Like could you please close the front passenger side window? Could we please not listen to music? Go straight another block and then make a left. That’s right. No, left! I meant you were right, not right turn. Left, left!...
