Uber is a great service IMO, it helped many people from being ripped off by taxi drivers or even auto rickshaw in all Indian cities. That being said, the very same drivers made riot when uber first launched in India. Uber being a large international corporation seems to cover it all in a win-win fashion. Good strategy, I admire it.
Uber was all good for the first quarter or 2 quarters of 2017. Hell lot of rides in each and every city they launched. Most of the people are happy, and being a small company we used to give Uber coupons as well as Uber credit to business rides. And we love it.
How good is it for the drivers?
I don’t see any negative points where it is not good to the drivers. I suppose all the drivers should love it. Because it’s fair. Drivers used to get more rides than ever before.
How drivers playing Uber?
This is something that I suspected over the last few weeks, I thought it might be one of my weird thought. But suddenly yesterday one of my friend told me the same. He seems to be more digged into it. No wonder we discussed a lot on this.
What are these drivers doing?
It’s quite simple, they have a WhatsApp group for all the drivers in the city. You cannot join until one of the admins approves you and you are personally known to one of the member. Here is the game, nobody goes online in the morning. It’s a turn based system. Only a few drivers goes online in the morning and they notify the others after they get a ride confirmed so that others can come online. Other drivers make themselves available for hire if and only if they get confirmation from others.
Essentially this will break the supply and demand system hence it turned into a surge pricing for the user.
Who loses?
- Uber for sure in the long run because it will create an assumption that Uber is costly.
- Drivers also, once Uber is dead they are back in square one.
- Passenger, because they pay more.
What can be done to prevent this?
- Check for patters in the city, I think Uber math team do it. Uber Developers
- Put a minimum time for every driver to be in the system. Make this in alignment with the possible surge period. I believe Uber’s revenue modal is not based on surge pricing.
- Your solution goes in comments please.
