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by T_D_K
2662 days ago
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I'm not sure how that's a big deal for Lyft. It seems like a pretty healthy supply and demand curve -- if the number of drivers drops, it becomes more profitable to be a driver. And there's always people looking for supplemental work, who'll go where the money is.
I suppose the part I'm missing is the reduction in riders if there's not enough drivers, but that is apparently not a huge issue (according to their rider-retention numbers). Do you disagree? |
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And if you look around at what they spend all of this money on, it's incentives and marketing towards drivers (as well as insurance). That's a lot of churn given the loss they're taking on these expenses towards drivers.
Re: your other point about demand. A piece of anecdata that weighs on my mind is, 10 years ago, there was some extreme economic disincentive for a cabbie to come to my residential neighborhood. Uber's black car service was a godsend, even though it cost twice the price of a cab. The supply/demand curve made sense, since I was paying more for my sparse neighborhood.
Now I get 10x quicker service for half of the cab cost and a quarter or less of the black car cost. Wat.
What I want to know is whether this is because there's a supply of 96% of yearly suckers who come to my neighborhood without doing the math like cabbies in 2009? Or is it just that Uber/Lyft is dumping incentives on them? Because my neighborhood hasn't become more dense, and the math got far worse for the driver.
I keep wondering what a reversion to this norm means for Uber and Lyft. If drivers have a lot more pricing power through churn, is 2009-cab-refuses-to-come what it looks like? If you can't get a car due to supply constraints, somehow would that be good for these companies?
Anyway, it seems like Uber/Lyft pour most of their money into making drivers happy, and yet they fail to keep them on "the platform". I don't know the full ramifications of it, but it seems like a major issue.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/20/only-4-percent-of-uber-drive...