Klarna and affirm are the next gen of bullshit companies. Like Uber and WeWork before it. Absolutely massive scams fed with easy money and dumping on the next fool.
What about when you want to get to/from the airport or other transportation hub like a train station or bus station? One experience I had was I called the taxi company the day prior to my trip to reserve a taxi to the airport, but it did not show up, and I had to scramble.
What kind of airport doesn't have a convenient transit connection already?
Actually, don't answer that question because I live close-ish to IAD and... it's a whole thing. But Dulles is located in a car-dependent asphalt wasteland so I think my point still holds. DCA is actually sane about this and is right off a major subway line (Blue).
What about families that makes public transit "out of the question"? I haven't been to SFO but it looks like it's the same issue as with IAD, which is that it's smack dab in the middle of the suburbs and has very poor transit connections to the surrounding areas (although it has an actual train line, which IAD still doesn't have!)
North America is really a unique beast in this regard, though, as nowhere else is it common to intentionally make airports so difficult to get to and from. Even in Europe, certainly for remote airports you might not expect lots of train connections, but IAD and SFO don't fit that bill.
I guess you can say that Uber's value prop is that they smooth over the failures of American urban planning in exchange for their cut of flesh.
Great. Now try Tallahassee, Florida. Or Liverpool. Or the myriad of other non-global/dense city with limited public transportation infrastructure especially during off hours.
Which is said for Klarna, because there seems to be an actual market for what they do. Using cheap VC money ruined a perfectly fine market opportunity, and a chance to build a sustainable business. Well, I think we will see a lot more of those in the next months.
Klarna is notorious for privacy violations. For a good while it was possible to pretty much doxx any of their users just by entering some of their details in any Klarna-enabled online store. If my memory serves, they may even have had a ”which of these similarly named persons are you” dropdown at some point…
I once checked them out (or a provider they had bought, might be "Sofort") when all other options seemed worse.
IIRC I would have had to log into my bank account through them, giving them my login data and letting them read all of my transactions (data they use to gauge trustworthiness, I think). I was shocked that that's legal and amused to find out it probably isn't.
(Disclaimer: Highly anecdotal, it was multiple years ago)
Uber has no business being in this group. They provide real value to customers and drivers. Taxis have provided absolute shit service in many places and Uber absolutely came in with a superior product and business.
at this point the average Uber driver is no better than the average taxi driver, and the last time I compared the price of an Uber ride to the price of a taxi the taxi was 10% cheaper.
Uber got where it did by losing vc money and by ignoring laws. That fits my personal definition of bullshit company.
Your Uber driver will never mysteriously "forget to turn on the meter", have a "broken credit card machine", or any of the other scams taxi drivers pulled on me constantly.
No instead they will call you before the trip and ask you where you are going and then cancel the trip after hanging up.
If it is raining or the sun is out or the trains are busy or it is any of one a hundred random reasons - you will have surge pricing. Not just 10-15% extra but 100-150% extra. But don't worry keep standing around for a 30-40 minutes and checking the app eventually the price will come down...
klarna and affirm are what happens when you graft the business model of a rent to own furniture/electronics store (where an xbox will end up costing $1425 after all payments) or a "buy here, pay here" used car sales lot onto some web2.0 bullshit and marketing hype
Klarna has good tech for payment solutions, and they have really optimized the funnel for purchasing through debt. I mean, the latter to me is bad, but do you mean they dont or wont make money and how so?
They're all real business with real value. I blame the VCs who kept feeding them endless amounts of capital when they were clearly hitting a ceiling of how much value they could generate.