It's probably worth noting that--primarily in denser locations--the rapid delivery of goods is already a thing. Delivery of papers by bicycle messenger (although that has declined), takeout delivery, grocery delivery (which has been around for a long time in many cities but has been getting more systematic with services like Instacart). Of course, there have also been massive failures trying this in the past like Kozmo.
I suspect there's a complicated relationship between density, profit margins and overall cart value of what's being delivered, price sensitivity, and other factors. It obviously does work in some domains and those who already have established something that could form the basis of a delivery infrastructure may be in the best position to experiment further. It won't work for everything or everyone but if fast delivery works for food for example, there's no inherent reason it shouldn't work for a lot of other goods that people can't get easily delivered today.
It's also about division of labor and specialization. Grocery stores don't have thousands of vendors showing up at stores, they have long delivery chains that consolidate and redistribute... On the last mile for home delivery it makes sense for one service to act as a delivery agent for multiple stores, when a pizza shop doesn't have many orders from 1pm-5pm, they are paying employee(s)... with a service based delivery, the throughput is more optimal.
Not to mention the time this will save... I hate going to the store, which kills at least two hours a couple times a week. I'd pay $20-30 to have that time back. It won't reduce traffic either, but at least the uber drivers are more likely in economy/subcompact cars (a lot of prii) which would displace the SUV behemoths that would otherwise be used by those most likely to be ordering.
You could presumably try something like TaskRabbit although I have no personal experience and it would presumably cost more than $20-30 for the length of time you cite.
That sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen. Imagine they have the "wrong" old-dog adopted by an innocent family, and something bad happens afterwards? Who is the family going to blame exactly? More importantly, who are you going to call out if that were to happen? Be honest.
Where do you think "bad old dogs" at the animal shelter come from? It's also easier to predict an older dog's behavior than a puppy's eventual behavior.
Maybe instead this should be left to the professionals. There's some honesty.
Uber is in a inherently interesting space, directing large numbers of people using software for stuff that happens outside of the computer.
That means that instead of solving problems that are sticky enough in the lab never-mind in the world, they can solve them with a market. For problems like who should deliver what package and how to optimize that, they can offload a lot of the intelligence to drivers.
This might have interesting implications for other products.
It's nice that, with this approach, individuals can make some money besides a regular job. But what's not so nice, is that the level of the work is quite low. And what's also not nice, is that Uber is a regulator of that market (having strong financial interests themselves).
Quietly is a funny way to put it since I've heard it in the news three or four times lately.
Each time I hear about it I think of a hollywood heist movie that starts and finishes quickly when the robbers simply figure out how to manipulate things so they're the uber driver delivering the package they want.
How does insurance work with this? What if my driver is robbed, gets in a crash or decides to pocket my stuff? Do Uber insure the contents or the retailer (or neither)?
A major threat to Uber's profitability is its inability, thus far, to monopolize drivers. If it expands successfully in moving goods, it might be able to consolidate enough demand to make sure every available driver is always working for Uber.
It'll be interesting to see if its able to drag Lyft, Instacart, Shyp under the water as it puts its very large oxygen tank to use.
I'm just thinking of SimCopter, where as a copter pilot you could get missions of all kinds popping up on the screen, and you could choose to take a delivery, passenger, fight a fire, and more stuff I can't remember.
Not a bad model really. Uber is a distributed worker service.
The taxi companies in my town have always offered package delivery (though I've never seen it used much). The idea isn't new, though the technology could help out with the practicality of it.
Yep. I drove a cab for about a year (2003ish, college town of ~200,000 people), and the company I drove for did this. It wasn't a big business, but there were a few substantial accounts, notably the local university hospital system, which sent around a lot of specimens in very serious-looking containers. Pre-ubiquitous GPS, shared taxi dispatching and routing involved a lot of yelling and guessing.
Uber's selection of businesses for delivery is strange. Hugo Boss? Louis Vuitton? Tiffany's? Those are all stores for which the shopping experience is paramount.
The brands mentioned seem like an implicit admission that this will be an expensive service. Is there actually demand for same day delivery of Tiffany's? Who buys stuff from Tiffany's but can't be bothered to go to the store and also needs it for tonight?
Or it could be the new Yodel: unreliable, poor customer service, cheap, badly paid workers on piecerate.
The funny think is that local merchants used to offer delivery a lot more ("butcher's basket" bicycles, fish vans, electric milk floats, etc). I guess we're coming back to that mode of business.
On the backs of 1099 workers. Uber needs to be work on some social responsibility. Do we really want a country where the majority are struggling to serve the few?
The ingenious twist of American ideology is that so many of the many perceive themselves as aspiring members of the few, and hence oppose the kinds of policy that would improve conditions for the many.
They're free to work for whoever they want. No one is forcing anyone to drive for Uber, they're doing it voluntarily. Why forcibly stop consensual behaviour?
Freedom of choice comes in degrees, with no sharp divide between free and not free.
The freedom of an individual to negotiate with employers exists in a context of wild inequality in negotiating position, information asymmetry, and coordination problems among workers that lead to a race to the bottom (absent collective bargaining or government intervention).
I don't know enough about Uber and their workers to comment on that in particular, but I don't think that "they could have not signed on, so it's OK" is necessarily a strong position from which to oppose collective intervention, governmental or otherwise, without qualification of the degree to which participants in an agreement were free to make their decisions, and what the consequences of thier decisions will be on the choices available to others. Since we're talking about low-wage workers and a giant company, my guess is that closer examination of those considerations won't aid an anti-intervention or pro-market (for common definitions of pro-market) argument.
It doesn't seem an issue of workers negotiating with the individual business. You're redefining "freedom of choice" to mean freedom to negotiate with a company. It's clear that the parent meant freedom to choose when/where they work. If there were better alternatives, people would chose that over Uber.
The fact that they aren't choosing other things shows that they're making an informed decision that they believe is best for them given their alternatives. We're free to wonder about if things could be even better for the people who made the choice to work for Uber, which is where some kind of negotiation between workers and Uber would come in, but that seems to miss the point completely. If there were better alternatives provided by any other company, most of the workers would go there.
> You're redefining "freedom of choice" to mean freedom to negotiate with a company. It's clear that the parent meant freedom to choose when/where they work.
Can't it be both? Really, I don't see how the two can be considered separately. The individual negotiation occurs in the context of the broader field of choices and consequences available, and of the relative power of the participants (which may, perhaps most relevantly, be considered as their ability to cope with any harm that results from saying "no" to a given offer).
> The fact that they aren't choosing other things shows that they're making an informed decision that they believe is best for them given their alternatives.
I don't agree that the fact of a choice having been made gives us any insight in to the degree to which it was "informed" but otherwise, sure.
My point is: that someone said "yes" and that it was within their power to say "no", is a pretty poor metric for freedom per se, and a bit more than that is going to be needed to demonstrate that (say) government intervention
would necessarily be inappropriate or harmful.
The problem is it is harmful to others. There is always someone who is willing to work for less or worse conditions which collectively affects everyone.
Employers shifting externalities onto employees is something that labor law has been created to mitigate for decades.
The fact that Uber has found a loophole (which is being closed quickly) does not make it "okay, because it's consensual".
Also, I have issues with semantically null statements that could have been written by a Markov Chainer that's seeded with text from the Mises Institute, but that's a more personal problem.
One can simultaneously support allowing most consensual behavior such as matching buyers and sellers of services through technology while also being somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that many of the seller jobs being created are relatively low-paid contractors while the buyers are more often than not urban professionals. At some level, this is nothing new--dog walkers anyone?--but it's the focus of a lot of these new businesses. (All the while, trying to simply automate away as many of those jobs as possible.)
Remind me all you want but forward looking statements made with certitude about brand new services require at a minimum something that allows you to look into the future. Either that or they are premature at best and possibly quite wrong.
First, I wasn't the one who downvoted you (I was only having fun that you were being downvoted for what appeared to be a sarcastic remark). Second, I think JohnLen expressed a reasonable opinion and you should have made more effort (arguments) if you wanted to question it. But that's just me.
It would be smart for Uber to acquire Instacart. Instacart has the knowhow and Uber has the network and technology. It seems like a smart business decision that will lead to world domination.
Kind of the same thing, but in the opposite direction: This morning my girlfriend got a notification that some day next week Uber drivers will pick up donations and transport them to Goodwill.
I seem to recall WalMart looking into the idea of having customers deliver goods to others "on their way home." Don't know if that was successful anywhere.
This company is in a inherently interesting space, directing large numbers of people using software for stuff that happens outside of the computer and also offer lots of jobs for people
I suspect there's a complicated relationship between density, profit margins and overall cart value of what's being delivered, price sensitivity, and other factors. It obviously does work in some domains and those who already have established something that could form the basis of a delivery infrastructure may be in the best position to experiment further. It won't work for everything or everyone but if fast delivery works for food for example, there's no inherent reason it shouldn't work for a lot of other goods that people can't get easily delivered today.