This is my biggest aggravation. They consistently underreport estimated pickup times. Dropoff times are essentially universally significantly later than the estimate before booking.
It's things like this that make agents potentially exciting. So much of enshittification is wrapping an essentially good service in a crappy and misleading UI to drive extra revenue. If you can replace the lying UI with a more honest one, and then do a fair and automatic comparison between Uber and Lyft, a lot of the annoyance goes away.
This is the same thing the food delivery apps (including Uber Eats) do. I have screenshots showing the estimated delivery time pretty consistently jumping up anywhere between 20% and 50% from what it shows on the initial screen to what you get once you've placed the order. And then often they don't even make that time estimate.
An accurate estimate isn't really possible with the food delivery business model. Couriers will have 2-3 orders, so if you are order 1 or two, there is a new variable that enters the equation after you purchase the food. They obviously add other items on a similar route, but wait times and such are fairly random). Of course they could do 1 order to 1 driver but that would double the labor costs (sequential orders would be 2-3 deliveries per hour max per courier, vs 4ish when optimized).
That doesn't explain why the delivery consistently jumps 30% to 50% as soon as you hit the confirm button and they process your payment. If they were giving an honest estimate, you'd expect a gradual increase in the estimate as the delivery person showed up 2 minutes late at point A, then 5 minutes late at point B, then 10 minutes late at point C, etc.
The Uber Eats delivery time estimates are a lie, plain and simple. Once they have your money in hand, they'll shamelessly admit to the lie, which is why the estimate jumps instantaneously.
also, you would expect to at times get over-estimated wait times. but my experience is always underestimated by about 20 minutes. so consistently, in fact, that I suspect they have a very good idea of the true time and then subtract 20 min from it.
Then they shouldn't charge for faster delivery. It just doesn't make any sense. Like i'm 95% sure in most cases you don't actually get a car faster and they just take your money and provide no marginal value (granted, I only use the apps about every other month). How else could they consistently offer multiple price tiers regardless of availability? I'm not claiming fraud necessarily, but I also can't imagine how you could offer it without committing fraud. At some point you're just lying ("estimation with negative effort" as a friend calls it) about car etas to drive the perception of value.
Uber could provide a range or a point in the middle, but it seems like they just estimate the best case scenario and then it's usually not the best case.
Dev turned doordash driver here. Let me tell you why those estimates are bullshit.
First, there are three different ways that orders can come in. 1) Tight integration into the POS system. 2) Through a separate parallel physical tablet. 3) Something spits out something on a printer.
There are opportunities with 1 and 2 to do some sort of feedback on how busy things are. I know for the tablet option that at least for some restaurants they are able to indicate how long the order will take.
But half the places I get to have no integration, they just put the ticket on the pile and it's done when it's done. A couple places that do this in particular also don't even start the order until the driver shows up, on purpose. The app will tell the customer I'll pick it up in 5 minutes no matter what. There's a chain that does prep work in front of the customer, but certain locations will not make pickup/delivery orders if there's anyone in line in the shop. I stopped doing deliveries there.
You'd also think that places with the potential for awesome metrics making pickup timing a breeze would be fast food chains, right? Nope. Not a single iota of smart integration whatsoever.
I've found that keeping customers in the loop as to what's happening with their deliveries ends up keeping them happy, even if it's gonna be slow. I suppose some things never change.
You're spot on, I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike on the weekends for exercise and the wait times are BS because everyone orders lunch/dinner at the same time and they're in essentially a random queue with everyone else who orders. Add to that multiple pick ups and drop offs and you've got a mess.
Talking to people really does help though, everyone wants to be more forgiving when you remind them theirs a human factor involved in getting the food to them.
They're just going to replace the engineers, analysts and designers. The same greedy MBAs and VCs are still going to be running it and the agents they deploy will reflect that. This is not a competitive market by any definition - huge information asymmetries and extremely low competition. We need to go back to either government sponsored monopoly with the appropriate regulatory models or we need to declare it a utility and set prices.
I find it a lot easier to just not use Uber and Lyft at all. It's so insanely expensive it's really only worth it if you need to get to or from the airport and all your social circle is at work. Otherwise it's easier and cheaper and generally less stressful to drive, walk, or take public transit.
I’d be way more excited about a functional consumer protection agency or actual antitrust enforcement than trying to beat a dark pattern with more dark patterns. Just wait til AI agent service providers get in on the regulatory capture game, politicians are cheap to buy these days.
I'd take that with a grain of salt. I've went through the process to cancel an uber one trial recently, and I would say it's not anywhere near "23 screens". Maybe the user in question got unlucky and got hit with all the A/B trials, and they're being super generous with what counts as a "screen", but the process was relatively painless.
Might be because of your location. Some governments like California have regulated these types of things with a law that says you must be allowed to cancel in the same manner you signed up.
Uber had a formal program in place, built into their software, to deny ride requests they suspected came from government and regulatory officials, in cities where they were violating transport regulations [0]. This isn't their first rodeo.
I can, I’ve written a billing system before (unfortunately). There’s a lot of annoying math/edge cases and systems to sync between.
While I never implemented a restriction like this, it would have prevented a lot of weird bugs/customer support issues and kept the underlying code much simpler.
(Annoying math = time zones, prorations, discounts, billing cycle anchors, etc. see the “falsehoods programmers believe about X” series)
(Systems to sync between = internal DBs, billing APIs, payment processors, etc.)
I mean sure, I get it, but companies like Uber leave edge cases like that out when it hurts them (customers cancelling) but move heaven & earth to remove them when it helps them (I bet its easy to re-join within 24 hours of cancelling?).
I was part of a faith-based health sharing program for a few years. When it came time to cancel my membership, I had to call in and speak with a rep. I got past several rounds of retention attempts and succeeded in cancelling. The rep offered to pray for me before we ended the call and asked if I had any prayer requests. I mentioned something about getting over a bad cold and she said, “you know, one of the benefits that we offer—“
I felt a little bit bad about hanging up but mostly I was just mad.
This actually works reliably with quite a few companies, especially large ones with low marginal cost services. They will often have a standard script where they will offer anyone calling to cancel a large discount for 3-12 months. People can, and many do, call back at the end of each promo period to say they're cancelling and refresh the discounted rate.
For Uber? In the handful of times I've canceled uber one trials I've never seen this. It's always through the app. Not even the FTC complaint alleges this.
Are you in Cali? They have a state law that says "if you can sign up online you have to be able to cancel online".
I ran into this with a NYTimes subscription I tried to cancel. They detected I wasn't in a state with such protections and removed the cancellation options while not providing a way to cancel. Made things real hard to shutdown.
Presumably they're specifically referring to uber rather than the broader conversation about dark patterns in canceling. I, too, remember how hard it was to cancel ZipCar—I think I just ended up closing the credit account it was backed by because I couldn't successfully navigate the labyrinth of phone-based customer support to cancel.
The complaint has some screenshots starting at page 15, which I think is representative of the cancellation process I went through. If you're being super generous (ie. start counting from you first launched the app, and also scrolling down as a "screen"), I can count 9-10 screens. I'm not sure how you can get 23.
There is common sense legislation that exists out there that is extremely simple: just require that you must allow users the exact same methodology and as easy to cancel as they did to sign up. Signed up with 3 clicks online? Need to be able to cancel with 3 clicks online. No exceptions.
Was in my local gym trying to set up a membership and someone was in there screaming that it’d be easier to “burn the gym to fucking ashes” than cancel the sub. Turns out the cancellations person was only there on a Tuesday at 10AM or something useless.
Just tell them you moved, that's why you're canceling, and you live nowhere near any of their other branches therefore it would be physically impossible for you to come in.
This works for me, and I have no qualms lying to circumvent stupid tactics like these. I have turned into a LIAR when speaking to customer service for stuff like this because it just makes me more sympathetic as a customer, even though it's insane and unfair that one has to do this as a sort of social hack instead of the business just doing the right thing.
Worth noting that in the UK if you say « this is obviously predatory and isn’t going to hold up in small claims court » this requirement almost always disappears and they tell you that just this one time they’ll be nice and cancel from today.
Sirus wasn't bad, but it was still a call which is annoying.
The worst I've experienced was equifax. I signed up for a free trial to see where my credit sat and what was up, then cancelled. It was a phone call, 30 minute wait, and SUPER weaselly behavior in the call center script. Something to the effect of Them: "Hey we want to give you this free gift", Me: "Will that gift keep my subscription active?" Them: "yes". Repeated several times as they tried just a bunch of avenues to not cancel my account. I literally had to say "No, I just want you to cancel my account" or "Are you going to cancel my account" like 20 times. It took over an hour.
This isn’t just a dark pattern — it’s dark matter. The kind where it says 'cancel anytime,' but when you actually try, it throws up a screen like: 'Please proceed by faxing us from the moon.'
