

Why clueless people hate Uber's surge pricing - tn13
http://lironshapira.blogspot.com/2014/12/why-clueless-people-hate-ubers-surge.html

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aaronbrethorst
The title is unnecessarily rude and baiting. Perhaps a better title would be
"Uber's surge pricing is an example of a poor user experience."

~~~
eurleif
But your title would place the blame on the opposite side of where the post
places it. Is it really just the title you disagree with, or the post itself?
If it's the latter, it would help if you could make specific criticisms of the
argument it presents.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I disagree with the article's thesis, from which both the title and content
stem. Let me know if the Fisking below is specific enough for you.

    
    
        Uber's surge pricing is awesome. It's a
        well-executed feature that makes the
        product better.
    

Baseless assertion, citation needed.

    
    
        And yet... tons of people irrationally
        hate it!
    

Citation needed.

    
    
        People who hate Uber's surge pricing haven't
        come to terms with the fact that it's
        impossible for Uber to charge the normal fare
        and still get them a ride right now.
    

The timing of this blog post seems to suggest that the sentence above is about
the Sydney hostage crisis, and, if that's true, that's a pretty fucking
callous to write something like this in the wake of such an event
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Sydney_hostage_crisis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Sydney_hostage_crisis))

Here's a blog post that I also disagree with, but at least it attempts to make
a counter-argument: [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/16/in-
defense-...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/16/in-defense-of-
uber-s-awful-sydney-surge-pricing.html)

The author of this blog post goes on to compare other examples of products and
services with finite and infinite lifespans and availability, and—here's the
part that I think is really important—then makes this point that I kinda-
sorta[1] agree with:

    
    
        What the surge-haters *don't* get is that the
        supply of Uber drivers is also limited. Every
        bit as limited as nice houses or seats on a flight.
    

Yes! That's right! (More or less.) Except that Uber:

1\. Requires us to take their word for it.

2\. Doesn't express this through their user interface in any way, shape, or
form.

3\. Has a significant burden of proof after all of the PR debacles they've
been through ranging from Hurricane Sandy, to Emil Michael, etc. etc., all the
way up to the Sydney hostage crisis (cf. [http://www.wired.com/2014/12/uber-
surge-sydney/](http://www.wired.com/2014/12/uber-surge-sydney/)).

Issues 1-3 presented above represent a _user experience_ deficiency.

    
    
        Surge-haters have an iTunes-like mental model
        of Uber's supply capacity. They never learned
        Econ 101
    

That's Uber's problem, not their customers' problem. If a $25 billion
corporation cannot figure out how to properly explain this to their customers,
then it begs the question of who they're hiring with all that cash.

The Wired article I linked to above says this, which I completely agree with:

    
    
        The fact is, even though Uber didn’t
        intentionally do anything sinister
        [in Sydney], the company’s public image
        has grown so tainted in recent weeks
        and months, that the public actually
        believes it’s capable of doing something
        like this. And that’s an issue that’s
        much tougher to fix.
    

[1] The availability of 'nice' houses is completely different from a seat on
an airplane departing tomorrow. If you wanted to talk about something like 'an
acre of land in San Francisco,' then yes, clearly, we're talking about the
same thing, but 'nice house' is too different for each person for us to have a
meaningful conversation about this.

