Uber is a marketing company. The Uber business model is nearly identical to the taxi business model it is replacing — except taxi drivers don’t have to lease or rent cars from Uber as they did with the taxi company. You also don’t have mobster-controlled “Medallions” as a means to artificially constrict supply.

I think a lot of people have no idea how the old taxi business worked.. it was far worse than Uber — it was more of a monopoly as well because you were required to drive a specifically-branded car purchased or leased from the taxi company. You couldn’t use the same car to drive for other companies. Damage had to be repaired at the specifically designated repair shop (owned by the taxi company of course,) and you had to pay for insurance from the specific taxi company “vendor” (also owned by the taxi company.)

And.. you were an independent contractor; you were the customer of the taxi company. You got to pay your own self-employment taxes, but your own health insurance and if you got sick, you still had to pay the taxi company the lease fee for the car. While you did collect your own cash fares, you had to pay a very high percentage (8-10%) on credit card fares and you were paid those fares weekly. If you lost the charge slip paper, you lost the fare, however the taxi company still had the swipe, so they’d still collect the money but just not pay any of it to you.

The taxi business is and was an incredibly corrupt and nasty business. There is a reason that job was popular with fresh off the boat immigrants — anyone who had done the job more than a minute knew how much of a rip-off it was (unless you were willing to sleep in your car and drive 16+ hour days in order to save up money to start your own limo business or convenience store which was a common goal among many of the south Asian immigrants I drove with.)

The kids hating on Uber really have no idea what they are talking about. Unless someone has actually worked in the towing, taxi, limousine, hot shot, or trucking businesses (all extremely nasty and tough businesses,) it’s pretty hard to have much credibility when complaining about the gig economy, Uber, etc. Uber/Lift/Doordash is a dream compared to the bad old days. You can have one car and pretty much drive and deliver as much as you want and make money proportional to how hard you are willing to work. It isn’t easy-street, but nobody plans on being a career Uber driver — it’s a stopgap, a transition, or a supplement. Anyone thinking that this is some kind of full time career is either of low-IQ and has no prospects of doing anything better, or just lacks ambition. Being a McDonald’s cashier ought not be a career either, but there are people working in that position for 15+ years. At that point, that failure is on them. We shouldn’t be optimizing society around making low wage service jobs into some kind of permanent career. Even a high school kid gets promoted at McDonalds if they stick around for more than a few minutes, yet there are literally people who have been making minimum wage for years. At some point people ought to be treated as adults and not like exploited children. A person chooses to drive for Uber/a taxi/whatever. They aren’t Shanghaied or otherwise indentured. If people don’t want to do those jobs, then that ought to motivate them to find something slightly better — or start at the bottom washing dishes somewhere and move up through a restaurant’s ranks. But that requires hard work and dedication— traits in very short supply in an era where people that literally sweep floors think that work is worth $15 per hour.

Source: I drove for Yellow Cab Houston in the summer of 2001. I also drove hot shot deliveries in Houston in 2008 and a good friend of mine owned a bike courier business. I also worked a string of shitty restaurant and bar jobs, lived on the street a short time and now I work as a software engineering project manager for one of those FANG companies.