this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
257 points (98.9% liked)

News

23320 readers
3793 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

The city has just 39 licensed cab drivers.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

But it's a tactic, right? They could still make money, if a bit less, by operating in Minneapolis. But they can put pressure on residents to try and get it repealed by stopping, and try to send a message to other cities.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

No, they barely make money as it is

Lyft is losing money, Uber is barely profitable

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

As a whole, yeah, but top-line losses don't mean each ride makes them less profitable. My understanding was their margins are slim enough they need a lot of rides to subsidize their fixed costs, so fewer rides means less profit, not less loss.

If Uber is actually profitable, stopping operations in Minneapolis really should make them less so. If this isn't them taking a small loss now because they believe they'll avoid a bigger loss later, I can't make sense of it.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes, they could make a very tiny profit from a decently sized city, but then it might encourage other cities to follow suit.

The costs are not all fixed, covering another city means paying more support agents, having people signing up local drivers, etc. so after this change it might not even be profitable after all

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

That's my point though?

If costs like support agents that scale with rides make the rides unprofitable, their business model is upside down. Especially for Uber, I'm counting costs that scale with rides with costs per ride, vs infrastructure and truly fixed costs. Maybe they're so close to breaking even per ride that raising costs depresses demand enough to make them unprofitable, but it seems a lot more likely they're doing this to send a message first and foremost.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Uber is making way more money than they let on. They got caught stashing millions over seas. They and lyft both take over half of the transaction on average and have reduced their support teams to mostly bots and people who can barely read.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Millions? That's almost as much as they make in a day

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Tell us you don't understand gross revenue versus net profits without telling us.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Uber increased the cash on hand by 139M in the 4th quarter, so they definitely make more than a million a day net profit