> Users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel.
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.
I walked out before I became another victim.
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.
In my mind it should be something like 3 or 4 screens/prompts max.
Account (1) -> Cancel (2) -> Are you sure (3) -> Why did you cancel (4).
1: Account
2: Cancel
3: Call this number.
4: Call number.
5: Welcome to Customer Service press… … …press 9 to cancel.
6: We need to confirm who you are. Give birth date, etc.
7: Are you sure?
8: Agent gets on the line.
9: Why do you want to cancel?
10: We are offering you a discount to continue and not cancel, how about that?
11: Cancel
12: Are you sure again? (This time for real)
13: Cancelled, but we are offering you a BIGGER discou… this is when I hang up.
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.
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.
I should (pretend to) cancel more often!
I used to do this with the cable company but they seem to have gotten wise to it. Last time I tried in 2020 they basically told me to pound sand.
Fortunately I got fiber now and got to tell them to pound sand instead.
I felt a little bit bad about hanging up but mostly I was just mad.
Very clearly intended to combat “oh shit I need to cancel that one” when the charge shows up in hopes you forget again.
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.)
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.
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.
A company can save a lot of money by not handling edge cases.
There is no support. It does not exist.
Why do they do these things?
Because they can get away with it. Nestle has gotten away with killing nearly ten million children since 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestlé_boycott
Companies have no morality. Unless someone holds them accountable they're going optimize for making money.
On another note, an actual edge case that happened to me is that I was in a different country when my Uber One was about to renew, but I had no way to cancel because the app kept geolocating me and displayed a UI specific to my visiting country. I got no Uber One benefits in that country anyway. So I had to send an email to stop renewal, and while I was waiting for a reply, I got charged. Support said they can’t refund me, and I ended up having to do a chargeback.
Uber Eats markets a 2 for 1 deal that I would have only ordered due to the deal. They always add both items when you take the deal to the cart, but they suddenly changed it. I didn't realize I had to manually add both, and only had one delivered. I called them up and they only refunded a portion, and not the whole thing without accounting for the fact that it was an opportunity cost for me. I would have just bought something else, or not at all. It's tin-foil hatting, but they coerced a purchase imho.
That's not what "coerced" means. "Deceived", maybe.
Yes it could still be gamed, but anyone who's worked on user funnels knows that every added step reduces conversion, so it would be self-balancing.
I wonder... what if you artificially padded the signup process with feel-good stuff?
- screen: Did you know, <picture of Scarlett Johansson> Scarlett also uses this service?
- screen: Since you are signing up, we are adding a Free 10% off voucher for <stuff!>
- screen: Our customer Service Representative (attactive person) is always standing by!
etc...
- screen <n>: click [Yes] to sign up!
“We made you enter your name and address and password and credit card details. That’s 204 steps!”
Can’t say whether this is the recommended method for all services but it works for me.
I am far from a novice computer/device user. you’re already making a decent amount of money off me and the slave labor wages you pay your workers, why try to aggressively milk every penny I have? I stopped using it after their joke of an outsourced customer support would not do anything but run me in circles. How much did losing my business cost them in revenue vs. the blatant petty theft in dark patterns would have gained? There has to be a day where all these user hostile apps triggers some response from people like “no, enough of this.”
I guess now I'll be a party to the class action and get a gift card in 10-12 years from this BS. Neat!
I'm able to see this in my Uber app today (set a destination, then at the bottom of the screen is a row for payment options, clicking that will show you Uber balances (uber cash), payment methods, and vouchers) and am located in the US.
If you are not seeing this, I'm thinking you need to reach out to support via email and have a long (probably frustrating) conversation.
Thus being blacklisted by them seems like a non issue, unless there’s local monopolies somewhere.
Cabs, busses, bikes, trains...
I live in a small city. When I travel, I generally have to be at the airport or train station between 4 and 530 AM. Uber put the taxis out of business, so the choice is Uber, Lyft, wasting a half hour and alot of money parking, or trying to find a black car service.
I was in Rome for business. The choice is Uber or the local cab hailing app, which the cabs don’t always respond to, and the cabbie frequently tries to ripoff a dopey foreigner.
Once upon a time (around 2005-2006) I had a colleague whose father was a taxi driver. He (the colleague) was openly telling us that every cabbie cheats. Once in a blue moon you find an honest one, or one whose cheating-meter-subsystem is broken.
I have, the commenter I replied to hasn’t :)
Not really. You can say this about smaller US cities, but NYC is absolutely a city where the >90% percentile of people can live without the daily use of a car.
(The simplest reason for this has nothing do to with car ownership or desirability per se: it's because of NYC's food delivery happens by bike or moped.)
I’ve checked this side by side with colleagues at the airport getting ride quotes to the same hotel. When you have Uber Cash they will quote you more. You can find numerous Reddit threads on the topic as well.
This feels very illegal to me, but not a lawyer.
Bay Area traveler says Uber gift cards boosted fare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43751945
The less they know about you the better. Good reason to not have Gift Cards inside of the applications.
Basically any possible pitch for it is worse in every way than simple downward wealth redistribution.
If you take your idea to the logical extreme then you're essentially arguing for permanently fixed prices. This is one reason why it's sometimes impossible to get a taxi in places where the rates are fixed by government edict.
CC companies, especially in the states, almost always favor the cardholder over the merchant.
Your card provider needs to keep you happy far more than your card provider needs to keep Uber happy.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/uber-loses-appeal-b...
Visa/MasterCard/Discover/etc are little more than clearing houses.
Banks serve as both issuers (to the consumer) and processors (to the merchant), often times both.
I’ve had to do a handful of chargebacks and I don’t know or care whether they banned me: I would never voluntarily do business with them again anyway.
How did they rectify this issue they “discovered”? They gave me Uber credit…
Seems the vendors are catching on, with orders often dramatically wrong without any consequence. This is pure speculation, however.
I also found vendors would often substitute items out of stock with those of a lesser value, but write a semi-cute message on it. Nothing like buying some fancy cola, only to get a can of coke and a love letter..
Endless chatbot and help option loops; I gave up, and refuse to use their services - though use was rare anyway.
Super interesting to me we have such different experiences. Maybe because I have UberOne?
When I want take-out food I just call the restaurant to order, then get in my car (or on my bike) and pick it up myself.
Mind you, that's still not exactly "expensive" for delivery [0], but I can make better food both faster and cheaper than waiting, I can pick it up and actually use an insulated bag faster than waiting for delivery, and pretty much any other food strategy at least guarantees I'll actually have the expected meal and not have to waste my time with customer support (or money if I decide it's not worth the hassle).
[0] Imagine you're a driver, you incur $3 in actual expenses, the delivery takes 15min, and they have to wait 15min for the food to be ready (this is the thing that makes pizza delivery more efficient -- as soon as you get to the store there's another pizza waiting). Suddenly that's a $14/hr gig without any benefits and where you need to purchase a special insurance on top of things, assuming the only part Uber keeps is the 20% fee they're scamming you out of. Beyond that, you're at a much higher risk of bodily harm than doing something like construction, and if those aren't good drivers I don't really want to be encouraging more of them to be on the street, especially with time pressures (and if they are skilled ... that's less than McDonald's pays even before you factor in benefits).
Shortly after it was introduced it seemed every order of mine would get surprise delayed after pick up as the driver would have to first drop off a different order at >90° different direction from me, no doubt for the user who would get priority for being on UberOne.
I don’t order food often enough to justify a subscription, so I just switched to Mr D(elivery), a local South African company where the delivery time is at least almost always consistent. I also feel a bit better about less of the money leaving the country.
In some cities, they did, even before Uber existed.
But they still had to pay their drivers a living wage. Uber didn't, and people went with the cheaper fares.
Then there were no more taxis, and all the taxi drivers were making a third the money driving for Uber.
The situation is a complete mess here :/
Then they sold to a UK company, who sold to a German company, who recently sold to Lyft, each step along the way the new owner finding ways to make the service worse.
Well, now we're stuck at the airport waiting for a mob of cars to fight each other to transport us each as least efficiently as humans have figured out how to do. But at least we can stare at our phone while we wait to get fucked.
And this doesn't even touch the horror of the driving side
Meanwhile, my city is suing a local cooperative for "safety reasons" or some bullshit. I don't expect anything to ever improve at this point.
"CEO donors who gave $1 million include Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Tim Cook, head of Apple; and Dara Khosrowshahi, head of Uber."[1]
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rich-people-and-corp...
Since 2019, I've relied on ride-shares and delivery services, consistently questioning their fee structures. During this time, I've spent an unconscionable amount on Uber and Uber Eats alone.
A big shame both to the ones running the show and the ones who trained them to think this is acceptable.
Funny enough I had to take an uber today but it was taking too long so I wanted to cancel the request and call a taxi, I was asked 4 times if I wanted to really cancel, small things like that really do just inflict a little bit of pressure it’s a horrible practice. The fact that a company comes up with these dark patterns to squeeze every cent from you says everything you need to know about them.
You'd think that given no services were actually rendered and no perishable items, it'd be an easy open-shut support case.
But, no, you see: "that automatically accepted order itself was the service rendered"
Cool. I took the L because I order food all the time. Hate them for it. I don't know what our alternative is. We all laughed at this company as they burned through billions a year to acquire us, and now it's a monopoly robbing us all.
Same for Uber Eats. They estimate 25 minutes for a drop off, but it's often more like 45 minutes.
Just recently, Uber (with some partner) started testing delivery robots in my (city) neighborhood. And I love Waymo, as much as I've been able to use them. Maybe automation will change the economics.
Also, IIRC, for many years, Amazon barely squeaked a profit. They wanted to be at the low end of the margins to capture market share. Once they got big enough, they increased their margins a little and started turning a big profit.
They then flipped the "make a profit" switch and are now shady in ways customers dislike (ripping you the customer off).
gkapur•7h ago
I don’t see those deals on Uber Eats so it feels like the real value of Uber One is for heavy Uber Eats users.
PS. Worth going through the cancellation flow when you are up for renewal as they will probably offer you 50% off Uber One.
xeromal•7h ago
zeroonetwothree•6h ago
candiddevmike•6h ago
cogman10•5h ago
We have a restaurant where I can order a $10 meal and pick it up myself. The same meal done through uber is $30. Everything has a percentage added and there's at least 3 extra "you used us" fees that get tacked on. All the menu items can have anywhere from a 20->100% markup. It's quite insane.
paxys•5h ago
gruez•5h ago