The ENTROPY trend is starting to shine through in recent news with popular ride-sharing app “Uber” testing out a new feature that would allow for riders to opt into waiting longer for a ride in return for a lower fare. This is an interesting concept as many companies are looking to streamline their processes to make them as fast as possible for as cheap as possible. Here Uber is taking part of that goal, incentivizing its consumers to wait longer by offering them a lower price.
It begs the question to the riders of what they value higher – money or time? While in recent news it would seem to be a feature that is unlikely to work as trends have recently shown companies using automated intelligence and other methods to make their service deliveries to their even faster, reducing time, we at Baba believe Uber may be on to something.
Over the past few years Uber has been subject to a myriad of controversies involving their high fares, especially with their use of the so-called “surge” pricing which uses an algorithm to analyze how many ubers are in demand and if it reaches over a certain threshold the price for an uber gets multiplied by how large the demand is. Stories have come out of Ubers having surges of up to 8x making a 5-minute trip that would normally be $10 actually cost $80. These price inflations are the reason for this change as consumers do want to get to their destination as quickly as possible but are not willingly to pay exorbitant amounts extra for it.
This decision is very interesting in terms of our #THENOWAGE2018-2019 Forecast as it follows our ENTROPY trend which details the concept of going against current trends to set a new precedent. It will be interesting to see what comes about with the rolling out of the new feature and as well to see how it effects their main competitor, Lyft’s decisions moving forward.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/19/17479238/uber-cheaper-fare-longer-wait-test-update
Comments (0)
Comments are closed here.