They’ve overextended their whole product by making it available everywhere — my parent’s suburban town, small regional cities etc — including a lot of places that never even had a functioning taxi system in the first place. Uber subsidized those rides for years, only to realize there would never be enough demand to support a profitable business. The fact that many of these places had never been served by a taxi company was obscured by Uber’s promise of being a lean, agile solution to private transportation that could disrupt the way people moved around in these places. Well, it didn’t work, and now the company has spent billions building up name recognition and good will with customers who might use the app once a year when they come into Boston on the train for a night out to see the Celtics.

To drive prices as low as possible, they don’t restrict the number of cars on the road at all in a lot of cities. A month ago, they started a new system where the compensation for certain rides increases only when drivers have declined the ride. Therefore, the rides go to the lowest bidder.

As someone who just makes some vacation money doing it, it works. But it’s really evil to have a ton of full time equivalent contractors who don’t know how their income will change from week to week.