The idea with Uber (and, I gotta ask, where is the damn umlaut? There is absolutely nothing that says “first class” like a foreign diacritical mark) is that you dial them up on a smart phone and they send a sexy black car (with a driver inside, of course) to pick you up and take you where you want to go, like you were Mr. Big in Sex and the City.
Class costs, of course, and it bugs Felix a little that Uber costs at least twice as much as a regular cab, and it bugs him a little more that they try to pretend that they aren’t a luxury item, which they pretty much are, unless you can put them on your expense account, but what really bugs him is that they go in for “fancy surge pricing,” which means that they charge more for a ride during times of peak demand, like New Year’s Eve, when some dude got charged $135 for a 12 block ride. Yeah, says Felix, they try to explain it all with “fancy supply and demand curves, but you could call it a ‘rip off drunk people’ people too.”
Well, one could possibly make fun of Felix and his yuppie amigos, who, judging from one post, don’t blench at the sight of a $295 prix fixe, but what really strikes me as that Felix’s rant suggests how foreign “markets” are to the human imagination. We have a very strong tendency to believe that a product or service has some sort of absolute value in and of itself, unrelated to demand. A 12-block cab ride can’t be worth $135! But what Uber is offering is really the availability of a car and driver whenever you want it on New Year’s Eve. How much would you have to pay to rent a car and driver on New Year’s Eve for four or six hours? A lot more than $135, right?
Besides, who needs a limo when you can have a share-a-bike program, right, Felix? You’ve written so eloquently about them here, here, and here. Or are those only for times when you aren’t on your way to a $295 prix fixe?
