If you are curious about this, I recommend There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. It covers how some folks, with no credit, are forced to live in extended stay hotels (where they take cash up front and don’t run credit) which can cost multiple times what rent can cost.
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
>How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
If you are curious about this, I recommend There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. It covers how some folks, with no credit, are forced to live in extended stay hotels (where they take cash up front and don’t run credit) which can cost multiple times what rent can cost.
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
>How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
It's not. It's expensive to be poor.
How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
Aren't you going 20 times per week, twice, that's 40 rides.
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Aren't you going 20 times per week, twice, that's 40 rides.
Work 5 days a week = 10 rides. Plus four rides on the weekend, or not. That's why I used 14.
Where do you get 40 rides per week?
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Even if someone did 40 rides per week at your posited average of $25/ride, that's $4,000, not $1,000. Are you letting an LLM do math for you?