Uber brings surge pricing to UberEATS food delivery

Everyone loves surge pricing right? That’s why Uber is now bringing the innovative concept to its food delivery service UberEATS – because who doesn’t enjoy paying more for food?

The company provides a fairly logical bit of reasoning:

In order to maintain the speed, reliability, and selection people have come to expect from Uber, we depend on having delivery partners available in the right places at the right times. Even though more people are signing up for a flexible way to earn money every day, there are still times when there aren’t enough delivery partners in a particular area to complete every delivery request at Uber speed.

That’s why we’re asking UberEATS customers in select cities to pay more for delivery when they order from restaurants in areas where demand is high but delivery partners are scarce. An arrow below the restaurant name will notify users about the additional fee. The exact amount appears above the menu, and as a separate line item before checkout and on the order receipt. This way, they’ll still be able to order from the same variety of restaurants they love with fast delivery times.

The extra money from these orders goes toward financial incentives for delivery partners as well as our other operational costs. These partner incentives look at past patterns and aim to predict where and when there will be high demand and to encourage more people to get on the road in these locations.

Okay, fair enough, but it sets a bit of a worrying precedent that we hope doesn’t expand to other delivery platforms. I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a way of dealing with scarce delivery partners that was less disparaging to customers.

Here’s to hoping those “select” cities are truly limited to a small few. But hey, at least they warned us.

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Via VentureBeat