As I said, if you have a valid card. If your card is expired it depends on the CC company whether or not the transaction will go through. If it’s a common recurring charge sometimes it does.
In any case, it’s still a big engineering fuck up to attempt to charge an order of magnitude more than what the customer expects. I think their support was doing a decent attempt of fixing the issue and she panicked over the charge.
I don’t even really get why this is a story. Seems like click-bait taking advantage of the Uber sensationalism.
What’s interesting about Uber is the bigger picture issues. How do you balance innovation with regulation?
What’s NOT interesting? Minor customer service issues. Even if it has big, scary numbers.
Normally when someone whines about Uber I suspect a sense of entitlement issue. But if I was facing an erroneous bill for $16,000, I would seriously lose my shit and expect whoever was attempting to charge me that money to fix it and fix it quickly.
That’s not what I got out of the Gothamist post. I don’t see where there is a claim that any amount over $56.40 was ever attempted against the card.
Also, uber is quite clearly not trying to claim that they owe 16k. I mean, their billing system says that, yes, but their humans are saying that it’s a mistake that they are working to fix
Anyway, I see that Uber tried to adjust the trip cost to $41.09, and the original wrong amount was $4109, so the “decimal point” explanation makes sense to me. The subsequent 12K is an obvious fuckup, probably resulting from a CSR dealing with a problem that’s significantly different from the set of issues they usually deal with, but I don’t see any indication that Uber isn’t trying to fix it.
You are obviously a tough guy, but seeing a $16,000 charge appear on your phone can be startling to someone who isn’t as supercilious as you.
Three hours? Really? Maybe your time has no value, but that’s not true for most of us. There’s absolutely no reason this shouldn’t have been resolved in 5 minutes or less.
How long is it appropriate to wait before going to the media when they hang up on you after overcharging you by a few thousand dollars?
When Hessel asked for further explanation, she claims that the Uber representative said “Let me explain.” But before she could, the phone went dead.
Reached in person at Uber’s New York offices, another spokesperson apologized for the sudden disconnection. “I can explain that,” she said, before suddenly hurling down a device that emitted clouds of black smoke, facilitating her escape.
From what I can tell:
(4,109 * 3) = 12,327
12,327 - 12,142.49 = 184.51
184.51 - 15.31 (i.e., the difference between $56.40 and 41.09) = 169.20
169.20 / 3 = 56.40
So, if you accidentally CHARGE 4,109 three times, then CREDIT $15.31, then CREDIT the full fare three times, the math works out. And/or various permutations of the above.
In other words, you can get to this total (12,142.49) using only the numbers 41.09 and 56.40, plus (repeated) decimal misrepresentations of them. So it’s safe to say we can reject the “Uber is marginally more shitty than we thought” hypothesis in favor of “Uber’s customer service is marginally more incompetent than we suspected.”
Uber is totally annoying on some levels, I get it.
But chances are, they literally save lives daily by making it super-easy for people who are not in a state to drive, to get to where they need to be. That cannot be said for cabs, a lot of the time – or other sedan services.
Also, I was literally assaulted by a cab a couple months back, requiring an ER visit in the middle of the night. Guy literally took off while I was trying to open the door, knocked me to the ground, cut a nice inch-long slice of my chin open. Not cool. I’ve ONLY had pleasant experiences with Uber drivers, many dozens of them at this point in at least five or six different cities. My experience with cabbies is that they are often very sketchy.
But but deregulationist “disruptors” care about sidestepping the Establishment because they care about you. The customer. And destroying consumer protections is just one way to lower prices!
Well sure, that makes sense if you’re completely insincerely making stuff up. Cabs have their own apps in most cities now.
Maybe they should fucking fix it, then. Have you ever worked a customer service job? You say a lot of things that you have no personal power to resolve, and no timeframe in mind to resolve them. We live in the world we do today because there are more corporate apologists than people interested in holding the corporations accountable for what they do to their customers.
This person already had more than $4k in charges!!?? Driver had 2nd thoughts about BQE route so OK to for Uber to charge thousands? Still, this story has too too many ?. A hipster from WillyB wants to go to Manhattan instead of BedStuy? A miracle.
But I like Uber more. Nicer cars, nicer drivers, and I’ve yet to be assaulted by one (whereas I semi-regularly have negative cab experiences). Nobody’s forcing you to use them, or like them.
Why do you think they have their own apps now? Because they certainly didn’t before Uber. I tried a Yellow Cab app in SF right when Uber was starting up. It was beyond terrible. It was a joke.
Uber has upped the game. They’ve lit a fire under the cabs. I think the regulatory questions are totally real and not settled. And I think the potential negative impact on public transit investment could be real too. But let’s not pretend cabs provided great service before.
In my own personal experience I’ve had almost entirely positive experiences with Uber. They’re not perfect but their service has been as good or better than cabs consistently AND now it’s 10x easier for me to get a ride in SF. Before Uber we never counted on getting a cab easily. Now - we can always get a ride within minutes and it provides HUGE, REAL value.
YMMV I guess.
I just used Uber in San Fran while visiting this past weekend, and I was universally quite happy. Also used a few cabs, and they were pretty decent as well. But the Ubers sure proved useful! Also used Sidecar (which I hadn’t heard of before this trip) for a few longer trips between San Fran and Sonoma, and it was great service and a truly wonderful value. I tipped the Sidecar drivers heavily.
Sure, a 12k charge is pretty alarming.
But her correspondence with Uber shows the mistake was just in the letter - they didn’t have a 12k charge in their system, they were very sorry for the mistake, and were trying to sort it out.
They probably should’ve called to reassure her. She probably needn’t have taken a non-issue to the media, and the media shouldn’t have hand-wringingly dramaticised it.
Ain’t the unregulated free-market grand!
The lesson here is to not trust Uber until they get a goddamn umlaut over that U.
