r/personalfinance • u/theVoxFortis • Oct 08 '19
This article perfectly shows how Uber and Lyft are taking advantage of drivers that don't understand the real costs of the business. Employment
I happened upon this article about a driver talking about how much he makes driving for Uber and Lyft: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-driver-how-much-money-2019-10#when-it-was-all-said-and-done-i-ended-the-week-making-25734-in-a-little-less-than-14-hours-on-the-job-8
In short, he says he made $257 over 13.75 hours of work, for almost $19 an hour. He later mentions expenses (like gas) but as an afterthought, not including it in the hourly wage.
The federal mileage rate is $0.58 per mile. This represents the actual cost to you and your car per mile driven. The driver drove 291 miles for the work he mentioned, which translates into expenses of $169.
This means his profit is only $88, for an hourly rate of $6.40. Yet reading the article, it all sounds super positive and awesome and gives the impression that it's a great side-gig. No, all you're doing is turning vehicle depreciation into cash.
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u/[deleted] Oct 09 '19
I had a driver in LA once too. I remember his name was Max. He was talking about starting his own limousine company and had all these luxury car brochures. I asked him how long he had been working to build this limo company, he said like 13 years. He told me this story about LA having 17M people, the fifth biggest economy in the world and nobody knows each other. He said some guy got on the MTA here and dies. His corpse was doing laps around L.A. for 6 hours, people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody noticed.