The @Uber-@Postmates merger will ONLY benefit monopolistic pandemic profiteers focused on growing their power at the expense of restaurants, workers, and consumers.

2/ Both @Uber & @Postmates’ business models are built on trapping restaurants & workers in a predatory payday loan cycle of dependence and destitution.

And both @Uber & @Postmates use the “Break it till you Make It” approach to the law.
3/ @Uber was a vanguard in the business of providing illegal taxi service and misclassifying workers as “contractors.”

@Postmates pioneered the predatory practice of stealing menus and offering unauthorized delivery service from restaurants without their knowledge.
4/ Now, unauthorized deliveries are one of the apps’ favorite bait-and-switch tactics for convincing restaurants to pay 30-60% commissions.

When COVID-19 shut down dining rooms & dozens of cities capped fees to help restaurants, both @Uber & @Postmates lobbied hard to stop them.
5/ @Postmates, in particular, was not subtle about breaking the laws.
https://t.co/IU8QQIiAVC
6/ Merging these two repeat offenders will only hurt struggling independent restaurants, more than 100k of which have closed permanently or long-term due to COVID-19.
7/ Meanwhile, @Postmates & @Uber are burning $$$, backed by deep-pocketed investors who are betting they can monopolize the market, cut wages & hike their already-enormous fees.
8/ In the Q1-Q3 of 2020, @Uber lost $5.7 billion.

And @Postmates lost $105 million in Q1 & Q2 of 2020.

Obviously, their business models have been successful…🙃
9/ It’s time to recognize these eternally cash burning companies for what they really are: Silicon Valley slush funds to promote the abolition of labor rights & normalize the disruption of small biz out of existence.
10/ President-elect Biden’s new antitrust chief should investigate whether the @Uber-@Postmates deal is corrupt and undo this illegal merger.
11/11 In the meantime, there are ways to ensure restaurants & communities can connect through new tech while preventing predatory practices by middlemen.

As @moetkacik explains in “Rescuing Restaurants,” now more than ever, we must #ProtectOurRestaurants👇https://t.co/AjDGkiJqEE

More from Tech

So we had to develop technologies like this to barely manage control over limited areas in Iraq's few urban centers. Only ~8 in 100 Iraqi adults owns a personal vehicle. That rate is > 1 car/adult in America yet I have never seen any doctrine paper or work of fiction address this


We've seen and struggled in civil conflicts with instant, local, universal, distributed communications (cell phone era, basically every conflict since 2000). We've seen and struggled in conflicts with instant, global, universal distributed communications (everything since 2011).

The world's most overfunded military and glow in the dark agencies struggle and largely fail to contain conflicts where fhe vast, vast majority of people are locked into a ~5mi radius of their home.

How can they possibly contain a conflict in a nation with universal car ownership and the most developed road network in the world? The average car can travel over 400 miles on one tank of gas, how can you contain the potential of that kind of mobility?

I think that's partially why the system was so freaked out by 1/6. Yes, most of it is histrionics but you don't decide to indefinitely turn your capital into the Baghdad Green Zone with fortifications and 25k troops over histrionics alone.

You May Also Like