Joint venture: Uber Eats to offer weed orders in Ontario Uber Technologies' munchies delivery service, Uber Eats, has set its sights on another growth industry in the Canadian province of Ontario, Reuters reports. Yeah, it's weed. Canada legalised cannabis in 2018, and since then the market has taken off to be worth CAD$5bn (£2.9bn, $3.9bn) a year – helped along by the pandemic …
If the driver is truely independant & thus able to set their own rates, then how many of them would do the job for what amounts to below minimum wage? How could they cover wear & tear on their vehicles, petrol to keep filling the rides, and the insurance premiums that go through the roof once your provider finds out that you've decided to do a stint as a commercial driver in your normally private vehicle?
The answer is obvious: they are not independant, they have no ability to set their own rates, and Uber is so full of shit that it makes a used car salesman seem posatively saintly in comparison.
Modus operandi is - find a loophole in regulation, pump money into the business so it will grow large - then when it becomes too big to fail, the regulators will have difficult time taking it down - "people will lose jobs!" and so on.
Then lobby for regulatory capture so that the competition will be too expensive / difficult to form.
Keep exploiting people who cannot start their own business even if they wanted to - because there is too much regulation, taxes are too high for small business and so on.
The solution would be to ruthlessly close those operations and rebalance the tax system so that small businesses don't pay more tax than big corporations.
But missing piece of the puzzle are services that actually investigate and prosecute corruption. Otherwise politicians can just keep accepting money into their structures and pretend they are trying to solve the problem until they retire into the sunset.
the insurance premiums that go through the roof once your provider finds out that you've decided to do a stint as a commercial driver in your normally private vehicle
I'm no fan of Uber or motor insurance providers but if you're waiting until your insurance provider 'finds out' that you've started taking private hires then whatever insurance you have will likely be invalid and any claim you make may be refused and you may well find it difficult to get any insurance in future.
It may not be legal to deliver weed via Uber, but it sure doesn't stop their drivers trying.
Working in recreational dispensary (a fine post IT, pre-retirement profession BTW), I've already had to explain to three of their drivers, that if I give them weed to take to a customer, it is NOT called trafficking because a car is involved.
You'd think Uber would let them know this prior to sending them out into the real world.
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