USA TODAY International Edition
FOR SOME UBER RIDERS, SEXISM CLAIMS WERE LAST STRAW
‘ I am going to vote with my money,’ says one user who joined movement to # DeleteUber
Uber is famous for its confrontational business approach. But this time it’s riders who are getting in Uber’s face.
First some of them deleted their accounts when the ridehailing company did not honor a one- hour work stoppage called by New York cabbies at John F. Kennedy International Airport to protest President Trump’s controversial immigration order.
Then Uber caught flak when its chief executive Travis Kalanick refused to step down from Trump’s economic advisory council. ( He eventually did).
Now charges of sexual harassment and gender discrimination from a former engineer, Susan Fowler, have persuaded more riders to ditch the ride- hailing app.
Alyson DeNardo says she used Uber and UberEats more than any other app on her phone. Then she read Fowler’s lengthy blog post alleging the company ignored her complaints of sexual harassment and mistreated female employees. She says it made her stomach turn.
“I was outraged as a customer using their product and significantly concerned for every woman who works at Uber,” said DeNardo, who is head of public relations and social media for Justin Kan Enterprises and startup incubator Zero- F in San Francisco. “I refuse to support a company that actively puts the performance of their company over the well- being of their employees.”
Now she’s riding Lyft and public transportation. And DeNardo says she’s not alone.
“I find it incredibly hard to find anyone that will vocally admit they still use Uber,” she said.
Despite taking heat for its corporate culture and business practice, Uber remains the most popular ride- hailing app. And it could still repair its image with consumers, who often don’t stick to pledges of a boycott. Downloads, which dropped after the late January # DeleteUber campaign, have already bounced back.
But spending is down, ratings are low and other riders say they, too, would delete the Uber app — if they hadn’t already deleted it.
Jamie Rondeau, a small- business owner and mother of four from a suburb outside Phoenix, says she had always appreciated Uber’s “disrupter” mind- set, building a successful enterprise by shaking up the status quo and creating new and better options for consumers.
But she quit Uber after the JFK airport incident. Fowler’s charges, she says, were “the point of no return.” Instead she hails cabs, rents cars and hops on public transportation. For an upcoming business trip to Atlanta, she plans to download Lyft.
“I have a lot of choices, and I am going to vote with my money,” Rondeau said.
Data from consumer spending analytics firm TXN Solutions shows Uber’s market share has slipped by about 5% since the # DeleteUber campaign began in late January and, these researchers say, it’s not rebounding.
The week before the # Delete Uber campaign, Uber had 83.5% of the ride- hailing market and Lyft had 16.5%, according to TXN, which crunches data on spending habits from a research panel of more than 3 million consumers.
Uber’s troubles resulted in market- share gains for Lyft, which had 20.9% of the market following # DeleteUber and got another bump to 21.3% after Fowler’s blog post.
The decline in Uber’s market share was consistent in all four of its top markets: New York City, Washington, D. C., Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, TXN found.
“Consumers have a short memory, and some percentage of these people will go back. But all of these negative stories have kept the numbers suppressed, and they have not rebounded to their historical average,” TXN CEO Jonathan Wolf said.
But will that last? Uber says it had not seen a major uptick in people deleting the app in the past 60 days, though it did not provide ridership numbers. Downloads over the past few weeks have been higher than average, according to research firm Mobile Action.
For some, it’s already too late. They say they’ve quit Uber for good.
“I can’t think of anything that Uber could do that would bring me back,” DeNardo said. “They could offer me free transportation for a year and I would adamantly refuse.”