Uber wants customers to bulk buy rides, restaurants to batch cook value meals
The company is already making more trips and deliveries than ever.
Whether you’re a delivery fiend with a penchant for a popular dish from a local spot, or you’re someone who makes the same monotonous cab ride multiple times a month, Uber wants to make your routine a little cheaper.
Yesterday, the company announced a raft of changes across its services, with The Verge presenting one new feature — where riders can bulk buy 5, 10, 15, or 20 passes for the same route at a discounted rate — as an attempt to “chip away at the perception that its ride-hailing service is too expensive.”
Similarly, “Meal Deals,” a new Uber Eats offering, is also designed to save users a bit of cash, with a range of popular dishes prepped in batches at local restaurants priced at $15 or less, including fees.
With a renewed focus on its power customers, Uber’s latest initiatives might help the company book a few extra trips. However, its riders and drivers are already busier than ever, with the number of deliveries and taxi rides booked through Uber hitting record highs as it is.
In 2018, Uber was clocking just over 1.1 billion “trips” (a composite measure of the number of rides and food delivery orders completed on the platform) in the first three months of its fiscal year. In the last quarter, it notched almost 3x more than that, as users hopped into cabs and ordered private burrito taxis a staggering 3.27 billion times on the platform across Q2.
