By In the same week that Boris Johnson accuses Uber of systematically breaking the law, the company has in San Francisco and Chicago, expanded its courier service – Uber Rush.
The service has been active in New York for around a year, and the additional cities indicate that it has had a successful run.
Working on the usual Uber basis, the company plans to expand beyond “people moving”, as it plans to take on logistic giants FedEx and UPS.
Uber isn’t the only app service looking to cash in on super quick deliveries however, as Amazon begins to up its rapid-deliveries service, and other start-ups, including Postmates and Deliv, gear up for a long, hard battle.
What makes Uber Rush so different?
The real test will be to become the standard form of delivery for small businesses across large cities; it doesn’t hold water for state or country-wide deliveries.
What’s interesting however, is that if a restaurant, takeaway or any other service becomes suddenly swamped, it can sign up to the merchant platform and summon a courier to deliver orders to customers.
In the same vein, if an independent boutique or bookshop wants to offer one-day deliveries on recently released items, this may soon be the standard way to do it.
Unlike Postmates, the Uber Rush app is not designed to place an order however, as it exists only to be the delivery man – so customers must make an order and inform the merchant themselves.
Do the numbers add up?
Unsurprisingly, Uber Rush works on a model that mirrors the original service. Each delivery will cost the merchant or customer between $5 and $7 and the company will pay the courier between 75 and 80 per cent of that fee.
The couriers themselves are to deliver on bicycles and on foot in New York City, in cars in Chicago, and a mix of all three in San Francisco. Couriers are trained before they take on deliveries, but will only carry out one delivery at a time. They can however provide multiple packages at once, meaning that a courier can collect multiple payouts at once if carrying more than one load.
Is Uber Rush coming to the UK?
It isn’t a shock to find that Uber Rush has started out in some of the largest cities in the United States – New York City is 789km2.
With this in mind, it might be difficult to see this service heading anywhere outside of London, as even the largest UK cities pale in comparison to San Francisco and New York City. Birmingham, the second largest city in the UK, is a mere 267.8km2, and Manchester, the largest city in the north, is a paltry 115.6km2.
But who says that a smaller, independent app-based delivery service can’t thrive?
There probably already is one. We just haven’t heard of it yet.