The Two-Minute Lie

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Uber tells you a driver is two minutes away. You click Accept. Then it tells you it’s looking for a driver.

Wait. Didn’t it just have one?

Background

There’s a term for what happens next, and I picked it up from a YouTube short explaining it better than I can. Some people use the friendlier version, Crapification. The real word is Enshitification: a product or service starts out great, then gets worse on purpose, because the company has decided profit matters more than the people using it. The playbook is short:

  1. Build something great.
  2. Make it worse to make more money.
  3. Keep making it worse. Forever.

Uber is a textbook case. It showed up, undercut the taxi industry, and forced everyone else to either adapt or get out of the way. Once the competition thinned out, the small, quiet degradations started.

Here’s how a ride actually goes now. You open the app, enter your destination, and it tells you a driver is two minutes out. You accept. Your card gets charged. Then — and only then — it tells you it’s “looking for a driver.” The one that was supposedly two minutes away has evaporated.

So you wait. Two minutes becomes five. Five becomes ten. You reach for the cancel button, and right on cue, Uber promises a driver is coming any minute now — so you give it one more shot, because that’s the whole business model: bank on you not wanting to start over. Then, once it senses you’re actually about to cancel, a driver materializes. ETA: 14 minutes. Your two-minute promise is now a twenty-minute wait, and you’ve already been charged.

And the next time you need a ride, you open the app and play the same game again.

Bottom Line

That’s Enshitification in one app: a great product, degraded on purpose, kept just tolerable enough that you never quite leave. The two-minute estimate isn’t a mistake — it’s the hook that gets you to accept before the real wait shows up.

I experience this constantly, and I’m in deep enough that I pay for the privilege. I’m an Uber One member. $96 a year, so I can be enshitified with priority support.

James

James Nunn keeps himself busy running his business, volunteering when possible, hosting exchange students, sticking his nose into social issues but is generally considered a good guy. He loves to keep track of things using technology. He has a waning social media presence and is an occasional blogger capturing life's little (and big) moments. He was born in Australia, but now lives in New Orleans, Louisiana (USA) with his husband and two dogs.