If you live in London (welcome to the land of overpriced sandwichesand dating apps for your dog) you're probably familiar with the Uber surge pricing.
The taxi app has an uncanny knack of hiking its prices at the most inconvenient times. For example, when it's 1.03am and you're weighing up the pros and cons of risking waiting for the bus with the dodgy man standing on the opposite side of the road or paying £32 for a 20-minute trip (thanks 1.3x).
This morning, when the Northern line shut down this morning due to signal failure, leaving hoards of commuters struggling to make it to work (and as one of them, I can confirm it was a nightmare of biblical proportions), Uber outdid themselves by trying to charge £87 for a £2.80 journey.
Yes! Eighty-seven British pounds.
The story broke on the Metro, after one reporter shared a screenshot of her estimated trip fee from the app. So if you want to see what it looks like with your own eyes – and experience a bit of bank account PTSD – then please be my guest.
For £87 in 2019 you can buy a Ryanair return flight to Tuscany, an online supermarket order for the week or a meal at the Shard (just watch the wine list), all of which I think you can agree are a more preferable way to spend £87 than crawling through rush hour traffic while making awkward small talk with your driver.
Unsurprisingly, everyone else in London agrees – another traveller tweeted that his estimated fare on the app between Balham and Stockwell (a trip that takes all of ten minutes on the tube) was £41 this morning.
With rental prices soaring, salaries remaining static and the UK's politics in a state of Shakespearean-proportion tragedy, the last thing we need is for Uber to be having a joke at our (very literal) expense. Kick a woman while she's down, why don't you.