Taxicab confessions at CES
Last week when Mark Heinrich and I were at CES, we chatted up a lot of cab drivers about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The consensus is that the CES is way down this year in terms of people. One cab driver speculated that while most of the companies came to the show and honored their commitment, they took half as many staff. That was true for Phanfare. We had 4 people 2 yrs ago and 2 people there this time.
Cab drivers universally complained that they sometimes waited almost an hour at a hotel to get a fare (you can’t take a street hail in Vegas, unlike NY). Some drivers said they were doing fewer than 14 rides per day on a 12 hour shift, but some claimed as many as 24 rides. They claimed they took home about $5 per ride.
As usual, cab drivers pressured us to go to night clubs (aka strip clubs). We passed but we did interrogate them a bit on the economics of that pressure. Apparently cabs receive a $50 skin for each person they deliver at a club. There is a whole system of tracking which cab dropped the person off, whether they paid the cover, etc. The “affiliate” bonus for bringing a client to a brothel (legal outside of Las Vegas in Nevada) was reported by one of our drivers to be $180. That sort of explained why the drivers were willing to work for so little.
One cab driver told us he wanted to create a publication called CESPool.
But by far the most disturbing thing a cab driver told us was that he routinely takes passengers on the highway versus local roads from the airport to the strip if he believes they are not familiar with the town, almost doubling the fare. He asks a series of questions, the first often being “first time to vegas?”
For foreign tourists, especially people from Tokyo, he often loops twice around the town. He claims they never complain, but universally never tip.
In NYC, they have addressed the problem of cab drivers ripping off tourists by dispatching cabs from the airport on a fixed fare basis. You tell the taxi stand operator where you are going, and he hands you a paper with the fare to your destination. You hand that to the driver and that is what you are supposed to pay. It is sad that we need that in the world. Most taxi drivers are probably honest, but it only takes a few to give a place a bad reputation.
