Five stars or bust

There is only one acceptable rating to leave your Uber driver

The other day I looked up my personal Uber rating after reading a Wall Street Journal story on the ubiquity of five stars. I don’t take Uber much, but when I do I always leave five stars and consider myself a generally respectful rider. So you can imagine my alarm when I opened the app and clicked on “my account” to see a 4.75 in the upper lefthand corner. Yikes. In a five-star world, I had just read in the Journal, my 4.75 was the sort of score reserved for madmen and serial killers:

Driver Roxie Benesch, a 60-year-old who has worked in Austin, San Antonio and Nashville, has a refrigerator with energy drinks, flavored electrolytes and bottled water. She also has a karaoke mic.

She wears green on St. Patrick’s Day, hands out candies on Valentine’s Day and adorns her Tesla Model 3 rental in rainbow colors during June’s Pride Month. She has paper bags handy in case people have to throw up after a night out and offers to hold their hair back if they need assistance.

“I haven’t done anything to deserve less than a 5,” said Benesch, whose current rating is indeed a top-notch 5. Sometimes, she gets worried about picking up passengers rated less than 4.8. 

“Like a 4.79 is really low. I wonder, ‘Do I have to fear for my life with this person?’”

I made this graphic to help you understand Uber’s ratings system.

Uber lets riders and drivers rate each other at the end of a trip from one to five stars, but what looks like a scale is really a binary. Five stars is good. Everything else is bad. For riders, a couple bad ratings don’t mean that much, but for drivers they could be the difference between maintaining access to the app and being deactivated—gig-speak for suspended or fired. A lot of riders understand this and leave five-star ratings by default. The Journal, however, and the Uber riders it interviewed, worry that five stars has lost all meaning, and Americans are being guilted into leaving perfect ratings for people who are only doing their job:

“Everyone is a 5, everyone needs a 20% tip or more for doing the bare minimum,” says Alex Romanovsky, a 39-year-old San Franciscan and self-proclaimed “superstar” passenger who compares giving a driver top marks as the default to handing out participation trophies in kids’ sports. Health tech investor and fellow San Franciscan Viral Gandhi complains that ride-hail firms have created “all this headache” for leaving less than five stars, and says he’s left perfect ratings even after trips in dirty cars just to avoid the hassle. Five stars! People are handing them out like candy! Like A’s at Harvard! When everyone is super, no one is!

How can I put this nicely: gtfo. There is only one acceptable rating to leave your Uber driver or other gig platform worker, and it is five stars. Great ride? Five stars. Silent, awkward trip? Five stars. Didn’t like the music? Five stars. Car smelled like KFC? Five stars. Uber Eats order came late? Five stars. A ketchup packet burst in the bag? Five stars. Gig cleaner missed some spots in the bathroom? Five stars. You didn’t like their attitude? They seemed unfriendly, reserved, disinterested? Five stars. Don’t be an Alex Romanovsky or a Viral Gandhi. The world has enough petty dictators already. Unless you fear for your safety or find a dead body in your Uber, it’s five stars or bust.

As a customer, you could be forgiven for not knowing this. The companies don’t exactly advertise it, and the very design of their ratings system suggests a range from “bad” to “average” to “great,” when in reality it would be more accurate as a thumb’s up or thumb’s down. But now you know, and here is what I want you to see the next time you’re asked to rate an Uber driver or similar gig worker:

• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: This person deserves to have access to this platform and the ability to earn a living through it

• ⭐️, ⭐️⭐️, ⭐️⭐️⭐️, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: This person is a danger to me, themself, and others and should be removed from the service

In the beginning, ratings on gig platforms weren’t so problematic. Reviews and ratings were supposed to help solve the “trust” problem—that is, help you feel ok booking a room in someone’s home or getting a ride from a stranger before Uber and Airbnb were global household names. Platforms threw other solutions at the trust problem, like background checks and real-time location tracking, but reviews were a big part of the pitch. The online platform economy was built on trust and credibility, companies argued, as evidenced by the peer-to-peer ratings that people on both sides of the platform accrued.

What gig companies didn’t say was that these peer ratings were also part of their solution to how to manage workers at arm’s length. Most gig workers are classified as independent contractors, as frequent readers of this newsletter know, and they can only receive so much instruction about how to do their work. Platforms that make too many demands of their workers run the risk of having the relationship reclassified as employment, which would make them liable for a minimum wage and other employer benefits.

How to provide a high quality service without exercising direct control over workers is a classic challenge of the gig economy. Company toolkits include worker incentives, safety standards, regulations, and customer ratings. Uber, for instance, can’t force drivers to keep their car clean and tidy, help riders with their luggage, and make “polite, easy-going, and respectful” conversation during a trip. It can’t tell Roxie Benesch to stock her car with energy drinks, wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, or hold back the hair of vomiting passengers, though I’m sure it would like to.

What Uber can do is write a guide to a five-star trip. And all drivers want five stars, because the system is designed so that lesser ratings carry consequences. The same is true for workers on food-delivery apps DoorDash and Deliveroo. Bad ratings are used to punish workers in a variety of ways, from deactivation to lowering the number of jobs they receive, while offering the companies plausible deniability. The workers are small businesspeople doing independent jobs, and their customers provide the ratings. All the companies do is design the marketplace that connects the two sides.

Of course, designing the marketplace is very important. In a 2020 paper, researchers identified the problem of “reputation inflation” in online marketplaces. They defined it as the phenomenon of “raters feeling pressure to leave ‘above average’ ratings” because of their “desire to not harm the rated seller.” Over time, the researchers argued, this reputation inflation made ratings less informative and eroded the value of the system. The paper suggests this form of inflation is most prevalent in peer-to-peer online labor platforms, like gig work, where the cost of negative feedback is high and workers are “highly substitutable.”

In other words, a ratings system like Uber’s is prone to reputation inflation and becoming less informative. So why not change it? Maybe because the point isn’t really to inform platform users, it’s to indirectly control the workforce. It’s hard to think of another reason that it even makes sense to set up a five-star system and then require participants in it to maintain an absurdly high rating like 4.8. And how better to indirectly control workers than by setting the standards of a five-star job, and then requiring your workers to earn almost exclusively five-star ratings? Why also is it that apps like Uber always ask you to rate the worker but never the platform, as though the company itself is somehow uninvolved in the quality of the service?

Gig companies are using you to evaluate and manage their workers so that they don’t have to. They ask you to participate in ratings systems without fully understanding their meaning or importance, and then use those ratings to control their workers. If you’re a consumer of gig services, I hope it offends you that the rating you are casually asked to give after an app-based transaction is put to the un-casual use of managing workers at arm’s length, so firms don’t risk being deemed employers. I hope you are outraged at being used as a quiet gatekeeper of whether gig workers have a high enough score to continue “being their own boss” and “setting their own schedule” and all those other favorite gigisms. I hope you’ll join me in the only acceptable form of protest: five stars, always. Five stars forever. Five stars or bust.