Deal ya no deal
If you’re reading this post, you sure as hell own a smartphone and have a bunch of apps installed on it as well. If you’re even remotely interested in the tech end of things or the economics, you know where the money is and how mergers and acquisitions are both exciting and intriguing from a consumer’s point of view. There are those that affect us and those that don’t. As with every blog post, I’ve attempted to give my extremely random thoughts some sort of form with this.
Each product or service (people too, btw) offered to us can be categorized into three major categories: There’s the candy - which tastes and looks good but is probably hurting your health (several interpretations possible) a little while making happy. Then there are the vitamins which enhance your health but aren’t absolutely necessary. You can live without these but life does seem better with them. Then there’s the best category. The painkillers. These solve a problem for us and most of us cannot live without them. These are essential especially in certain contexts.
The deals and megers that make us happy would be the ones that enhance our experience or provide more ROI or value for money. Naturally, the topmost category there would be a deal between a painkiller and a vitamin. Sweetening of essential commodities/services ain’t too bad either. What hurts us the most however is when two painkiller manufacturers decide to join hands before there are many more in the market, thereby reducing our choices and infringing upon the leverage we had as paying customers.
The proposed Ola-TaxiForSure merger is one such deal. This not only reduces my secondary choice, but also dilutes the quality of service. I live in what can arguably be called a suburb of Bangalore south and it is usually hard to find an Uber around here. So, my natural second choice has always been to hail an Ola cab. Ola has insane deals (God bless VCs) and relatively decent cabs and cabbies. Taxi4sure is worse than Ola but better than hailing an auto. Their cabs are shoddy and drivers are often shabby. Clearly, this deal takes away the two things that made me an Ola customer. They now have a worse fleet of cars and they lesser money to spend on customers and drivers.
I doubt we’ll see 50% cashback schemes and I’m sure drivers will never again get incentives as high as 5,000 INR for 10 trips. Why? Because for one thing Ola now has a huge crater in their account thanks to the acquisition and more importantly, because they don’t need to. The drivers now have a choice between signing up with Uber who aren’t exactly having a great time here (they have stricter rules now too), staying back with their old travel agencies which have almost no business or signing up/sticking to the new Ola-T4S entity which guarantees them customers. The need for a high financial incentive to make them stay has now disappeared because the drivers need Ola more than the other way around which was the case until recently.
I do hope more players emerge in this space and that customers end up being kings once more. I love discussing the painkiller, vitamin and candy theory and applying to every facet of life, so if you follow me on Twitter or know me personally, feel free to discuss examples and your thoughts on the topic. If this post gave you a headache I’ll gladly share a paracetamol or a Diclofenac Sodium. Cheers!