Ride sharing is a very new and unexplored industry that has exploded over the last few years.  The face of this has largely been Uber, a company founded in 2009 for lowering the cost of black car services, and now being a ride sharing company that at one point controlled 84 percent of the ride hailing market.  However, that number is in decline.

A very, very long string of scandals  have been troubling Uber for the last few years, which all recently came to a head when the co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick was pressured to resign.  Many point to the scandals surrounding Kalanick as the reason for yet another year of losses in 2016, estimated at around 3 billion dollars.  The removal of Kalanick’s polarizing character should theoretically stop the workplace environment problems and practices of spying on competitors like Lyft to get a competitive advantage.  Theoetically with those problems gone, they should be able to turn around the business and start making money.  However, this may not be the solution.

Although most major ride sharing companies are reporting huge growth, they are also all reporting losses.  Lyft, Uber’s main competitor in many parts of the world, have reported 600 million in losses  in 2016 alone, and Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride sharing company that even partnered with Uber in China to try to minimize costs, lost 571 million in the first five months of 2015, although they were in a growth stage.

Ride sharing is very obviously very popular and is growing at an increasing rate.  Despite the popularity, ride share companies are struggling to find profits.  I think that the ride sharing industry is at a crossroad, where they have to evolve and change in a major way to become a viable business that can actually make money.  Uber has been at the front of the ride sharing explosion so far, but it will be interesting to see who can change the game and become the new face of the industry.

The events in Houston recently have made me question capitalism and the free market, specifically the operations in the free market that make America, and Canada, the place that it is.  These free market operations have given our countries growth and prosperity, but also have a flip side as shown by some stores hiking up prices for water and other necessities when people needed them the most, after hurricane Harvey devastated them.  This made me wonder about the validity of “ethical business” while maintaining the intrinsic self interest of the free market.  It seems that increasingly, businesses always go for the more profitable option, and only doing the “right” thing when public outrage or the risk of their choices outweigh their profits.  I feel similarly to Milton Friedman in thinking that there is no such thing as ethical business, as there is no ethical responsibility in business, and therefore only choices made to maximize profits that sometimes align with good morals.  There are also people with different opinions such as R. Edward Freeman, stating stakeholders in a business including workers, employees, and the community, control the actions of business.  However, we can see the suffering community in Houston who hold “stakes” in the businesses of Houston, but are not being taken into consideration and are being price gouged.  The stories of struggling families are hard to hear, but in the context of this class and business ethics, they provide interesting questions of business ethics.  Is it ethical for people to price gouge? Can a free market exist without it?  But more importantly, does ethical business even exist?