How #DeleteUber worked in Lyft's favor
Call it a tale of two ride-sharing services.
In the days following the announcement of President Donald Trump's immigration ban, rival companies Uber and Lyft responded in starkly different ways.
Lyft pledged $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union. Uber, meanwhile, whose chief executive was on President Trump's economic advisory council, was seen as attempting to subvert a taxi drivers' strike in protest of the ban. The hashtag #DeleteUber went viral on social media as a result, and an estimated 200,000 people removed the company's app from their phones.
Now new data show that the companies' responses led to opposing reactions: Lyft saw a 30 percent increase in riders in the days following its $1 million pledge. Uber, meanwhile, had a 10 percent dip in riders around the same time, according to 1010 data, a data-management company in New York that analyzed consumer spending data to come up with the figures.
"People reacted to the news, and we saw an almost immediate increase in Lyft usage," said Natalie Seidman, senior vice president of data insights at 1010 data. "This isn't something we'd ever really seen before."
And consumers on both sides of the aisle say they're trying to make their political views known, too, by deliberately supporting some companies and shunning others.
"We're in such a hyper-polarized environment - I've never seen the country this polarized, ever," Paula Rosenblum, managing partner of Retail Systems Research in Miami, told The Washington Post last month.