We tried!

We are sad to announce the official end of UVER. Although many of us are still passionate about the important cause (keeping local money local, for starters!), as things stand we are not be able to continue. Although I am sad that it didn’t succeed, I’m glad we tried it, and glad that in some way it brought us all together.

UVER’s demise was caused by a few factors. First, in order to reach breakeven we needed about 1000 members and about 30 restaurants to cover the cost of insurance and staff. We only got to about half of that number of restaurants and less than half the number of members. In our planning we overestimated how much the college would use the service, how many restaurants would join, and how many deliveries we would do per day. As a result, the service never broke even, required more and more investment to stay alive and the path to cover our costs became too far to reach. After contributing tens of thousands of dollars and several hundred hours of volunteer time, the founders and board members simply cannot justify keeping it alive as a legitimate standalone business.