Banning Uber in the Hamptons is going to be an absolute disaster
The ban is effective immediately.
So is my outrage.
Let me take you back to 2001.
That year, the year the Queen of New York City publicists, Lizzie Grubman - representative of everyone from Brittany Spears to Jay-Z - lost her crown.
After leaving then-nightlife hotspot Conscience Point Inn, Grubman got in a fight with the bouncers over a parking space. The shouting match ended with Grubman getting into her car, backing into a group of people, injuring 16 of them, and then driving away.
One year later she plead guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges surrounding the incident. She insisted she was not drunk.
Imagine if she was. A lot of people in the Hamptons are.
It's a party, after all.
Since the early 1990s the small villages on the eastern point of Long Island, known as The Hamptons, have become a summer play-place for New York City's privileged. During that time, though, the area never quite got the hang of a very New York City thing - the taxi cab.
This is why getting rid of Uber's service in the hamlets is a huge mistake.
As recent as 2012 any Hamptons-goer would tell you that the best thing for you to do, if you wanted to imbibe over the summer, would be to hire a driver. The taxi companies in the Hamptons were (and still are) generally local businesses that charge "cityits" (that's idiots from the city) what any New Yorker would perceive as exorbitant prices to travel the short distances between Amagansett and Water Mill, East Hampton and Bridgehampton.
You get the picture.
Enter Uber. The company streamlined the cab-calling process and stadardized quality.
And now that's over everywhere east of Southampton (which is untouched by the ban, but also mostly occupied by people's grandparents).
