Myself and a group of friends called a different cab company (""Cab A""), to take us from a house in Portland to the Old Port, because we had a discount with them. There wasn't enough room for all of us, so the driver said he'd return to pick us up. Before he could, an Elite Taxi cab swooped in ""coincidentally"" and pulled up right in front of the house. I say ""coincidentally"" because there was no reason for him to be in such a residential neighborhood on the edge of town, and in hindsight it seems very likely that Elite monitors other companies radios so that they can steal their business.
We initially didn't realize that it wasn't the cab that we had called, but this quickly became clear to us. He asked us where we were headed and we told him to just drop us off where he had just dropped our friends off. He said that he had done no such thing, at which point we asked if this was ""Cab A"". He immediately became offensive, rude, insulting, and hostile towards us and towards ""Cab A"", ranting about how ""this wasn't no f*cking Somalian company."" We explained to him that we had a discount with that company, which is why we called them. We asked him if he would honor the same discount, and if not, to please let us out. He continued to use offensive and extremely unprofessional language, and very rudely denied our request, and once again began ranting about the other company, and asked us why the hell we wanted to ride with them anyways. We were in disbelief at how racist, xenophobic, ignorant, and unprofessional he was (to put it kindly), and immediately asked him to let us out. Instead of doing so, he continued harassing us and bad mouthing the other cab company.
Instead of letting us out where we were, as we had asked multiple times, he finally turned around and took us back to where he had picked us up, running up the fare, and running his mouth the whole way. He told us we still had to pay up (a $3 fare) even though we explained our mistake from the get-go, and even though he refused to let us out when we had asked. When I told him I wasn't going to, he proceeded to call the police. Feeling threatened by him and disgusted by the whole situation, we got out of the car and started walking away from him, only to have him follow us. We eventually got away from him, and finally got into the right cab.
We summed up what had happened to our new driver. He couldn't believe what we had told him, and said that Elite Taxi pulls those kinds of bush league, illegal moves all the time. When we got to our destination and paid our driver, guess who shows up? The %#&%# from Elite. We tried to ignore him and just walk past him, as he proceeded to THREATEN me physically, and started getting out of his car.
We continued ignoring him as we waited to get into a bar, but were confronted by the police. We quickly started explaining to them what had happened, and offered to walk to an ATM to get the $3, just so we could be done with this ridiculous situation, and because we had used our cash paying for our legitimate cab. Most of the officers (for some reason they needed about 8 for the two of us) were not much more professional than the cab driver, and refused to listen to our side of the story or let us get the money. We continued trying to explain what had really happened, as civil and mature adults, but each time they interrupted us, telling us that we should have paid our cab, and to ""shut up, we were just drunk"". We had each had two drinks by this point....We ended up being ARRESTED and taken to jail, all because we refused to be bullied and taken advantage of by this guy. The DA decided not to move on with the case. (I guess it seemed like a waste of time to pursue a case over a $3 cab fare because there are actually REAL criminals in Portland, a fact which the officers seemed to be oblivious to.)
I would strongly advise against doing business with ""Elite"" Taxi. Elitist Taxi would be a more accurate description.
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