13 ms·

Amazon delivery drivers complain about bad work conditions

162 points by nreece 9y ago

tyingq 9y ago
"skip lunch and urinate in plastic bottles, and some return to homes after their 9pm deadline" "the allocation and number of stops, and the volume to be distributed for any given day, lies entirely with Amazon." Argh. If true, hopefully someone can verify the claims and raise some visibility.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  "Use contractors, they said. It's so much easier and cheaper, they said..." I don't have any evidence as to the accuracy of this anecdote, but when I see those news stories about delivery drivers shitting on someone's lawn, this is right where my mind goes. 'That person probably had an insane deadline to meet and no protections ensuring that they get time for basic and universal human functions.'
- op00to 9y ago
  I rarely get my amazon same day deliveries before 9pm. This is great, because I either get free delivery and free extension of amazon prime.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > Argh. If true, hopefully someone can verify the claims and raise some visibility. For the piss-in-bottles, ask any random truck or delivery driver. It's more common than you'd like...
hitekker 9y ago
I'd change the verb in the title to "criticize" instead of "complain about".
- ebiester 9y ago
  How about "reveal"?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mabbo 9y ago
It's such a complex situation. Amazon has contracts with small companies who provide trucks and humans. Amazon provides the work, the groups of packages, the routes, the app the drivers need to use to deliver. The companies compete with each other for more 'routes' each day. They offer to take on more work, to do more. And then they hire anyone they can to fulfill those routes. The drivers themselves are on contracts with the small companies that can end at any time. Not making your rate? Up to the small company to decide if you have a contract tomorrow. The contracts themselves presume the drivers will deliver a route in a specific number of hours for a fixed rate of pay. But newbies work at a much slower rate. And during the holiday season, they need a lot of extra labor- a lot of newbies. Who is to blame? Amazon? The companies? The drivers? Capitalism gone mad? Take your pick.
- snarf21 9y ago
  I agree, this is part of the "gig" economy gone bad. I think the solution is quite simple though. All contracts must also include a minimum wage (not saying this is the US minimum wage currently) per hour. This sets a floor and forces more of the cost back up the chain. It fixes the problem of someone forcing minimally bid contracts to people who are desperate for any kind of work. We have great algorithms and the computing to calculate "fair" amounts of time for delivery including traffic data and time of day that can also be extremely optimized for efficiency. Then the contract is for X hours at Y wage plus (maybe?) a bonus per delivery. We complain about sweatshops making sneakers in abusive conditions but say cynical things like "... people don't have to take these jobs ..." when it comes to having parcels delivered right to our door so we don't even have to leave the house. I think it only fair we take a stand that these people deserve a decent living for delivering our (frequently frivolous) purchases.
  - Kadin 9y ago
    Minimum wage laws are already supposed to work like that. The problem is that companies, Amazon and their contractors in particular, have been able to mischaracterize employees as "contractors" in order to get around minimum wage laws. It's the lax enforcement of 1099 mischaracterization that has allowed the "gig economy" shit-sandwich jobs to proliferate. A deliver driver who has to maintain a delivery schedule or meet delivery deadlines given by Amazon (and in likelihood follows a programmed route given to them by an Amazon routing system) is in no real sense an INDEPENDENT contractor in the way that definition was originally meant. Contractors are exempt from minimum wage laws because otherwise there would be a catch-22 situation if, say, a plumber you hired mis-estimated the amount of work involved in a job. (If he gave you an estimate that a job would be $100, and it turned out to take 10 hours plus $50 in materials, he could very well end up making below minimum wage. But he can't go back and squeeze you for more money; he's the one who gave you the estimate! But it hardly makes sense to penalize him again for not paying himself enough.) But these exceptions envisioned bona fide independent contractors, mostly skilled tradespeople, and not today's largely-unskilled and entry-level "contract" jobs.
aviv 9y ago
They also deliver very late at night, past 11pm kind of late.
deanCommie 9y ago
On reddit, "spagheddie" wrote: I was once a FedEx delivery driver, so I don't know how it is for Amazon, but I would imagine it's similar? At FedEx we got paid per package delivered, which means the faster you deliver your packages, the more you are technically getting paid per hour. In addition to this, you'd get a daily bonus for delivering the packages fast. We could take our lunches whenever, nobody cared as long as the packages got delivered. However, very few people ever stopped to eat their lunch. Most people would eat and drive. If there was a bathroom on your route, that's cool, but otherwise you are peeing in a bottle because you aren't trying to waste time searching for a bathroom when you could potentially deliver 4 or 5 packages in that time. All of this holds especially true at this time of the year, when guys are getting ran 6 days a week, with 200+ packages per day, and with the sun going down an hour earlier (night time delivering slows you way the fuck down). Well what happens when you deliver so slow that you're making less than minimum wage? I don't know about Amazon, but at FedEx if you were so slow that you made less than minimum wage with your per package deliveries, you were simply paid minimum wage for that day's work. Anyways, there are a lot of shitty jobs to have during the Christmas season but, in my opinion, this is the worst one of them all. The pay isn't bad if you have your route down; but goddamn you can't even enjoy the damn holidays because you're always on "go" mode. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7iv6s9/amazon_drivers_are_asked_to_deliver_up_to_200/dr1on4x/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7iv6s9/amazon_dr...
- naner 9y ago
  I've noticed this sort of thing a lot in the job market: performance or pay are directly tied to metrics resulting in employees being incentivized into odd behaviors (breaking the law, sabotaging coworkers, skipping breaks/lunch, stagtegically cancelling or avoiding work, etc). This type of management through metrics goes hand in hand with the gig economy and also temp agency/contract work.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Not to mention Wells Fargo...
  - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
Manglano 9y ago
They're probably reaching road vehicle bandwidth saturation, which is affecting drivers and warehouse workers downstream of the web interface. Refactoring their supply model for depots and reallocating staff to the depots. Y'know, the Amazon General Store.
TsomArp 9y ago
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is worth 100 billion dollars... gotta love wild capitalism! (not a communist, before somebody gets offended)... wow, the downvotes without any reasoning or debate... go world go!
- musage 9y ago
  You might enjoy this, I know I agree with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfAAQUQ_54&t=42m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfAAQUQ_54&t=42m43s (turn the sound down some before clicking the link though, it features screaming about important things for the right reasons)
- sctb 9y ago
  This comment breaks the guidelines by being unsubstantive and then complaining about voting. Could you give them another read, please? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
anonathon0000 9y ago
I'm a supervisor at UPS, so maybe I can offer an opinion (this is a throwaway account). I'm not sure if there is anything analogous to the US Department Of Transportation in England, but we have to abide by pretty strict rules here in the USA regarding driving hours. A UPS driver cannot work over 14 hours on a shift, must have 10 hours between shifts, and cannot exceed 60 hours in a week without (IIRC) 38 consecutive hours before the next shift. That being said, we HIGHLY AVOID working drivers over 12 hours per shift, and try to take on a lot of extra help during the holiday peak season so that the work is distributed evenly. From what I can tell from the article, these are probably inexperienced drivers who may be on their own in regards to organizing their delivery route, sorting packages on their vehicle, and learning their route. Because UPS has a centralized management system (as apposed to FedEx, for instance, which is contract based), we monitor every driver and can send other drivers to assist anyone who begins to struggle. Its not unheard-of for UPS drivers to pee in bottles (and less often, poop in big plastic bags that are kept handy in the package cars). Its definitely not encouraged, but it happens, especially when you're on a rural route. UPS drivers have it pretty good because of the collective bargaining that's available through the union. We're definitely going to have some rough days ahead of us for the next few weeks, but peak season is a big deal that we prepare for months in advance.
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  Thank you for your candid response. Would you be able to answer how many packages the average driver delivers on a route and what happens if a package is stolen i.e who is liable? Curious to see how often package theft occurs. Thanks again!
  - acomjean 9y ago
    UPS I believe is self-insured (this if from many years ago a friend tried to get me to be a "seasonal helper" and I went to the orientation.) Meaning it comes out of the companies profits. Basically UPS hires a lot of extra people to ride along with the drivers and deliver pacakges during the holiday season. The pay was decent for the work.
  - Declanomous 9y ago
wnevets 9y ago
dailymail.co.uk really shouldn't be on the front page of hn, its a tabloid.
- Theodores 9y ago
  Stop Funding Hate is a pressure group outing major brands and getting the to apologise for advertising in the Daily Mail, e.g. 'Paperchase', last week or so: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42058103 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42058103 So this is a valid point, HN needs to find better sources that the Daily Mail. In light of this, here you go: https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Amazon-Flex-Reviews-E1324363.htm https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Amazon-Flex-Reviews-E132...
  - gadders 9y ago
    Stop funding hate is a pressure group consisting of a few hundred far-left agitators. Censorship should be opposed in all forms. https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/stop-funding-hate-nasty-elitist-campaign-press-censorship/ https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/stop-funding-hate-nast...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- gadders 9y ago
  The Guardian will be a tabloid from early next year: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/13/guardian-and-observer-to-relaunch-in-tabloid-format https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/13/guardian-and-o...
  - gberger 9y ago
    Tabloid can refer to either a type of journalism, or newspaper format. Daily Mail is both, Guardian will only be the latter.
    - 9y ago
quantumofmalice 9y ago
There was a time when you could give a christmas bonus to the mail man. I wish that the delivery men were more consistent, I would love to be able to give them a cash gift for all the work they do for me and my family on a regular basis. Unfortunately it seems like during the holidays the usual delivery guy isn't around and it's a chaotic mix of people. While we are here, I hate that they are now making people deliver on Sundays. Every year I struggle more with the morality of the package economy.
- agrajag 9y ago
  I'd really prefer that people be paid an adequate wage where I don't feel like I have to tip. And why is Sunday delivery worse than Sunday work in a myriad of other industries, like retail or restaurants?
  - quantumofmalice 9y ago
    I'm not big on Sunday retail either. I prefer the older tradition where most stores were closed on Sunday so people could be with their families.
    - gumby 9y ago
      For an alternative perspective: Sunday shopping is a boon to people who work or have other conflicts the rest of the time (e.g. work M-F, kids' games on Saturday). Also for holidays: my mother really appreciated being able to work Thanksgiving, Xmas, July 4th etc because others really wanted that time to be with their families‡ -- those holidays meant nothing to us (immigrants) but meant that when she wanted someone to cover for her for some other day everybody owed her a favor (plus as a bonus people generally try not to go to the hospital those days -- she was an M.D.). ‡ (or perhaps it's simply that I was such a horrible kid that she was happy to be out of the house).
    - techsupporter 9y ago
      I’m thrilled that there are several places open on Sunday because I work a non-typical shift while keeping this whole Cloud Economy working. The standard 9-5, Monday-Friday work hours aren’t so “standard” in my corner of our industry.
nocoder 9y ago
In India, this gets worse. Lot of delivery guys use 2 wheelers and can often been seen carrying a huge bag full of packages on their bikes. Moreover many buildings don't have lifts so they end up carrying this load up 2 or 3 storeys. This is extremely back breaking work and add to that the pressure to deliver packages on time and navigating crazy Indian traffic on two wheelers with such heavy loads. On the other hand I am not sure what can be done.... People are just concerned about their convenience with no regards for rights of the delivery people. And given the level of unemployment it is unlikely that there will be protests from the drivers. While Indian e-commerce booms it will be on the backs of these guys.
- tomcam 9y ago
  Sobering, and almost physically painful to read. Probably the only realistic solution is the booming economy in India. Eventually, one hopes, there will be better accommodations for everyone, and the drivers will benefit along with everyone else. I assume unionization would not work due to the huge supply of alternate employees?
  - nocoder 9y ago
    Yeah... There are too many desperate and unemployed people for unionization to make an impact. You can just get rid of the union employees. Given the poor educational investments lot of people are simply not equipped to exploit the opportunities in booming economy. This basically results in larger inequality since for high paying jobs there is lot of competition due to talent crunch driving wages up. At the same time for menial jobs there is too much labor leading to downward pressure on wages. Combine the two and you have ballooning inequality. My fear is that India might end up there.
    - robryan 9y ago
      Bad for employees but when I have been there in the past I was impressed with how quickly things would be delivered from Amazon in Mumbai.
zeep 9y ago
pesos have to flow in the right direction...
asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago
I had an Amazon delivery driver pull up to my house at 10pm in his Camry. They clearly don't have their shit together.
zw123456 9y ago
I always wondered why not have all delivery done at night? There is a lot less traffic generally between 10PM and 6AM for example, it seems like they could do a lot more deliveries and it would put less load on the highways and be safer and less stressful for drivers. And not sitting in traffic jams means less fuel consumption. Is there some reason why that is not done?
- wunderg 9y ago
  Good luck finding any houses at night or being shot while trying to use flashlight
  - thisone 9y ago
    pretty much. A couple weeks ago there was a post to the facebook group for my village 'watch out there's a man with a white van shining a torch into people's houses' To be followed by comments saying 'that's just the Hermes delivery guy'
- dazc 9y ago
  I don't want to live in a neighbourhood where night time deliveries are the norm. You may also find that not many people want to work overnight for a basic wage either.
- dancryer 9y ago
  It would prove tricky to do home deliveries at night when everyone's asleep...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Declanomous 9y ago
  I'm working for UPS seasonally right now, and delivering packages after the sun goes down is about 3 times slower because it's so much harder to find people house numbers, and people's walkways and porches aren't well lit. Working night shift isn't particularly appealing either, and residential streets don't have much traffic. UPS has a union who would oppose these changes I'm sure.
twobyfour 9y ago
Yet another point in the "don't use Amazon" column. Yes, it can be slightly less convenient to have to shop around - but if you can afford it, it's worth it for the peace of mind. Besides, I no longer trust Amazon to send me the actual product listed. The small retailers have been far more reliable in that regard.
purplezooey 9y ago
This "hire contractors" story is getting very familiar, ie Uber. Maybe we haven't had much innovation outside of writing the software and making the distribution chain. We need more roads and transit too.

162 points by nreece 9y ago

"skip lunch and urinate in plastic bottles, and some return to homes after their 9pm deadline" "the allocation and number of stops, and the volume to be distributed for any given day, lies entirely with Amazon." Argh. If true, hopefully someone can verify the claims and raise some visibility.

leggomylibro 9y ago
"Use contractors, they said. It's so much easier and cheaper, they said..." I don't have any evidence as to the accuracy of this anecdote, but when I see those news stories about delivery drivers shitting on someone's lawn, this is right where my mind goes. 'That person probably had an insane deadline to meet and no protections ensuring that they get time for basic and universal human functions.'
op00to 9y ago
I rarely get my amazon same day deliveries before 9pm. This is great, because I either get free delivery and free extension of amazon prime.
mschuster91 9y ago
> Argh. If true, hopefully someone can verify the claims and raise some visibility. For the piss-in-bottles, ask any random truck or delivery driver. It's more common than you'd like...

hitekker 9y ago

I'd change the verb in the title to "criticize" instead of "complain about".

ebiester 9y ago
How about "reveal"?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mabbo 9y ago

It's such a complex situation. Amazon has contracts with small companies who provide trucks and humans. Amazon provides the work, the groups of packages, the routes, the app the drivers need to use to deliver. The companies compete with each other for more 'routes' each day. They offer to take on more work, to do more. And then they hire anyone they can to fulfill those routes. The drivers themselves are on contracts with the small companies that can end at any time. Not making your rate? Up to the small company to decide if you have a contract tomorrow. The contracts themselves presume the drivers will deliver a route in a specific number of hours for a fixed rate of pay. But newbies work at a much slower rate. And during the holiday season, they need a lot of extra labor- a lot of newbies. Who is to blame? Amazon? The companies? The drivers? Capitalism gone mad? Take your pick.

snarf21 9y ago
I agree, this is part of the "gig" economy gone bad. I think the solution is quite simple though. All contracts must also include a minimum wage (not saying this is the US minimum wage currently) per hour. This sets a floor and forces more of the cost back up the chain. It fixes the problem of someone forcing minimally bid contracts to people who are desperate for any kind of work. We have great algorithms and the computing to calculate "fair" amounts of time for delivery including traffic data and time of day that can also be extremely optimized for efficiency. Then the contract is for X hours at Y wage plus (maybe?) a bonus per delivery. We complain about sweatshops making sneakers in abusive conditions but say cynical things like "... people don't have to take these jobs ..." when it comes to having parcels delivered right to our door so we don't even have to leave the house. I think it only fair we take a stand that these people deserve a decent living for delivering our (frequently frivolous) purchases.
- Kadin 9y ago
  Minimum wage laws are already supposed to work like that. The problem is that companies, Amazon and their contractors in particular, have been able to mischaracterize employees as "contractors" in order to get around minimum wage laws. It's the lax enforcement of 1099 mischaracterization that has allowed the "gig economy" shit-sandwich jobs to proliferate. A deliver driver who has to maintain a delivery schedule or meet delivery deadlines given by Amazon (and in likelihood follows a programmed route given to them by an Amazon routing system) is in no real sense an INDEPENDENT contractor in the way that definition was originally meant. Contractors are exempt from minimum wage laws because otherwise there would be a catch-22 situation if, say, a plumber you hired mis-estimated the amount of work involved in a job. (If he gave you an estimate that a job would be $100, and it turned out to take 10 hours plus $50 in materials, he could very well end up making below minimum wage. But he can't go back and squeeze you for more money; he's the one who gave you the estimate! But it hardly makes sense to penalize him again for not paying himself enough.) But these exceptions envisioned bona fide independent contractors, mostly skilled tradespeople, and not today's largely-unskilled and entry-level "contract" jobs.

aviv 9y ago

They also deliver very late at night, past 11pm kind of late.

deanCommie 9y ago

On reddit, "spagheddie" wrote: I was once a FedEx delivery driver, so I don't know how it is for Amazon, but I would imagine it's similar? At FedEx we got paid per package delivered, which means the faster you deliver your packages, the more you are technically getting paid per hour. In addition to this, you'd get a daily bonus for delivering the packages fast. We could take our lunches whenever, nobody cared as long as the packages got delivered. However, very few people ever stopped to eat their lunch. Most people would eat and drive. If there was a bathroom on your route, that's cool, but otherwise you are peeing in a bottle because you aren't trying to waste time searching for a bathroom when you could potentially deliver 4 or 5 packages in that time. All of this holds especially true at this time of the year, when guys are getting ran 6 days a week, with 200+ packages per day, and with the sun going down an hour earlier (night time delivering slows you way the fuck down). Well what happens when you deliver so slow that you're making less than minimum wage? I don't know about Amazon, but at FedEx if you were so slow that you made less than minimum wage with your per package deliveries, you were simply paid minimum wage for that day's work. Anyways, there are a lot of shitty jobs to have during the Christmas season but, in my opinion, this is the worst one of them all. The pay isn't bad if you have your route down; but goddamn you can't even enjoy the damn holidays because you're always on "go" mode. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7iv6s9/amazon_drivers_are_asked_to_deliver_up_to_200/dr1on4x/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7iv6s9/amazon_dr...

naner 9y ago
I've noticed this sort of thing a lot in the job market: performance or pay are directly tied to metrics resulting in employees being incentivized into odd behaviors (breaking the law, sabotaging coworkers, skipping breaks/lunch, stagtegically cancelling or avoiding work, etc). This type of management through metrics goes hand in hand with the gig economy and also temp agency/contract work.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Not to mention Wells Fargo...
- zaptheimpaler 9y ago

Manglano 9y ago

They're probably reaching road vehicle bandwidth saturation, which is affecting drivers and warehouse workers downstream of the web interface. Refactoring their supply model for depots and reallocating staff to the depots. Y'know, the Amazon General Store.

TsomArp 9y ago

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is worth 100 billion dollars... gotta love wild capitalism! (not a communist, before somebody gets offended)... wow, the downvotes without any reasoning or debate... go world go!

musage 9y ago
You might enjoy this, I know I agree with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfAAQUQ_54&t=42m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNfAAQUQ_54&t=42m43s (turn the sound down some before clicking the link though, it features screaming about important things for the right reasons)
sctb 9y ago
This comment breaks the guidelines by being unsubstantive and then complaining about voting. Could you give them another read, please? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

anonathon0000 9y ago

I'm a supervisor at UPS, so maybe I can offer an opinion (this is a throwaway account). I'm not sure if there is anything analogous to the US Department Of Transportation in England, but we have to abide by pretty strict rules here in the USA regarding driving hours. A UPS driver cannot work over 14 hours on a shift, must have 10 hours between shifts, and cannot exceed 60 hours in a week without (IIRC) 38 consecutive hours before the next shift. That being said, we HIGHLY AVOID working drivers over 12 hours per shift, and try to take on a lot of extra help during the holiday peak season so that the work is distributed evenly. From what I can tell from the article, these are probably inexperienced drivers who may be on their own in regards to organizing their delivery route, sorting packages on their vehicle, and learning their route. Because UPS has a centralized management system (as apposed to FedEx, for instance, which is contract based), we monitor every driver and can send other drivers to assist anyone who begins to struggle. Its not unheard-of for UPS drivers to pee in bottles (and less often, poop in big plastic bags that are kept handy in the package cars). Its definitely not encouraged, but it happens, especially when you're on a rural route. UPS drivers have it pretty good because of the collective bargaining that's available through the union. We're definitely going to have some rough days ahead of us for the next few weeks, but peak season is a big deal that we prepare for months in advance.

bob_theslob646 9y ago
Thank you for your candid response. Would you be able to answer how many packages the average driver delivers on a route and what happens if a package is stolen i.e who is liable? Curious to see how often package theft occurs. Thanks again!
- acomjean 9y ago
  UPS I believe is self-insured (this if from many years ago a friend tried to get me to be a "seasonal helper" and I went to the orientation.) Meaning it comes out of the companies profits. Basically UPS hires a lot of extra people to ride along with the drivers and deliver pacakges during the holiday season. The pay was decent for the work.
- Declanomous 9y ago

wnevets 9y ago

dailymail.co.uk really shouldn't be on the front page of hn, its a tabloid.

Theodores 9y ago
Stop Funding Hate is a pressure group outing major brands and getting the to apologise for advertising in the Daily Mail, e.g. 'Paperchase', last week or so: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42058103 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42058103 So this is a valid point, HN needs to find better sources that the Daily Mail. In light of this, here you go: https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Amazon-Flex-Reviews-E1324363.htm https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Amazon-Flex-Reviews-E132...
- gadders 9y ago
  Stop funding hate is a pressure group consisting of a few hundred far-left agitators. Censorship should be opposed in all forms. https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/stop-funding-hate-nasty-elitist-campaign-press-censorship/ https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/stop-funding-hate-nast...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
gadders 9y ago
The Guardian will be a tabloid from early next year: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/13/guardian-and-observer-to-relaunch-in-tabloid-format https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/13/guardian-and-o...
- gberger 9y ago
  Tabloid can refer to either a type of journalism, or newspaper format. Daily Mail is both, Guardian will only be the latter.
  - 9y ago

quantumofmalice 9y ago

There was a time when you could give a christmas bonus to the mail man. I wish that the delivery men were more consistent, I would love to be able to give them a cash gift for all the work they do for me and my family on a regular basis. Unfortunately it seems like during the holidays the usual delivery guy isn't around and it's a chaotic mix of people. While we are here, I hate that they are now making people deliver on Sundays. Every year I struggle more with the morality of the package economy.

agrajag 9y ago
I'd really prefer that people be paid an adequate wage where I don't feel like I have to tip. And why is Sunday delivery worse than Sunday work in a myriad of other industries, like retail or restaurants?
- quantumofmalice 9y ago
  I'm not big on Sunday retail either. I prefer the older tradition where most stores were closed on Sunday so people could be with their families.
  - gumby 9y ago
    For an alternative perspective: Sunday shopping is a boon to people who work or have other conflicts the rest of the time (e.g. work M-F, kids' games on Saturday). Also for holidays: my mother really appreciated being able to work Thanksgiving, Xmas, July 4th etc because others really wanted that time to be with their families‡ -- those holidays meant nothing to us (immigrants) but meant that when she wanted someone to cover for her for some other day everybody owed her a favor (plus as a bonus people generally try not to go to the hospital those days -- she was an M.D.). ‡ (or perhaps it's simply that I was such a horrible kid that she was happy to be out of the house).
  - techsupporter 9y ago
    I’m thrilled that there are several places open on Sunday because I work a non-typical shift while keeping this whole Cloud Economy working. The standard 9-5, Monday-Friday work hours aren’t so “standard” in my corner of our industry.

nocoder 9y ago

In India, this gets worse. Lot of delivery guys use 2 wheelers and can often been seen carrying a huge bag full of packages on their bikes. Moreover many buildings don't have lifts so they end up carrying this load up 2 or 3 storeys. This is extremely back breaking work and add to that the pressure to deliver packages on time and navigating crazy Indian traffic on two wheelers with such heavy loads. On the other hand I am not sure what can be done.... People are just concerned about their convenience with no regards for rights of the delivery people. And given the level of unemployment it is unlikely that there will be protests from the drivers. While Indian e-commerce booms it will be on the backs of these guys.

tomcam 9y ago
Sobering, and almost physically painful to read. Probably the only realistic solution is the booming economy in India. Eventually, one hopes, there will be better accommodations for everyone, and the drivers will benefit along with everyone else. I assume unionization would not work due to the huge supply of alternate employees?
- nocoder 9y ago
  Yeah... There are too many desperate and unemployed people for unionization to make an impact. You can just get rid of the union employees. Given the poor educational investments lot of people are simply not equipped to exploit the opportunities in booming economy. This basically results in larger inequality since for high paying jobs there is lot of competition due to talent crunch driving wages up. At the same time for menial jobs there is too much labor leading to downward pressure on wages. Combine the two and you have ballooning inequality. My fear is that India might end up there.
  - robryan 9y ago
    Bad for employees but when I have been there in the past I was impressed with how quickly things would be delivered from Amazon in Mumbai.

zeep 9y ago

pesos have to flow in the right direction...

asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago

I had an Amazon delivery driver pull up to my house at 10pm in his Camry. They clearly don't have their shit together.

zw123456 9y ago

I always wondered why not have all delivery done at night? There is a lot less traffic generally between 10PM and 6AM for example, it seems like they could do a lot more deliveries and it would put less load on the highways and be safer and less stressful for drivers. And not sitting in traffic jams means less fuel consumption. Is there some reason why that is not done?

wunderg 9y ago
Good luck finding any houses at night or being shot while trying to use flashlight
- thisone 9y ago
  pretty much. A couple weeks ago there was a post to the facebook group for my village 'watch out there's a man with a white van shining a torch into people's houses' To be followed by comments saying 'that's just the Hermes delivery guy'
dazc 9y ago
I don't want to live in a neighbourhood where night time deliveries are the norm. You may also find that not many people want to work overnight for a basic wage either.
dancryer 9y ago
It would prove tricky to do home deliveries at night when everyone's asleep...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Declanomous 9y ago
I'm working for UPS seasonally right now, and delivering packages after the sun goes down is about 3 times slower because it's so much harder to find people house numbers, and people's walkways and porches aren't well lit. Working night shift isn't particularly appealing either, and residential streets don't have much traffic. UPS has a union who would oppose these changes I'm sure.

twobyfour 9y ago

Yet another point in the "don't use Amazon" column. Yes, it can be slightly less convenient to have to shop around - but if you can afford it, it's worth it for the peace of mind. Besides, I no longer trust Amazon to send me the actual product listed. The small retailers have been far more reliable in that regard.

purplezooey 9y ago

This "hire contractors" story is getting very familiar, ie Uber. Maybe we haven't had much innovation outside of writing the software and making the distribution chain. We need more roads and transit too.