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Let's list what Walmart was offering the pilot program volunteers: - Free TV or iPad for signing up (hock it* for ~$100 I guess) - $2 per package delivery (ave

Let's list what Walmart was offering the pilot program volunteers: - Free TV or iPad for signing up (hock it* for ~$100 I guess) - $2 per package delivery (average 3-5 deliveries per night) - 54 cents for fuel per mile - Extra hour of OT pay (average pay $11 per hour) All of which the story says adds up to $15.40 for each 10 miles of five packages, not counting OT. After a week one employee said she got $100 after ~12 deliveries. All so you can spend an extra 30 minutes at your job waiting for someone else's groceries, which you will then spend 2 hours to deliver, by hand, to their (assuming) nice looking house with their nice looking family, as you then trudge back to your apartment and sit on your Walmart couch, in your Walmart clothes, eating your Walmart food and watching your Walmart TV. If that's not depressing I don't know what is. *edited for typo

AckSyn 8y ago
This presupposes the person delivering has a problem with envy, greed, and/or entitlement. A lot of people simply don’t care if others have more or less than the people they work for. Your comment is more telling about you than the broad generalization you paint of people.
sbinthree 8y ago
This is kind of a strange comment. I don't think a lot of HN folks have worked in last mile logistics, but $2/package is average to above average. Amazon typically pays around $1.50 for Prime packages and I would say it isn't just the upper middle class that is buying from Amazon at this point. If people don't pay for shipping, there will be a human cost. If people are willing to pay for some aspect of value-add (actually coming to your door, caring about retry attempts, caring about lost packages, caring about how well the people involved are treated) this would change fast. Anyone who tries to go slower than peak speed or do it ethically gets crushed by someone doing it faster or in a shadier way, because people refuse to pay for shipping.
- danharaj 8y ago
  > but $2/package is average to above average. Amazon typically pays around $1.50 for Prime packages That just means working for Amazon is even more abysmal. Last mile logistics is shitty to human beings period.
  - bradly 8y ago
    I know absolutely nothing about last mile logistics, but it's strange to me that (at least in the U.S.) we literally have someone going to practically every single house and business 6 days a week (postal carrier), and yet this is still a problem. I would think leveraging the human already coming to house every day would be the most efficient?
    - selectodude 8y ago
      UPS made $5bn last year. As Jeff Bezos says, “your margin is my opportunity.” He’ll make a whole lot more though, UPS is unionized and widely regarded as a pretty good place to work. Better shut them down.
    - brd529 8y ago
      Look up FedEx SmartPost, UPS Mail Innovations, DHL eConmerce, etc. these are all companies who “work share” with USPS. They deliver the package to the post office and USPS leverages their existing network of mail carriers to do the “last mile” delivery. The problem with these services is that they are very slow. The hand-off at the post office adds a day. Additionally these are considered economy services without a delivery guarantee by the carriers so they will wait until they have a full trucks worth of these before sending them on a leg. Wal-Mart is trying to get to same day delivery and bringing everything to the local post office for them to deliver would add at least a day. Furthermore those USPS economies suffer a bit once packages exceed 1 lb. it’s often too big for a letter carrier to take on their route - so they’d be delivered through the priority mail network which is often a different driver than your daily mail man and does not deliver to every house every day.
      - losteric 8y ago
- PeterisP 8y ago
  The point is that if $x/item is a reasonable cost for doing something in an industry, it's ridiculous to expect a comparable cost from workers who do something else, specialize in something else, and don't do it full-time on a sufficient scale to optimize their workday/workflow. It appears that Walmart for some reason thought that having their existing associates to do it "on the side" after their ordinary job will somehow be more efficient (or even just as efficient) than hiring people to actually do that (and just that) efficiently. Clearly this experience shows that it's not, and doing it in the way described in the article would reasonably cost much, much more than $2/package; and getting it done for "industry standard" prices would require doing it in the "industry standard" way.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
petra 8y ago
The economics of delivery are determined by route density - how many packages per mile you can deliver. Who will have higher route density ? UPS, which delivers orders for everybody wanting to ship to your neighborhood ? or Walmart, that only ships from Walmart, with it's measly share of e-commerce ? It was probably always a risky proposition. So what's the ideal way to test a risky proposition ? issue a big press release. And now i'm curios: how is the stock price affected from this press release, and failure ? is it possible, that this kind of tactic(very common in big companies) is beneficial to the stock price , or maybe to the compensation of managers ?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  If Wallmart had an easy delivery option, their e-commerce would be higher, and I suggest there is very high 'density' in the environs directly around a wallmart. The other advantage is that Wallmart sells the stuff we use a lot: cleaning things, toothpaste, diapers. If Wallmart coupled delivery with the gangbuster of all 'monthly box of stuff' type business plans (whereby the 'stuff' is not a tester box of perfume, but literally the stuff you buy most often in a household) - they could win. But the notion of getting employees to do this after shift is utterly beyond crazy. Just hire people for this, focus hard on selling the feature in a region, get people to sign up to 'toothpaste every month' and 'milk and eggs every monday',
  - ethbro 8y ago
    I'd be surprised if the density around Walmart was particularly high. As a consequence of opening a large number of huge stores, the majority seem to be in suburbs / places where land is cheap. Not exactly high-density urban centers.
rukittenme 8y ago
> sit on your Walmart couch, in your Walmart clothes, eating your Walmart food and watching your Walmart TV. That's basically how I exist now (excluding the "Walmart" prefix). I sit, I eat, I play video games, I'm somewhat dressed. What do you imagine people with a "nice looking house with their nice looking family" do on the weekends? The middle class doesn't have some secret club we all attend.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  They're yachting in the Hampton's naturally.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    Funny thing about yachting is it's not even cost-prohibitive for the middle-class anymore. Not since fiberglass became ubiquitous in the 70s. It's comparable to owning an RV/camper van - something I would not associate with the upper bourgeoisie.
    - eat_veggies 8y ago
      A boat costs about as much as a nice car, except boats are purely recreational. I can justify the cost of a $10k car because it'd be taking me to work every day, but $10k + upkeep for fun is ridiculous. Additionally, you need enough space to store the boat, which already puts you into bourgeoisie territory.
      - twblalock 8y ago
        Plus you need a vehicle that can tow the boat.
        ethbro 8y ago
        Or a storage slip.
      - newnewpdro 8y ago
chrischen 8y ago
According to the article, they are earning $15.40 per package. > "...that would earn them $15.40 in compensation per package and fuel, before overtime pay."
- pas 8y ago
  > After a week one employee said she got $100 after ~12 deliveries.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  This is a crucial correction and should be the top response.
voidlogic 8y ago
>Extra hour of OT pay (average pay $11 per hour) $11 is just below the in-store FT min wage. The avg is more like $13 with 1.5x (overtime?) that would be $19.50 + $2 package and .54 per mile.. 4 pks per night, 5 nights a week, driving 10 miles and taking 1 hr would then be $164.5 which is the income of an extra 12 hour shift for working an extra 5 hours... P.S. (((4×2)+19.5+(.54×10))×5)÷13 = 12 hrs
1000units 8y ago
Walmart has some nice TV's.
acchow 8y ago
Why are you not excluding the OT in your calculation? Isn't the pay they're getting from this way better than their normal walmart job when you include the OT they'd be getting?
- PeterisP 8y ago
  Not really if they're getting an hour of OT pay (the cap for this project) for two hours of actual work required.
amf12 8y ago
> All so you can spend an extra 30 minutes at your job waiting for someone else's groceries, which you will then spend 2 hours to deliver, by hand, to their (assuming) nice looking house with their nice looking family, as you then trudge back to your apartment and sit on your Walmart couch, in your Walmart clothes, eating your Walmart food and watching your Walmart TV. That's exactly what pizza, take out, Uber eats, news paper, usps delivery is about. Do you really think these delivery drivers make a lot more? Definitely more than Walmart but it's still not a lot. I think if Walmart had a better pay model, things would have worked.
mkirklions 8y ago
>All so you can spend an extra 30 minutes at your job waiting for someone else's groceries, which you will then spend 2 hours to deliver, by hand, to their (assuming) nice looking house with their nice looking family, as you then trudge back to your apartment and sit on your Walmart couch, in your Walmart clothes, eating your Walmart food and watching your Walmart TV. >If that's not depressing I don't know what is. Unemployment, starvation, no TV. Its weird, no one bats an eye when I work 60 hours a week but the moment a walmart worker works part time, we think that something is wrong with society. Whoever spreads anti-walmart propaganda did fantastic work.

AckSyn 8y ago

This presupposes the person delivering has a problem with envy, greed, and/or entitlement. A lot of people simply don’t care if others have more or less than the people they work for. Your comment is more telling about you than the broad generalization you paint of people.

sbinthree 8y ago

This is kind of a strange comment. I don't think a lot of HN folks have worked in last mile logistics, but $2/package is average to above average. Amazon typically pays around $1.50 for Prime packages and I would say it isn't just the upper middle class that is buying from Amazon at this point. If people don't pay for shipping, there will be a human cost. If people are willing to pay for some aspect of value-add (actually coming to your door, caring about retry attempts, caring about lost packages, caring about how well the people involved are treated) this would change fast. Anyone who tries to go slower than peak speed or do it ethically gets crushed by someone doing it faster or in a shadier way, because people refuse to pay for shipping.

danharaj 8y ago
> but $2/package is average to above average. Amazon typically pays around $1.50 for Prime packages That just means working for Amazon is even more abysmal. Last mile logistics is shitty to human beings period.
- bradly 8y ago
  I know absolutely nothing about last mile logistics, but it's strange to me that (at least in the U.S.) we literally have someone going to practically every single house and business 6 days a week (postal carrier), and yet this is still a problem. I would think leveraging the human already coming to house every day would be the most efficient?
  - selectodude 8y ago
    UPS made $5bn last year. As Jeff Bezos says, “your margin is my opportunity.” He’ll make a whole lot more though, UPS is unionized and widely regarded as a pretty good place to work. Better shut them down.
  - brd529 8y ago
    Look up FedEx SmartPost, UPS Mail Innovations, DHL eConmerce, etc. these are all companies who “work share” with USPS. They deliver the package to the post office and USPS leverages their existing network of mail carriers to do the “last mile” delivery. The problem with these services is that they are very slow. The hand-off at the post office adds a day. Additionally these are considered economy services without a delivery guarantee by the carriers so they will wait until they have a full trucks worth of these before sending them on a leg. Wal-Mart is trying to get to same day delivery and bringing everything to the local post office for them to deliver would add at least a day. Furthermore those USPS economies suffer a bit once packages exceed 1 lb. it’s often too big for a letter carrier to take on their route - so they’d be delivered through the priority mail network which is often a different driver than your daily mail man and does not deliver to every house every day.
    - losteric 8y ago
PeterisP 8y ago
The point is that if $x/item is a reasonable cost for doing something in an industry, it's ridiculous to expect a comparable cost from workers who do something else, specialize in something else, and don't do it full-time on a sufficient scale to optimize their workday/workflow. It appears that Walmart for some reason thought that having their existing associates to do it "on the side" after their ordinary job will somehow be more efficient (or even just as efficient) than hiring people to actually do that (and just that) efficiently. Clearly this experience shows that it's not, and doing it in the way described in the article would reasonably cost much, much more than $2/package; and getting it done for "industry standard" prices would require doing it in the "industry standard" way.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

petra 8y ago

The economics of delivery are determined by route density - how many packages per mile you can deliver. Who will have higher route density ? UPS, which delivers orders for everybody wanting to ship to your neighborhood ? or Walmart, that only ships from Walmart, with it's measly share of e-commerce ? It was probably always a risky proposition. So what's the ideal way to test a risky proposition ? issue a big press release. And now i'm curios: how is the stock price affected from this press release, and failure ? is it possible, that this kind of tactic(very common in big companies) is beneficial to the stock price , or maybe to the compensation of managers ?

sonnyblarney 8y ago
If Wallmart had an easy delivery option, their e-commerce would be higher, and I suggest there is very high 'density' in the environs directly around a wallmart. The other advantage is that Wallmart sells the stuff we use a lot: cleaning things, toothpaste, diapers. If Wallmart coupled delivery with the gangbuster of all 'monthly box of stuff' type business plans (whereby the 'stuff' is not a tester box of perfume, but literally the stuff you buy most often in a household) - they could win. But the notion of getting employees to do this after shift is utterly beyond crazy. Just hire people for this, focus hard on selling the feature in a region, get people to sign up to 'toothpaste every month' and 'milk and eggs every monday',
- ethbro 8y ago
  I'd be surprised if the density around Walmart was particularly high. As a consequence of opening a large number of huge stores, the majority seem to be in suburbs / places where land is cheap. Not exactly high-density urban centers.

rukittenme 8y ago

> sit on your Walmart couch, in your Walmart clothes, eating your Walmart food and watching your Walmart TV. That's basically how I exist now (excluding the "Walmart" prefix). I sit, I eat, I play video games, I'm somewhat dressed. What do you imagine people with a "nice looking house with their nice looking family" do on the weekends? The middle class doesn't have some secret club we all attend.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
They're yachting in the Hampton's naturally.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  Funny thing about yachting is it's not even cost-prohibitive for the middle-class anymore. Not since fiberglass became ubiquitous in the 70s. It's comparable to owning an RV/camper van - something I would not associate with the upper bourgeoisie.
  - eat_veggies 8y ago
    A boat costs about as much as a nice car, except boats are purely recreational. I can justify the cost of a $10k car because it'd be taking me to work every day, but $10k + upkeep for fun is ridiculous. Additionally, you need enough space to store the boat, which already puts you into bourgeoisie territory.
    - twblalock 8y ago
      Plus you need a vehicle that can tow the boat.
      - ethbro 8y ago
        Or a storage slip.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago

chrischen 8y ago

According to the article, they are earning $15.40 per package. > "...that would earn them $15.40 in compensation per package and fuel, before overtime pay."

pas 8y ago
> After a week one employee said she got $100 after ~12 deliveries.
gnicholas 8y ago
This is a crucial correction and should be the top response.

voidlogic 8y ago

>Extra hour of OT pay (average pay $11 per hour) $11 is just below the in-store FT min wage. The avg is more like $13 with 1.5x (overtime?) that would be $19.50 + $2 package and .54 per mile.. 4 pks per night, 5 nights a week, driving 10 miles and taking 1 hr would then be $164.5 which is the income of an extra 12 hour shift for working an extra 5 hours... P.S. (((4×2)+19.5+(.54×10))×5)÷13 = 12 hrs

1000units 8y ago

Walmart has some nice TV's.

acchow 8y ago

Why are you not excluding the OT in your calculation? Isn't the pay they're getting from this way better than their normal walmart job when you include the OT they'd be getting?

PeterisP 8y ago
Not really if they're getting an hour of OT pay (the cap for this project) for two hours of actual work required.

amf12 8y ago

> All so you can spend an extra 30 minutes at your job waiting for someone else's groceries, which you will then spend 2 hours to deliver, by hand, to their (assuming) nice looking house with their nice looking family, as you then trudge back to your apartment and sit on your Walmart couch, in your Walmart clothes, eating your Walmart food and watching your Walmart TV. That's exactly what pizza, take out, Uber eats, news paper, usps delivery is about. Do you really think these delivery drivers make a lot more? Definitely more than Walmart but it's still not a lot. I think if Walmart had a better pay model, things would have worked.

mkirklions 8y ago

>All so you can spend an extra 30 minutes at your job waiting for someone else's groceries, which you will then spend 2 hours to deliver, by hand, to their (assuming) nice looking house with their nice looking family, as you then trudge back to your apartment and sit on your Walmart couch, in your Walmart clothes, eating your Walmart food and watching your Walmart TV. >If that's not depressing I don't know what is. Unemployment, starvation, no TV. Its weird, no one bats an eye when I work 60 hours a week but the moment a walmart worker works part time, we think that something is wrong with society. Whoever spreads anti-walmart propaganda did fantastic work.