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This sort of thing happens all the time at the apartment complex I live in (in the South Bay Area, California). We have an outdoor "mail room" with an automated

This sort of thing happens all the time at the apartment complex I live in (in the South Bay Area, California). We have an outdoor "mail room" with an automated package locker. I'm not sure if the package locker is usually full or simply hard for drivers to use, but often the delivery drivers will just leave a pile of like 30-50 packages next to it. Honestly, I don't blame the drivers in the slightest. If I were treated the way they were treated and paid what they were paid, I wouldn't care about doing my job the right way either. Hell, they're so monitored by algorithms and surveillance devices that they probably don't have time to do it the right way even if they wanted to. Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job. This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's.

hk1337 5y ago
It probably depends on the location because here, we have an indoor locker room that requires a pass to enter. It always seemed like either the lockers are full either because there were a lot that day and/or people would leave the packages in the locker for days. Also, I noticed people would just give the address of the mailroom and probably did not sign up for the locker service.
FpUser 5y ago
>"until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force" They're not demented. They know it. They do not give a flying fuck.
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  OK. So what is to be done?
  - popcube 5y ago
    call your Congressman?
  - Griffinsauce 5y ago
    Support unions, vote for workers rights. Then again, in the US it's very hard to focus your vote like this due to the two-party system. So... work on getting a better political system in place?
    - pverghese 5y ago
      Like the police union
      - Drakim 5y ago
        There are unions that behave badly, therefore unions as a concept is broken and should be abolished. Funny enough that logic never applies to corporations. If some corporations behave badly, murdering people, overthrowing democratically elected governments, kidnapping children, well, that's just how it is, we can't abolish corporations, even regulating them is criticized. Unions help the small guy though, so those are okay to trash.
        Griffinsauce 5y ago
        IMHO the need for unions is a symptom of a poor political system (yes, this goes for my own country too, not US-bashing here). So yes they are broken and shouldn't _need_ to exist. That's a different argument though and I agree with your point.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      One party actually has advanced workers’ rights in recent decades.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    For workers to fight for their rights / money. It is the only way. Owners will not out of blue get generous and decide to pay more money.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  There's no point in stopping consumption as an individual, but if there was a workers unionization movement to support or an organized consumer action such as a boycott...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gkop 5y ago
    Some people do find that it feels good stopping consumption as an individual.
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      That's yet another consumer choice rather than an exertion of political will. The point of political ideas is to change reality, to exert will and make it manifest. Individual consumer choices absent a movement don't do diddly squat.
      - gkop 5y ago
        I agree. Just quibbling over the unqualified "there's no point".
sombremesa 5y ago
> until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job Everyone knows this already - though the lowest rung is occupied by the undocumented, and no one wants to help them.
ajmurmann 5y ago
So what am I supposed to do as the consumer? Where can I buy things where this won't be the case? For a few product categories, I sometimes have alternatives. Farmers market which is seasonal. I'm lucky to live in Portland which had a great local book store. Many other things I need regularly are much harder.
- balls187 5y ago
  I'm curious what do you need to purchase regularly that you cannot pick up at a local store?
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    What makes you think that store treats its employees better than Amazon treats its drivers? Maybe you can talk to the employees, but that's just the first layer. What about their suppliers?
    - balls187 5y ago
      Unions
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    As dehrmann said in a parallel comment, sure I can pick up almost everything at local stores, but I don't believe that most of them treat their employees any better than Amazon does. That's why I listed farmers markets and our fabulous Powell's as alternatives where I'm pretty confident that employees get treated well or there aren't any.
    - balls187 5y ago
      Ah, I see I misinterpreted your comment, missing the key point that you are asking what local alternatives where employees are treated better. I'm lucky that Fred Meyer (my preferred local retail store) is unionized. More over, I tend to shop at mom & pop stores, if possible.
- 5y ago
balls187 5y ago
> This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's. You sure this is only Amazon, and not also USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc? I'd sooner blame your apartment complex than delivery companies. Anecdotally, I've had so few problems with delivery drivers, that I can't recall specific examples. On the other hand, the amount of lousy experiences with apartment complex management companies and their policies would fill a long twitter thread. For example, ordered computer equipment from Newegg. It was delivered to my apartment complex mail room, which closed at 5pm. I left work early to pick it up, only to find out that the staff had closed down and went home early (4:45p).
- rlp 5y ago
  FedEx maybe. UPS is unionized, I think they pay a fair wage.
  - seg_lol 5y ago
    That is neat to hear. Rather than fix a systemic issue, couldn't we just have a national holiday?
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    So you assume that getting paid more automatically equates to more often doing the right thing? Then it’s definitely not Bezos’s fault!
- tshaddox 5y ago
  At my building I’m pretty sure, given that every USPS package gets delivered to my mailbox, every FedEx and UPS package gets delivered to my apartment door, and like 25% of Amazon-delivered packages never show up or show up mysteriously a few days after they are marked as delivered.
wruza 5y ago
until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap"… Ahem, the society is not only middle and upper middle class, even (I believe) in US. These drivers themselves use Amazon and other “cheap” services, I mean do you realize they sometimes need to buy things too? That’s obviously not a counter argument to your conclusions, but something to account for before raising the prices.
sennight 5y ago
> Its all your fault BS. I didn't ask for the lockers, or even want them - because I knew what would happen. I've never signed up for Prime service for the same reason. Tell me again, how is anything my fault?
hackernews777 5y ago
> This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's. Agree. > Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job. Disagree. This is entirely the fault of yes-men/pie in the sky management at Amazon. Any manager with the slightest bit of autonomy at Amazon is making six figures and is willing to throw their employees under the bus for money. They will do literally anything to avoid admitting that a problem that exists that can be solved but will cause a KPI to go down. Absolutely no one is willing to go to bat for ideas that cause temporary productivity decrease but a quality and productivity increase over the long run as the company gets better at solving the problem.
- vletal 5y ago
  Btw. fun cultural difference: In some other countries it's not considered Ok to keep packages on front porches or next to mail boxes. Drivers in the Czech Republic would never leave package like that and hence it would be their mistake not Amazons/Bazoses.
  - lillecarl 5y ago
    In Sweden where I live, if it doesn't fit in your mailbox you'll have to pick it up somewhere. In Germany a friend of mine told me that if they're not home at time of delivery Amazon's shipping partner will intentionally deliver to her neighbors, smaller city though but I guess culture is indeed different.
    - svl 5y ago
      This is the normal procedure in the Netherlands as well, for I think all-but-one of the package delivery services. If you're not home, delivery goes to one of the neighbours (could be 5-6 houses away if the driver already knows that that one is at home). Might not be common in the inner cities, but definitely in towns and suburbs. Good for social cohesion, as otherwise we wouldn't see most of these people for months at a time. It's common to such a degree that many of the shipping forms on webshops have a dedicated field to indicate that you don't want this, though I've never felt the need to use this; definitely more convenient to walk over to the neighbours than to a pickup point.
derefr 5y ago
This implies that "things like this" are somehow bad, though. What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing? I know Amazon already don't bother to process their own returns, instead selling those off in bulk lots for potentially far below the market value of the items (sort of like creditors selling off bad debts rather than trying to collect on them themselves.) Both situations suggest a paradigm where human labor is by far the most expensive part of any logistics process, such that margin can always be increased simply by replacing workflows that involve even a little bit of human labor with fully-mechanized/externalized workflows, even when that brings service quality down.
- EarlKing 5y ago
  > What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing? This is the sort of situation which happens so infrequently that literally the solution is you ask whoever calls about it to "read me off the TBA number off the tracking label", look up which DSP was responsible, and tell them to divert someone to go pick those up. Any DSP worth its salt always has some number of drivers on rescue or, failing that, one of their dispatchers will go pick it up. In short: DSPs are incentivized to maintain personnel to handle problems on route, and this is exactly the sort of thing they can and should handle. Either way those packages are going to be marked missing/undelivered and the DSP will get dinged for that driver's fuckup, so they might as well send someone out to pick them up and get them properly delivered.
- rambambram 5y ago
  > What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing? Excuse me? There's like a pile of boxes in the way. Amazon should clean this up, quickly. So you say it's better that random people living there should be made responsible for getting rid of a pile of boxes instead of Amazon who put them there? What if I "abandon" a sh*tload of poo in your front garden because that's cheaper for me?
RC_ITR 5y ago
Idk which your in, but FYI there’s a socal South Bay (south of long beach) and a NorCal South Bay (basically Silicon Valley. Hope that prevents future confusion.
- gkop 5y ago
  There’s one Bay Area.
  - RC_ITR 5y ago
    I mean, I love the bay too, but google 'south bay area' and SoCal's comes up first. You're asking the capitalization to do a lot of work.
tasogare 5y ago
> Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes [...] Something in the like is happening in France: when looking at Apple dedicated websites there are a bunch comments like "don't order iphone/macbook on Amazon, it'll be stolen". What is happening is the post and most delivery services hired almost exclusively diversity, which then works with their cultural quirks (some even record themselves and upload videos on social networks). Things may chance when the middle/high class realize that having reliable service is better than a few sjw points, but it's still a long way to go.
- wyre 5y ago
  Did you just imply delivery workers are stealing Apple packages because they’re non-white and call it a “cultural quirk?”
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    He's actually implying that non-native Frenchmen cannot be trusted to deliver packages correctly because they don't care about doing a good job but that's not much better.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    Yes, they just did.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  Imagine complaining about “sjw”s in France, a country known for it’s citizens ability to stand up for social justice.
EarlKing 5y ago
> This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's. Well, in the case of your apartment complex and its package locker, it could be either/or. If it's an Amazon brand locker and they're just dropping the packages then chances are the locker was full and the app told them to just drop them there because that was a safe location. If it's a Luxor or some other offbrand locker then they either may not have codes needed to access it or they were trying to shave a few minutes off their time by just dropping everything in the lobby. That might sound horrible but when everyone is incentivized to piss in a bottle and not take their breaks in order to make their deliveries and nobody at corporate ever bothers to investigate then these sort of things are going to happen. That being said... > This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's. Yes. This is the correct answer. :D
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > If it's an Amazon brand locker and they're just dropping the packages then chances are the locker was full and the app told them to just drop them there because that was a safe location. These were not dropped outside a locker at the intended delivery address; they were at the wrong address entirely.
  - EarlKing 5y ago
    OK, then next question: Is the intended delivery address say one street over? Reason: Packages can only be dropped off if your device reports that you're within a certain radius of the delivery point. When navigating, crossing into the radius defined by that point (termed the 'geofence') is what pops up the button that says you've arrived at your destination. So imagine... you're a driver using the turn-by-turn directions on your device and it suddenly says you've arrived at your destination. So you grab the packages and head over to the building number listed on the packages... except someone put the point for the geofence at the wrong spot so the radius of the geofence extends to the next street over, causing drivers to stop on the wrong street and deliver to an address with the same building number. Mind you, I'm not saying that's what happened here, but that's one possibility.
    - 5y ago

hk1337 5y ago

It probably depends on the location because here, we have an indoor locker room that requires a pass to enter. It always seemed like either the lockers are full either because there were a lot that day and/or people would leave the packages in the locker for days. Also, I noticed people would just give the address of the mailroom and probably did not sign up for the locker service.

FpUser 5y ago

>"until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force" They're not demented. They know it. They do not give a flying fuck.

orhmeh09 5y ago
OK. So what is to be done?
- popcube 5y ago
  call your Congressman?
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  Support unions, vote for workers rights. Then again, in the US it's very hard to focus your vote like this due to the two-party system. So... work on getting a better political system in place?
  - pverghese 5y ago
    Like the police union
    - Drakim 5y ago
      There are unions that behave badly, therefore unions as a concept is broken and should be abolished. Funny enough that logic never applies to corporations. If some corporations behave badly, murdering people, overthrowing democratically elected governments, kidnapping children, well, that's just how it is, we can't abolish corporations, even regulating them is criticized. Unions help the small guy though, so those are okay to trash.
      - Griffinsauce 5y ago
        IMHO the need for unions is a symptom of a poor political system (yes, this goes for my own country too, not US-bashing here). So yes they are broken and shouldn't _need_ to exist. That's a different argument though and I agree with your point.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    One party actually has advanced workers’ rights in recent decades.
- FpUser 5y ago
  For workers to fight for their rights / money. It is the only way. Owners will not out of blue get generous and decide to pay more money.
tehjoker 5y ago
There's no point in stopping consumption as an individual, but if there was a workers unionization movement to support or an organized consumer action such as a boycott...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gkop 5y ago
  Some people do find that it feels good stopping consumption as an individual.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    That's yet another consumer choice rather than an exertion of political will. The point of political ideas is to change reality, to exert will and make it manifest. Individual consumer choices absent a movement don't do diddly squat.
    - gkop 5y ago
      I agree. Just quibbling over the unqualified "there's no point".

sombremesa 5y ago

> until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job Everyone knows this already - though the lowest rung is occupied by the undocumented, and no one wants to help them.

ajmurmann 5y ago

So what am I supposed to do as the consumer? Where can I buy things where this won't be the case? For a few product categories, I sometimes have alternatives. Farmers market which is seasonal. I'm lucky to live in Portland which had a great local book store. Many other things I need regularly are much harder.

balls187 5y ago
I'm curious what do you need to purchase regularly that you cannot pick up at a local store?
- dehrmann 5y ago
  What makes you think that store treats its employees better than Amazon treats its drivers? Maybe you can talk to the employees, but that's just the first layer. What about their suppliers?
  - balls187 5y ago
    Unions
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  As dehrmann said in a parallel comment, sure I can pick up almost everything at local stores, but I don't believe that most of them treat their employees any better than Amazon does. That's why I listed farmers markets and our fabulous Powell's as alternatives where I'm pretty confident that employees get treated well or there aren't any.
  - balls187 5y ago
    Ah, I see I misinterpreted your comment, missing the key point that you are asking what local alternatives where employees are treated better. I'm lucky that Fred Meyer (my preferred local retail store) is unionized. More over, I tend to shop at mom & pop stores, if possible.
5y ago

balls187 5y ago

> This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's. You sure this is only Amazon, and not also USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc? I'd sooner blame your apartment complex than delivery companies. Anecdotally, I've had so few problems with delivery drivers, that I can't recall specific examples. On the other hand, the amount of lousy experiences with apartment complex management companies and their policies would fill a long twitter thread. For example, ordered computer equipment from Newegg. It was delivered to my apartment complex mail room, which closed at 5pm. I left work early to pick it up, only to find out that the staff had closed down and went home early (4:45p).

rlp 5y ago
FedEx maybe. UPS is unionized, I think they pay a fair wage.
- seg_lol 5y ago
  That is neat to hear. Rather than fix a systemic issue, couldn't we just have a national holiday?
- jtbayly 5y ago
  So you assume that getting paid more automatically equates to more often doing the right thing? Then it’s definitely not Bezos’s fault!
tshaddox 5y ago
At my building I’m pretty sure, given that every USPS package gets delivered to my mailbox, every FedEx and UPS package gets delivered to my apartment door, and like 25% of Amazon-delivered packages never show up or show up mysteriously a few days after they are marked as delivered.

wruza 5y ago

until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap"… Ahem, the society is not only middle and upper middle class, even (I believe) in US. These drivers themselves use Amazon and other “cheap” services, I mean do you realize they sometimes need to buy things too? That’s obviously not a counter argument to your conclusions, but something to account for before raising the prices.

sennight 5y ago

> Its all your fault BS. I didn't ask for the lockers, or even want them - because I knew what would happen. I've never signed up for Prime service for the same reason. Tell me again, how is anything my fault?

hackernews777 5y ago

> This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's. Agree. > Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job. Disagree. This is entirely the fault of yes-men/pie in the sky management at Amazon. Any manager with the slightest bit of autonomy at Amazon is making six figures and is willing to throw their employees under the bus for money. They will do literally anything to avoid admitting that a problem that exists that can be solved but will cause a KPI to go down. Absolutely no one is willing to go to bat for ideas that cause temporary productivity decrease but a quality and productivity increase over the long run as the company gets better at solving the problem.

vletal 5y ago
Btw. fun cultural difference: In some other countries it's not considered Ok to keep packages on front porches or next to mail boxes. Drivers in the Czech Republic would never leave package like that and hence it would be their mistake not Amazons/Bazoses.
- lillecarl 5y ago
  In Sweden where I live, if it doesn't fit in your mailbox you'll have to pick it up somewhere. In Germany a friend of mine told me that if they're not home at time of delivery Amazon's shipping partner will intentionally deliver to her neighbors, smaller city though but I guess culture is indeed different.
  - svl 5y ago
    This is the normal procedure in the Netherlands as well, for I think all-but-one of the package delivery services. If you're not home, delivery goes to one of the neighbours (could be 5-6 houses away if the driver already knows that that one is at home). Might not be common in the inner cities, but definitely in towns and suburbs. Good for social cohesion, as otherwise we wouldn't see most of these people for months at a time. It's common to such a degree that many of the shipping forms on webshops have a dedicated field to indicate that you don't want this, though I've never felt the need to use this; definitely more convenient to walk over to the neighbours than to a pickup point.

derefr 5y ago

This implies that "things like this" are somehow bad, though. What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing? I know Amazon already don't bother to process their own returns, instead selling those off in bulk lots for potentially far below the market value of the items (sort of like creditors selling off bad debts rather than trying to collect on them themselves.) Both situations suggest a paradigm where human labor is by far the most expensive part of any logistics process, such that margin can always be increased simply by replacing workflows that involve even a little bit of human labor with fully-mechanized/externalized workflows, even when that brings service quality down.

EarlKing 5y ago
> What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing? This is the sort of situation which happens so infrequently that literally the solution is you ask whoever calls about it to "read me off the TBA number off the tracking label", look up which DSP was responsible, and tell them to divert someone to go pick those up. Any DSP worth its salt always has some number of drivers on rescue or, failing that, one of their dispatchers will go pick it up. In short: DSPs are incentivized to maintain personnel to handle problems on route, and this is exactly the sort of thing they can and should handle. Either way those packages are going to be marked missing/undelivered and the DSP will get dinged for that driver's fuckup, so they might as well send someone out to pick them up and get them properly delivered.
rambambram 5y ago
> What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing? Excuse me? There's like a pile of boxes in the way. Amazon should clean this up, quickly. So you say it's better that random people living there should be made responsible for getting rid of a pile of boxes instead of Amazon who put them there? What if I "abandon" a sh*tload of poo in your front garden because that's cheaper for me?

RC_ITR 5y ago

Idk which your in, but FYI there’s a socal South Bay (south of long beach) and a NorCal South Bay (basically Silicon Valley. Hope that prevents future confusion.

gkop 5y ago
There’s one Bay Area.
- RC_ITR 5y ago
  I mean, I love the bay too, but google 'south bay area' and SoCal's comes up first. You're asking the capitalization to do a lot of work.

tasogare 5y ago

> Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes [...] Something in the like is happening in France: when looking at Apple dedicated websites there are a bunch comments like "don't order iphone/macbook on Amazon, it'll be stolen". What is happening is the post and most delivery services hired almost exclusively diversity, which then works with their cultural quirks (some even record themselves and upload videos on social networks). Things may chance when the middle/high class realize that having reliable service is better than a few sjw points, but it's still a long way to go.

wyre 5y ago
Did you just imply delivery workers are stealing Apple packages because they’re non-white and call it a “cultural quirk?”
- emodendroket 5y ago
  He's actually implying that non-native Frenchmen cannot be trusted to deliver packages correctly because they don't care about doing a good job but that's not much better.
- kergonath 5y ago
  Yes, they just did.
iamacyborg 5y ago
Imagine complaining about “sjw”s in France, a country known for it’s citizens ability to stand up for social justice.

EarlKing 5y ago

> This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's. Well, in the case of your apartment complex and its package locker, it could be either/or. If it's an Amazon brand locker and they're just dropping the packages then chances are the locker was full and the app told them to just drop them there because that was a safe location. If it's a Luxor or some other offbrand locker then they either may not have codes needed to access it or they were trying to shave a few minutes off their time by just dropping everything in the lobby. That might sound horrible but when everyone is incentivized to piss in a bottle and not take their breaks in order to make their deliveries and nobody at corporate ever bothers to investigate then these sort of things are going to happen. That being said... > This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's. Yes. This is the correct answer. :D

JadeNB 5y ago
> If it's an Amazon brand locker and they're just dropping the packages then chances are the locker was full and the app told them to just drop them there because that was a safe location. These were not dropped outside a locker at the intended delivery address; they were at the wrong address entirely.
- EarlKing 5y ago
  OK, then next question: Is the intended delivery address say one street over? Reason: Packages can only be dropped off if your device reports that you're within a certain radius of the delivery point. When navigating, crossing into the radius defined by that point (termed the 'geofence') is what pops up the button that says you've arrived at your destination. So imagine... you're a driver using the turn-by-turn directions on your device and it suddenly says you've arrived at your destination. So you grab the packages and head over to the building number listed on the packages... except someone put the point for the geofence at the wrong spot so the radius of the geofence extends to the next street over, causing drivers to stop on the wrong street and deliver to an address with the same building number. Mind you, I'm not saying that's what happened here, but that's one possibility.
  - 5y ago