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Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

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Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#31

Post by tharne »

standardUser wrote: post #25
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

One side effect of the growth of Amazon is the replacement of "decent" jobs with absolutely soul sucking ones. In the early 2000's I knew people that worked as delivery drivers for UPS or FedEx and it was a decent job. They seemed happy. Now I see the Amazon delivery people, and they look majorly stressed out as if they are on the edge of collapse. Many times they are delivering things at 10pm desperately trying to m…

Traditionally it has been unions that have placed a check on employers' perpetual quest to trade humanity for efficiency.

That's true to an extent, but unfortunately unions (at least in the US) tend to end up mimicking the same corporate behavior they are supposed to be placing a check on. The get bigger and more powerful and they start to take and take with no concern for the fallout, and like corporations, they get politicians to do their bidding at the expense of the general population.

There are towns near me teetering on bankruptcy, while the police and firefighters can retire after 20 years of service with a pension equal to 80% of their last 3 years of pay. Any effort to reform what is obviously an unsustainable agreement that never should have been struck in the first place is meet with a wall of resistance and veiled threats to public safety.

In the private sector, unions have had a long history of opposing environmental regulations out of fear that it would affect employment in heavy manufacturing. Auto workers unions have repeatedly opposed any effort to invest in public transportation and reduce auto dependency.

I've heard that Scandinavia has had better luck with unions, but here in the U.S. unions have been every bit as self-serving and bullying as the corporate overloads they're supposedly a counter balance to. I'd love to see better restraints on corporate power, but I'm not holding my breath for unions to be anything but one more moneyed interest.

Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#32

Post by lincolnq »

post_break wrote: post #3

I'm just happy because 9 times out of 10 USPS would mark my stuff as delivered and then deliver it the next day. I have yet to have an Amazon delivery go bad besides when they try to deliver to my work after 5pm. I recognize people have huge issues with amazon delivery drivers but my experience has been better than USPS.

My house has the same street name and number as another house on the same block, across the town line (it’s about 15 houses away). UPS and FedEx drivers rarely mess it up, but Amazon contractors drop my package at the wrong house about 60% of the time. I always dread ordering from amazon for this reason.

Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#33

Post by gerbilly »

Yeah and I just got apackage from them where everything was damaged. The book was just thrown in along with a large item. It was all creased and useless as a gift.

The carton for the small appliance they bundled with the book had what looked like a punch mark in it.

The whole shipment was an utter mess.

Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#34

Post by jacobolus »

tharne wrote: post #28
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

One side effect of the growth of Amazon is the replacement of "decent" jobs with absolutely soul sucking ones. In the early 2000's I knew people that worked as delivery drivers for UPS or FedEx and it was a decent job. They seemed happy. Now I see the Amazon delivery people, and they look majorly stressed out as if they are on the edge of collapse. Many times they are delivering things at 10pm desperately trying to m…

I think we're all guilty of contributing to this problem. We all say we're for livable wages and then don't vote with our dollars as often as we should. I'm definitely guilty of going to Amazon because a book is a few dollars cheaper there and I can get it in two days instead of a week. If we care about workers and corporate behavior, we need to be willing to pay a little more for products that are made by companies…

If we care about workers and corporate behavior we need to change the law (and elect/appoint legislators and political executives and law enforcement agents and judges who will follow/enforce existing laws) to allow workers to unionize, increase the minimum wage, enforce fairer working hours, safer working conditions, better worker protections from fraud and theft, etc.

If Amazon wants to run a delivery network it should have to own the trucks, pay the workers a salary, guarantee them basic labor rights, and so on. Foisting all of the legal and financial liability for bad practices onto fragmented and poorly managed subcontractors who only exist to serve Amazon as a single customer is a tremendous abuse.

Federal antitrust action against monopolies and monopsonies would be helpful too.

Individual consumers can’t possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy, and we can’t expect consumers to solve this type of problem.

Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#35

Post by vector_spaces »

tharne wrote: post #28
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

One side effect of the growth of Amazon is the replacement of "decent" jobs with absolutely soul sucking ones. In the early 2000's I knew people that worked as delivery drivers for UPS or FedEx and it was a decent job. They seemed happy. Now I see the Amazon delivery people, and they look majorly stressed out as if they are on the edge of collapse. Many times they are delivering things at 10pm desperately trying to m…

I think we're all guilty of contributing to this problem. We all say we're for livable wages and then don't vote with our dollars as often as we should. I'm definitely guilty of going to Amazon because a book is a few dollars cheaper there and I can get it in two days instead of a week. If we care about workers and corporate behavior, we need to be willing to pay a little more for products that are made by companies…

I agree with you, but one feature all of the examples you gave have in common is that they're only accessible to certain demographics. When you make Simón Borreo, one of the founders of Rappi, said a few years ago in an interview[1] that the wildfire success of Rappi and other on-demand startups in Latin America and other emerging markets is due to vastly lower labor costs. The unfortunate reality is that by and large pricing for many items is artificially low due to (hyper)exploitation happening somewhere up the pipeline -- if something is cheap and accessible, often it is because somewhere up the chain, wages are lower or labor conditions are poorer. (Incidentally I think Simón's point should make everyone living in countries with strong labor and minimum wage laws who values those things highly suspicious of the on-demand model and the lobbying efforts of unicorns in that space)

It's relatively easy to drive availability for the small subset of the population who didn't notice the apples on their grocery bill cost $5.99 a pound because they were organically grown on a small biodynamic farm in Oregon that treats its workers kindly. It's much, much harder (or outright intractable) to drive availability for everyone else -- under the current system.

[1] https://lavca.org/2016/12/01/entrepreneur-profile-simon-borr...

Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#36

Post by jkaplowitz »

tharne wrote: post #31
standardUser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally it has been unions that have placed a check on employers' perpetual quest to trade humanity for efficiency.

That's true to an extent, but unfortunately unions (at least in the US) tend to end up mimicking the same corporate behavior they are supposed to be placing a check on. The get bigger and more powerful and they start to take and take with no concern for the fallout, and like corporations, they get politicians to do their bidding at the expense of the general population. There are towns near me teetering on bankruptcy…

Sure, US unions need some reforms, just like the plutocrats need to be reined in.

And yet, if there are moneyed interests promoting the goals of big business and the rest of the ruling class, isn't it better to balance that out with whatever imperfect form of unionism is currently available while advocating for the necessary reforms? An anti-worker imbalance in money and power seems worse than that.

Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#37

Post by txcwpalpha »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

One side effect of the growth of Amazon is the replacement of "decent" jobs with absolutely soul sucking ones. In the early 2000's I knew people that worked as delivery drivers for UPS or FedEx and it was a decent job. They seemed happy. Now I see the Amazon delivery people, and they look majorly stressed out as if they are on the edge of collapse. Many times they are delivering things at 10pm desperately trying to m…

>It seems the "decent" jobs are going away, replaced by ones that turn workers into robots to better extract value from their labor.

We are in a (or entering a) transitionary period where said workers are soon to be literally replaced by robots. The current market expects robot-like efficiency from these jobs, but the robots aren't ready to fully take over yet, which means people get stuck filling the gap with jobs that require more and more of them. Transitionary periods always suck for the people caught in the churn.

On one hand, once the robots are more widely deployed for warehouse work and delivery, there will be less stories about overworked, tired humans. On the other hand, there might be more stories about less availability of low-skill jobs, and these same humans now being underemployed.

Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#38

Post by tharne »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #36
tharne wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true to an extent, but unfortunately unions (at least in the US) tend to end up mimicking the same corporate behavior they are supposed to be placing a check on. The get bigger and more powerful and they start to take and take with no concern for the fallout, and like corporations, they get politicians to do their bidding at the expense of the general population. There are towns near me teetering on bankruptcy…

Sure, US unions need some reforms, just like the plutocrats need to be reined in. And yet, if there are moneyed interests promoting the goals of big business and the rest of the ruling class, isn't it better to balance that out with whatever imperfect form of unionism is currently available while advocating for the necessary reforms? An anti-worker imbalance in money and power seems worse than that.

That's what I believed when I was younger. However, after watching unions in action, they seem to make things even worse, especially for younger workers. I don't think the answer to outsized corporate power is to try and balance it with outsized union power.

What I'd like to see is simply more decentralization of power, something like the "trust busting" under Teddy Roosevelt. When any organization gets past a certain scale it seems to lose touch with basic values and decency. You see this with countries too. Small states like Singapore or Denmark don't often start needless wars or meddle in the affairs of others, the way superstates like the U.S., Russia or China do.

Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#39

Post by uoaei »

snowwrestler wrote: post #30

Amazon is pulling a fast one here, and The Verge is letting them get away with it. Here’s the key part: > it’s also been building out a network of its own delivery drivers under the Amazon Flex platform, which is a kind of on-demand contract network similar to Uber and food delivery companies like DoorDash. So, in fact Amazon is not delivering their own packages, they are employing an ad-hoc network of local truckers…

Some of the most unsafe driving I've seen is from those Amazon Sprinter vans. I blame Amazon more than the driver.

Re: Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS

#40

Post by diegoholiveira »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

One side effect of the growth of Amazon is the replacement of "decent" jobs with absolutely soul sucking ones. In the early 2000's I knew people that worked as delivery drivers for UPS or FedEx and it was a decent job. They seemed happy. Now I see the Amazon delivery people, and they look majorly stressed out as if they are on the edge of collapse. Many times they are delivering things at 10pm desperately trying to m…

Stop buying stuff online and start buying from locals.
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