Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by dwags » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:22 PM UTC

papreclip wrote: post #43

spike021 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 meet their quotas. Even UPS sounds.. not great. I have a friend who's a delivery driver for UPS and especially this time of year he has days where his truck is loaded with 250-300 parcels and they're basically all supposed to be delivered…

RE: UPS - The hours aren't bad. You get overtime past 40 and are generally glad when it happens. If you work at a normal pace you won't get into trouble for productivity with your boss, and you're never at risk of making less money because you're not productive enough. UPS guarantees you a certain number of hours so you don't get trapped committing to a job that ends up only giving you 20/wk What sucks about the job…

Repetitive yes, brainless no. Every day is the same problem and you need to figure out the best way to solve it. You also get paid for the number of hours the computer says. Finish your route in 5 hours and getting paid for 8 was pretty rewarding. I also stayed in great shape and you get to hang out outside all day.

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

#52

Post by toomuchtodo » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:34 PM UTC

harikb wrote: post #41

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…

Amazon needs to add a "Deliver next week, given them a break" instead of the $1 it offers me which I never use anyways.

Deliver next week, ship via USPS. I don’t care when it shows up as long as the workers are paid and treated humanely.

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

#53

Post by magnetic » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

harikb wrote: post #41

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…

Amazon needs to add a "Deliver next week, given them a break" instead of the $1 it offers me which I never use anyways.

You can select "Amazon Day" delivery to accomplish that (kind of).

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

#54

Post by pornel » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

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…

Voting with dollars is hard when Amazon hoovers up their competitors. You may be buying from an Amazon subsidiary without even realizing it (e.g. UK's largest "not Amazon" book site is owned by Amazon).

Just vote with your votes for fair wages instead of tax breaks for Bezos.

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

#55

Post by jonlucc » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

harikb wrote: post #41

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…

Amazon needs to add a "Deliver next week, given them a break" instead of the $1 it offers me which I never use anyways.

I've been seeing a "deliver on my Amazon day (Saturday)" option, which is a way to batch deliver all purchases for a week.

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

#56

Post by asdf21 » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:37 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #34

tharne wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

Upvoted, because very valid points overall. That being said..

>Individual consumers can’t possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy

Of course not, however, they don't need full information to hear, at some point or another, that Amazon is a poor place to work.

And it isn't as if the government has a solid track record of producing new regulation lately. Can you name one well-executed regulatory initiative the US Federal Government has implemented in the last 20-30 years? Or better yet, one well-executed major infrastructure project?

I'm genuinely curious, maybe I'm just cynical, but I'm not sure it's even possible anymore for the government to be functional at any deeper level.

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

#57

Post by softwaredoug » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:39 PM UTC

We can be mad at Amazon, but so many brands have a chance to ruthlessly focus on customers, but choose not to. Even today, in grocery, you see it happening. There’s major players with deep pockets struggling to do an end-to-end grocery customer experience that competes. After a while I don’t want companies like this to survive.

If many markets were about two competent players duking it out, I’d be sympathetic. But usually it’s Amazon vs some company I’ve mostly just tolerated my whole life, but seems to care less about the customer. Amazon just often deserves to win.

Now maybe it already is already to the point we need to think about anti trust issues, but that comes with a big cost of potentially protecting a lot of incompetent players out there.

(And there are lots of brand that ruthlessly focus on customers that treat employees very well, ie Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, etc)

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

#58

Post by kelnos » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:39 PM UTC

khuey wrote: post #14

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.

15 minutes ago an Amazon driver left my package on the street in front of my building (in urban San Francisco) and marked it as "handed directly to a resident" in the system. Amazon doesn't provide any discoverable way to complain about this either so I'm sure their internal metrics look great.

Amazon's ways of getting help are... confusing... at best. Recently I ordered something, shipper marked it as delivered, but it wasn't there. I dug through the orders interface, trying to find an option for "item never arrived", but could only find things about returns and exchanges, or ways to report damaged items or bad packaging. After searching the customer support site for the problem, the (non-interactive) answer was essentially "wait 48 hours because sometimes things appear later than indicated". It had already been more than that, and there were no follow-up steps beyond that.

Eventually I googled the problem, and got linked to some random non-Amazon site, that told me to go find the generic "Help" link, and dig through a couple screens until I found a link to a chat interface (basically a "nothing here is helping me" link), where a robot would help me. The process worked perfectly and easily once I got there, but there's no way I would have gotten there on my own.

I suspect some people, when confronted with a missing item, will try part of what I did and just give up and eat the cost, especially if it's a cheap item. So the internal metrics look good, but that's not telling the whole story.

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

#59

Post by kelnos » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

Kovah wrote: post #23

The same happens here, but DHL is the major player being replaced and it makes total sense for both Amazon and its customers. To be honest, since my first delivery made directly by Amazon, until now, I never missed a single package. It was delivered on time, most times on the day after the order. DHL on the other side has horrible drivers that would just drop off the package at the next post station, instead of knock…

> I would appreciate paying more for the delivery if I knew that the drivers receive a better salary with that.

Unfortunately most people do not think like that, and would just not buy the item (or would buy it from a cheaper competitor) if there were higher shipping fees. Amazon knows this; free shipping is essentially a marketing cost for them. And they know that even if the shipping/delivery experience is sometimes frustrating, people will still come back for more.

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

#60

Post by jacobolus » Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 11:54 PM UTC

asdf21 wrote: post #56

jacobolus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

Upvoted, because very valid points overall. That being said.. >Individual consumers can’t possibly have full information about the supply chain of every item they buy Of course not, however, they don't need full information to hear, at some point or another, that Amazon is a poor place to work. And it isn't as if the government has a solid track record of producing new regulation lately. Can you name one well-execute…

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was quite effective until its leadership were unlawfully replaced with partisan hacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_...

One big federal problem with antitrust and other corporate–related law is that we have now had an unbroken half century of “conservative” domination of the US Supreme Court. Over that time consumer, worker, citizen, and small-business friendly interpretations of a wide variety of laws have been steadily replaced by interpretations friendly to wealthy/corporate interests.

That control should have been broken after Scalia died but the GOP-controlled Senate broke with any pretense of good faith or respect for norms or precedent and refused to allow even a moderate compromise candidate to come to a Senate confirmation vote. After regaining control of the presidency the Senate then eliminated the filibuster so it could force radical GOP ideologues through onto the bench.

> I'm not sure it's even possible anymore for the government to be functional at any deeper level.

This is absurd. The US civil service is full of highly competent experts without whom we would all be exposed to grave risks every day. They do their work conscientiously and seriously, largely out of the spotlight.

Let me recommend you read Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, or at least listen to one of these interviews about it:

https://www.scpr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/10/02/65410/

https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-what-is-the-fifth-risk-with-mich...