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Amazon Flex

flex.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Flex

#181

Post by yeukhon »

shawnee_ wrote: post #118

Q: Where can I deliver with Amazon Flex? A: Amazon Flex is available now in Seattle. It will be available soon in New York, Baltimore, Miami, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta and Portland. Smart move by Amazon to refrain from making any Bay-area city one of its test markets. It's like Amazon is saying "we don't need to prove this will work in the bubble; let's base our test data set on realistic markets…

Consider they are based in Seattle, I think they have better luck with Seattle. I am not dismissing other point you said, but Seattle is no different from being also a tech area :-)

Re: Amazon Flex

#182

Post by FollowSteph3 »

What happens if you get in a car accident delivering Amazon packages and don't have commercial car insurance as I suspect most people don't have not realize they need...

Re: Amazon Flex

#183

Post by jlgaddis »

TheRealWatson wrote: post #84
drglitch wrote: post #43

I guess i was part of trials in Northern New Jersey - a random guy showed up in a beaten up car (i noticed because it had pretty nasty oil smoke coming out of the tailpipes, almost cartoon-like). He was wearing an "amazon now" t-shirt, but then after having me sign a delivery slip, stuck around awkwardly expecting a tip. Not a good experience.

Can we agree already to not have to tip? I don't want Amazon to realize this money-saving practice at my expense. We don't tip UPS, we shouldn't tip these guys. Nobody tips me for pushing code to git.

The trend nowadays seems to be for everyone to ask for tips. I guess I kinda understand as it costs them nothing to do so and they definitely don't lose anything (and only serve to gain) by asking / soliciting for tips.

Re: Amazon Flex

#184

Post by chrisBob »

FollowSteph3 wrote: post #182

What happens if you get in a car accident delivering Amazon packages and don't have commercial car insurance as I suspect most people don't have not realize they need...

I think Uber deals with this by having an insurance policy that covers the workers while they are on duty. I am sure Amazon will do something similar.

Re: Amazon Flex

#185

Post by scrollaway »

ekianjo wrote: post #141
ousta wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cashiers are getting extincted little by little, supermarkets all have self checkin, macdonalds rlies heavily on it, train systems in many countries have automated lines, bakers have long been replaced by industrial ovens and breads in EVERY supermarket and they are now low qualified workers helped by electronic ovens who unfreeze breads instead of workers. don't make any mistake as technology evolves it becomes chea…

> cashiers are getting extincted little by little, Cashiers are still alive and well in Japan, thank you for asking. > Supermarkets all have self checkin Not everywhere and even where there is i see way more people queuing for the cashier queue than going for self checking but maybe it's different the Californian world or wherever you are living. > ovens and breads in EVERY supermarket I'm obviously talking about loc…

You keep making wiiild claims based on "I don't see it happening (as much as you)". Don't you travel?

> I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters.

There's less. There's less of all these jobs you mention. You say in another post "but it won't go extinct" - well no, probably not, they'll still exist in some form. Horse carts also exist, but nobody's here saying "Cars have not fully replaced horses".

> It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation

This is in effect all over the place. When I went to Berlin I didn't find a single subway train driver.

"It won't happen" is talk from people who didn't want to accept an eventuality a decade ago. Today, it's happening - putting your hands over your eyes is very much unproductive.

Re: Amazon Flex

#186

Post by IkmoIkmo »

I wonder how long it'll take for an online thievery marketplace will pop-up selling Amazon Flex delivery data. For example, if you know you delivered a $10k gold apple watch (hypothetically), I can bet you that a local thief would pay you at least $100 for you to tell him which house it was delivered to.

In fact, my neighbour's home was broken into last year. Turns out (unbeknownst to us), he apparently had a safe in his home with nearly half a million in value (watches, diamonds etc. Huge surprise to us because we know him as a chubby, nerdy government worker who drives an electric bicycle to work, never would've expected him to have some kind of tony montana thing going on in his house haha). Anyway so we spoke to him and the police after and apparently a small crew broke into his home and went straight for the safe with specialised equipment, i.e. they knew exactly where to go and someone had told them, and they made a massive, massive haul. Imagine you worked at Amazon Flex and delivered a rolex, that's valuable information.

Anyway there are the usual problems with this that you see at eBay or the SR (how do you escrow payments on what obviously must be an illegal online service with anonymous owners, and if you don't have escrow how do you establish trust between merchant and buyer), added to the fact it's pretty easy for the police to trace it back to a delivery man if it happens often enough. Anyway wouldn't be surprised to see it happen within a few years.

Re: Amazon Flex

#187

Post by mason240 »

ekianjo wrote: post #40
deanCommie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is these jobs need to last only long enough for society to get it's head out of it's ass and introduce a universal basic income policy

> and introduce a universal basic income policy here we go again with this... What's wrong with such jobs ? AS mentioned by Amazon you don't need to work 9 to 5, you can just work for extra if you need. Even if you HAD basic income this kind of part-time job could make sense to make a bit more money that the nothing you would get to survive on your own.

That's part of the appeal of UBI - we just accept that we are moving into a gig/freelance economy and these new jobs (and old jobs that have new conventions, like 3 day workweeks) are there to supplement UBI.

As a believer in capitalism, I see UBI as equalizing the labor side of the equation without economy-smothering alternatives like unions or excessive labor regulations.

It does by decoupling the need for a person to have a stable job. I think the effects of this would be almost as big as the shifts that happened during the Industrial Revolution. Once workers are truly free to choose their employers, we will see a massive shift in workplace norms.

Re: Amazon Flex

#188

Post by mseebach »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #186

I wonder how long it'll take for an online thievery marketplace will pop-up selling Amazon Flex delivery data. For example, if you know you delivered a $10k gold apple watch (hypothetically), I can bet you that a local thief would pay you at least $100 for you to tell him which house it was delivered to. In fact, my neighbour's home was broken into last year. Turns out (unbeknownst to us), he apparently had a safe in…

I've never received an Amazon package that listed its contents on the outside. The reason for this appears fairly obvious.

Re: Amazon Flex

#189

Post by jbapple »

Given that Amazon warehouse jobs include working unpaid time[0] and the standard practice of employers inflating per-hour rate expectations for piecework jobs, I am dubious of the "$18–25/hr" claim.

0: See INTEGRITY STAFFING SOLUTIONS, INC. v. BUSK, http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-433_5h26.pdf

Re: Amazon Flex

#190

Post by mavrc »

ekianjo wrote: post #89
tokenizerrr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll be deprecated as soon as self driving cars become viable. The same goes for most jobs like this, technology will catch up eventually and make them obsolote.

I'm still waiting to see cashiers disappear in supermarkets. Or bakers, since bread and cake production could be completely automatized by now. Strangely they are not going away. I wonder why... People who predict extinction of jobs are usually wrong.

Even in the tiny rural community I live in, cashiers are being replaced by automated systems in large stores. Smaller stores will probably continue to have cashiers until forever, but we're not talking about 100% of cashiers going away, we're talking about some percentage of that. If half of the available jobs in a market vanish, that will have significant and devastating effects, regardless of how they're lost. Especially for jobs like cashiering, because there are limited places for cashiers to go, and this problem will eventually effect lots of jobs that have no up front professional training requirement (and perhaps many that do, but that's its own discussion.)

It's only a matter of time, for example, until Domino's pizza production is automated. The only reason we haven't seen this yet is because hiring humans is cheaper than solving the complex automation problem this presents. But technology continues to get cheaper. When that swings the other way, your pizza will get made by robots. Pizza delivery by robots is already a solved problem, just waiting for the costs to skew the right way. In short: at the speed at which technological problems get solved, it's unlikely we will have even adequately discussed the ramifications of the problem before it arrives on our doorstep.

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