Amazon Flex • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Flex

#431

Post by ticviking » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:18 PM UTC

jlebar wrote: post #378

tzier wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, by having Amazon control the to-the-door experience, that gives them incredible granular controls over how things are done, when, by whom, and how they do it, including how they are supposed to treat you at the door (if you're there), what to say, etc. etc. You can't exert control (e.g. uniforms, greetings, etc.) over independent contractors, so Amazon would not be able to do any of this under th…

> You can't exert control (e.g. uniforms, greetings, etc.) over independent contractors That's false as a matter of fact.

Are you at all following Uber's legal issues?

Re: Amazon Flex

#432

Post by mrmondo » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:27 PM UTC

randyrand wrote: post #426

mrmondo wrote: post #422

I don't think that "$18-25/hr" is "Great Pay"

...not everyone gets to be a high paid programmer, dude.

I'm not a high paid programmer, but Amazon making a statement like that actually makes things worse, not better by normalising / promoting low income rates as 'Great'.

Re: Amazon Flex

#433

Post by digikata » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:34 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #409

digikata wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the probability of something going wrong higher if the delivery infrastructure isn't staffed with full time people? I would guess that mishandling, loss, misdelivery, theft would all be more likely under the flex model.

Why? What are you basing this on? Why would part-time people be any less responsible? They have less to deal with, more time to deliver, use their own car, choose their schedule, and set the radius and familiarity of their route. I'd expect them to make better deliveries and more accurately. Uber/Lyft have shown this model works fine.

I'm basing it on a rough mental model.

Let's assume there is zero difference between the quality of full time people and part time people, but, being people there is distribution of people that a) need to be trained over time to handle certain on-the-job situations (e.g. dog in yard, etc...), and b) the system needs time (or some number of deliveries) to discover that some people are basically not fit for the position - including people signed up with the intent to scam the system. Let's compare two groups of employees, a full-time group and a part-time group.

The first thing that might surface in this model is that the part-time group requires more people to fill the same number of deliveries that the full time group can fulfill. So, in terms of numbers of bad deliveries, you'll have more failures just because you had to draw a larger number of individuals for the part-time pool vs the full time - even if quality of individuals for the full time vs part-time are exactly the same.

Adding further assumptions doesn't improve things. Maybe one might assume that part-time employees are more likely to move on to other jobs and leave the Flex workforce - well that's more churn and you get more people in category b, and more people temporarily needing training/experience. Maybe the distributions aren't exactly the same between full time and part time - one might theorize that scammers are more likely to take jobs under flex (maybe even under multiple aliases to keep from getting caught)... again this makes the performance under Flex worse...

Maybe even given the quality differences, it only ends up making sense to offer Flex delivery on the periphery of where it doesn't make cost sense to install or expand full-time infrastructure.

Re: Amazon Flex

#434

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:36 PM UTC

mrmondo wrote: post #422

I don't think that "$18-25/hr" is "Great Pay"

> I don't think that "$18-25/hr" is "Great Pay"

For a job with little educational background, fairly free ability to set your own schedule, etc., its fairly good (even with the additional cost overhead that comes with independent contract work, as I assume is the case here.)

For most of the people on HN, sure, its pretty horrible pay compared to their alternatives, but HN isn't exactly the target audience.

Re: Amazon Flex

#435

Post by learc83 » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:38 PM UTC

kornholi wrote: post #429

radlad wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it far more frustrating when one of the last mile delivery services says they have delivered the package, and then it shows up a day or two later. Amazon hasn't honored the two day guarantee for me in these instances.

FedEx marked one of my packages as delivered but it didn't show up until 6 days later (the replacement arrived on the same day...). I assume someone just forgot about it on the truck, since the other one was actually delivered on time.

I've had far more problems with FedEx than with the contractors who deliver Prime Now.

FedEx (unlike UPS) routinely delivers packages a day late, and they often leave packages in front of my garage door (where they can get rained on) with no notification.

Re: Amazon Flex

#436

Post by barrkel » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:44 PM UTC

caskance wrote: post #297

barrkel wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; in the UK, you need courier insurance to be a delivery driver. If you're just Joe Public doing Amazon deliveries, you are potentially driving without insurance.

If you're just Joe Public doing Amazon deliveries, you can also break the speed limit or park illegally in order to make your deliveries. How is that any different from not being properly insured? It's the courier's responsibility to not do those things. The most Amazon can do is to not work with people they know break the law.

Illegal parking is a civil offense, and you're not likely to speed enough to get banned, whereas driving without insurance is a pretty serious criminal offense and will make it much more expensive to get insurance in the future.

Re: Amazon Flex

#437

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:50 PM UTC

caskance wrote: post #297

barrkel wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; in the UK, you need courier insurance to be a delivery driver. If you're just Joe Public doing Amazon deliveries, you are potentially driving without insurance.

If you're just Joe Public doing Amazon deliveries, you can also break the speed limit or park illegally in order to make your deliveries. How is that any different from not being properly insured? It's the courier's responsibility to not do those things. The most Amazon can do is to not work with people they know break the law.

> The most Amazon can do is to not work with people they know break the law.

Actually, Amazon can do more than that -- e.g., require up-front proof of appropriate insurance.

Re: Amazon Flex

#438

Post by somebehemoth » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:53 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #336

jimhefferon wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It perplexes me why they don't shift their delivery period six hours later to start at 15:00 and end at 21:00. Maybe they feel that even people doing delivery jobs are entitled to be home with their family at the end of the day?

Plenty of people work jobs where they are not at home in the evening, so I'm not sure this argument is the most effective. Second and third shift are real things for factory workers, almost everyone in a hospital, grocery store clerks, gas station attendants, janitors almost everywhere, security guards, emergency responders, hell anything that's open after 5pm (which is a ton of stuff). So yeah, adding a second shift…

Just because people do work 2nd shift does not mean it is ideal for them to do so. So I think parent is commenting to say that it is possible that delivery companies value work life balance for their employees and that is a good thing. Market forces change things sure (second shift becomes required to compete), but the first shift schedule is a benefit that I am sure a lot of delivery people appreciate.

Re: Amazon Flex

#439

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 11:55 PM UTC

tzier wrote: post #360

speby wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a massive lack of imagination. I highly doubt the only motivation from Amazon's perspective is strictly about cost-cutting. On its surface, yes, it would be easy to assume this could result in some odd or lesser version of having a major courier deliver your package. On the other hand, by having Amazon control the to-the-door experience, that gives them incredible granular controls over how things are done, w…

> On the other hand, by having Amazon control the to-the-door experience, that gives them incredible granular controls over how things are done, when, by whom, and how they do it, including how they are supposed to treat you at the door (if you're there), what to say, etc. etc. You can't exert control (e.g. uniforms, greetings, etc.) over independent contractors, so Amazon would not be able to do any of this under th…

> You can't exert control (e.g. uniforms, greetings, etc.) over independent contractors, so Amazon would not be able to do any of this under their current model.

You can, but the degree, nature, and scope of such control will be part of any analysis as to whether they are bona fide independent contractors, or actually employees where you are trying to evade requirements of employment law.

Re: Amazon Flex

#440

Post by mindslight » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 12:02 AM UTC

Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #425

mindslight wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UPS/Fedex/USPS have figured out how to reliably enter apartment buildings on their own (USPS uses a key, I presume UPS/Fedex use some numeric code convention). Amazon randos call you and make it your problem, as if they have never delivered a no-signature package before. Nearly every time I've used Amazon, they've surprised me with something crappy and I'm left wondering how they're so popular. Recently, they display…

> they've surprised me with something crappy What are they surprising you with? I've done loads of orders with Amazon and it's basically always what I ordered. Once I got some cheap knockoffs, but was able to easily return it. That's out of a few hundred orders. As for the timeout stuff, they should definitely stop calling it a guarantee. Most of the time it's correct, and fairly often I'll get a package much quicker…

The surprise is about their behavior, not about items received. In the situation I described, the discrepancy between the two times caused me to investigate further. 12 hours later, the same delivery schedule was still available. In other words, they deliberately misstated cutoff times to create a sense of urgency and discourage shopping around or having second thoughts before hitting submit. WTF?

In another instance - they canceled one item from an order, sent no notification of such, and completely erased that item from the order history. I was left scratching my head, until I reviewed emails to see if I really had ordered that item. Again, WTF?

I'm sure they're alright if you're constantly ordering things from Prime or whatever because there are more good instances to outweigh the weirdness, combined with their policy of crediting people to keep them happy and avoid breaking the illusion.