Two Portland delivery companies revolt against Amazon, shut down

&gt; &quot;The companies were losing money and employees trying to satisfy Amazon and their constant abusive changes,” Tom Rask, an attorney for Last Mile and Triton, told Motherboard. &quot;You have to hire numerous drivers who may or may not be working. One day Amazon dictates that you have thirty routes, the next day forty, then the day after twenty. You’re supposed to have enough drivers for back-up while Amazon is lowering pay. Amazon’s actions are unlawful.&quot;<p>Sounds miserable. Id shut down too if I was losing money with only 1 client.<p>If this were freelancing it’d be like having to be always available for one client 40 hrs a week, but not knowing if you’ll get to bill 5 hrs or 50… while your rates constantly decrease. There’s no point in having this business

This is more or less how it should be. If Amazon isn&#x27;t going to offer a good enough deal, then companies shouldn&#x27;t move packages for them. As more and more people figure it out, other delivery companies will stop working with Amazon as well, although it may be that the deals work out better in places with lower cost-of-living, easier delivery routes (due to climate, geography, etc.), or other advantages.<p>If some other delivery company can figure out how to make it work economically, then they can do the work instead.<p>If nobody is interested in trying to make it work, Amazon will have to either improve the deal it offers or go back to using FedEx&#x2F;UPS&#x2F;USPS.

Wow, I guess I never really paid attention to the details behind all the Amazon headlines I see.<p>&quot;In April, Amazon announced it would reduce the amount it paid for drivers from $17.25 to $16.00 an hour, according to the letter...Weeks later, Amazon announced a series of raises for its drivers around the country as part of a public relations push following a union drive at an Amazon warehouse&quot;<p>&quot;Currently, Amazon delivery drivers are expected to deliver upwards of 400 packages a day on 10-hour routes that often extend up to 12 hours.&quot;<p>400 seems crazy, I wondered about UPS. According to Google &quot;At UPS, the average driver makes about 120 deliveries per day, says Jack Levis, the shipping giant&#x27;s director of process management&quot;

&gt; [contract delivery companies] have to adhere to a strict set of rules from Amazon around hiring, pay, delivery times and routes, and more.<p>The only one of these that Amazon has any right to dictate is delivery times (and what they will pay for that delivery). The fact that Amazon has direct control over the contractor’s worker’s pay, and even the ability to fire those workers, is very shocking to me.<p>Remember, this isn’t a situation like Uber: these are not contractors to Amazon, but employees of independent delivery companies.

I don&#x27;t get Amazon&#x27;s play here. Just charge me more money for items, and pay your people well. I&#x27;d rather have a happy safe driver than a miserable one at the end of his or her rope, all so I could save a dollar.<p>Reminds me of Papa John complaining giving his employees healthcare would make prices go up 14 cents per pizza. Seriously? Who cares about 14 cents when ordering a pizza...<p>Amazon&#x27;s entire value to me is fast delivery. Definitely not lowest prices, and definitely not quality.

Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer<p>Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.<p>from: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;leadership-principles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;leadership-principles</a>

&gt; &quot;We refused their demands and they followed through with their threat, terminating their contract with us, leaving their employees confused and looking for answers,&quot; she continued. &quot;We’re doing everything we can to support the affected employees including connecting them with other Delivery Service Partners in the area who are hiring.”<p>I&#x27;d love for that PR person to drive the route one day and see if they can meet the quota. I can&#x27;t help but to hear a lot of contempt in her statement.

I suspect that amazon specializes in arbitrage.<p>They collect information in a domain (such as delivering stuff to places in a region). They build a detailed map of &quot;easy to deliver&quot; and &quot;horrible to deliver&quot; locations in that region.<p>After that, they take the &quot;Easy to deliver&quot; places for themselves and get a 3rd party to agree to deliver the rest, typically based on some rate scheme that is coarse to assume &quot;average delivery pain&quot; when in fact they&#x27;re getting <i>only</i> the impossible delivery list.

I work closely with someone who runs one of these Amazon DSPs.<p>He has 70 employees who love working there. In the last 6 months he has had only 2 people leave, and one due to their family moving.<p>He has a military background and he protects his people like they are his own unit. He deals with all the shit that Amazon throws down at him and builds his own processes and procedures to deal with things like day-to-day route variability.<p>The drivers work 10 hours a day 4 days a week. He will go in every morning and tweak the routes that the AI designs so that they can finish their 10 hour route in 8 hours, he still pays them for the full 10. Sometimes they will get done in 6 hours and run another route and make 2.5x their wage on the day.<p>He says the internal Amazon dashboards that track his company performance break due to his numbers. And everyone is making very, very good money with full benefits.<p>I’ve seen the numbers and anyone losing money running one of these shops is just doing a very poor job hiring, training, and managing the process.<p>I scoffed a year ago when he told me he was leaving his job to go do this. Since then I’ve eaten my words.

Vote with your dollars folks. I&#x27;m 5 years in to an Amazon boycott and hardly even notice really.

Clickbait title, it sounds like it&#x27;s some huge movement, but I take their point.<p>It seems to me that the underlying issue isn&#x27;t some sort of highly predatory company (Amazon in this case), a lot of them are or were.<p>The main trick is the ability to surveil and analyze employee activity. Imagine a 1950&#x27;s auto factory where every location, utterance, and move by a worker could be gathered and parsed.<p>I&#x27;d say that programmers will get a good healthy dose of that going forward and WFH gave it a good healthy shove.

I&#x27;ve started to shop directly with some retailers instead of buying through AMZN (ex: Thorne) and I&#x27;ve also noticed that AMZN has become increasingly expensive for many items, sometimes double the price than can be found locally (ex: Allouse). Being a Prime member doesn&#x27;t really offer me anything that I can&#x27;t live without. Sometimes I can get next day delivery but usually the item takes longer than 2 days. Recently I started some online shopping at Walmart and have been pleasantly surprised with the price and speed of service (sort of like AMZN use to be). I&#x27;ve decided to cancel my Prime Membership this Aug, mostly because AMZN just isn&#x27;t competitive and offers less value these days.

2 delivery companies quit.that leaves 1998 others. This is lower than an employee attrition rate. It is only newsworthy because it involves Amazon and they gave a reason which confirms a popular media narrative

The goal is to pay people high at the beginning, get them hooked on the pay, and then squeeze them by lowering pay and they have no choice because Amazon is a monopoly on their services.<p>Have people not figured this out yet?<p>That’s how they get you and transfer all the costs out of their hands. I’m surprised there isn’t more of an outrage over this.

A quick post I wrote with some back of the envelope math on this. I thought back two years ago that this was just an exercise in dumping risk onto entrepreneurs.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qr.ae&#x2F;TWGBfd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qr.ae&#x2F;TWGBfd</a>

Amazon is a cess pit in every respect. I use it once in a blue moon if I can&#x27;t find an obscure item elsewhere, but I mostly abandoned it some years back. Alternatives have raised their game, and aren&#x27;t regularly appearing in the news for being a cess pit. Everyone knows it&#x27;s a cess pit (you can&#x27;t miss the endless stories) but they like the convenience, and are frankly too lazy too look elsewhere, so the inevitable mock shock, disapproval and tut-tutting all comes off as quite insincere - just a little theatrical etiquette.

To the American employees complaining about Amazon&#x27;s ethical practices, just don&#x27;t work for them. This isn&#x27;t mainland China, it&#x27;s not either Foxconn or farm work.

This is an interesting analog of the problem retail workers have on shift scheduling and shift changes.<p>&quot;One day Amazon dictates that you have thirty routes, the next day forty, then the day after twenty. You’re supposed to have enough drivers for back-up while Amazon is lowering pay. Amazon’s actions are unlawful.&quot;<p>Delivery is probably something you want to run in house and not outsource. It opens them up to another group that could push to unionization though which is probably why they went the Uber route.

That&#x27;s interesting, I can&#x27;t say that I&#x27;ve ever seen an Amazon delivery truck. I&#x27;ve only hit non UPS&#x2F;USPS driver when getting something big that required freight delivery.<p>I suppose that the article goes in the same pile as the &#x27;how Costco pressures vendors&#x27;, &#x27;how Walmart beats up it&#x27;s employees&#x27;, ranging back to manufacturing companies, traveling farm labor, and block haulers on the pyramids.

This is having impact. Noticed last night that all orders to Portland had a delivery date of one week out vs the normal two days.

How is it even physically possible to deliver 400 packages in 10 hours? That comes to 1.5 minutes per package. One cannot do it even if it’s in the same area and every house has a package. Amazon employees already pee in a bottle to save time now they need to learn magic too?

That&#x27;s interesting. I wonder if it has anything to do with why my prime delivery time has jumped to the middle of next week. I get there&#x27;s a holiday this weekend, but everythign is saying July 6th.

I wonder if Amazon will start stores and do click to collect. Maybe the front half of a warehouse or something. Maybe you&#x27;d get some money for bringing your neighbors package back with you.

Amazon, like many other of the big companies, control revenue flow in the economy.<p>It&#x27;s not the people who crate the value who control the revenue flow, but the ones who have access to the customers.

Personally feel it won&#x27;t hurt Amazon one bit unless consumers change their &quot;reliance&quot; on it.

This is just a scheme for Amazon not to have to hire delivery drivers as full time.

Bezos truly chose the right time to retire: « Après moi le déluge »!

These are last-mile delivery workers. The Information had an excellent article a few weeks back about how dire the conditions are of their long-distance drivers who carry parcels between the warehouses. They have a much higher rate of accidents due to this, with innocent lives mangled and Amazon shielding itself behind the contractor status to dodge liability.<p>(paywalled) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;the-deadly-toll-of-amazons-trucking-boom" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;the-deadly-toll-of-a...</a><p>It is legally possible for judges to &quot;pierce the veil&quot; of limited liability in the case of severe malfeasance and I&#x27;d argue this is clearly the case, but our corporate-friendly judges see it otherwise.

Using AWS supports abuse?<p>At least for me, I think I can&#x27;t support Amazon&#x27;s treatment of people. Is there a way we on HN can have an effect here, and could avoiding AWS be a start?<p>Or is there a better way, or am I wrong to draw such conclusions?

Oh look, it&#x27;s the dumb, comma-style, title

Good. Amazon gets to feel some market pressure to pay people better. This is capitalism functioning well.

HN really needs to look at these types of headlines -<p>They are written without qualification.<p>0.001 of Amazon delivery companies shut down<p>2 out if 2000 delivery companies shut down.<p>Are both probably more accurate.