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Comment by jotato | Hacker News Reader

Amazon delivery has been bringing packages to us for nearly a year now. A few things I have noticed:

1) They can never find our house. Now, We do live in a newer neighborhood (3 yrs old) but USPS, UPS, and FedEx don't have a problem. AMZL US will often miss deliveries because they can't find our house. Usually this just sets the delivery back a day, sometimes 2 or 3. The worst case was 3 weeks.

2) They deliver late. Not really a con; just a fact. if AMZL US is delivering the package it won't get to us before 5.

3) Their drivers are not professionals. I get the feeling anyone can deliver for them. I swear half of the people I see are Uber drivers who don't have a route ATM.

4) Just yesterday AMZL US brought me a package. They guy who brought it didn't know how to scan the package to mark it as delivered. He actually had us do it for him. They have a long way to go before if they want to take this seriously

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>Their drivers are not professionals. I get the feeling anyone can deliver for them. I swear half of the people I see are Uber drivers who don't have a route ATM.

That's exactly what they are. See more here: https://logistics.amazon.com/

http://logistics.amazon.com is for small companies to work as contractors for AMZL. AMZL doesn't actually employ any drivers- they hire lots and lots of small companies that work on contracts paid on a per-route basis (1 route is a days work for one driver, generally). Those small companies can find people anywhere they like, so long as they can do the job.

https://flex.amazon.com/ on the other hand takes it even further: literally everyone is an uber-style single-person contractor doing n-hour contracts with AMZL or Prime Now to delivery packages. No middle-man contracting company.

Thanks. Good info. I assumed the logistics site was for 'independent contractors'

This has been my experience too, and I don't think I'm being nitpicky when I say that there is a large dropoff in reliability from UPS/FedEx to Amazon. I would estimate that the success rate in receiving my package on the scheduled date is about 50% with Amazon and somewhere around 99% with UPS/FedEx.

I live in a condo building which requires fob access, and while the UPS and FedEx drivers have a fob (because it's the same person every day making a large number of deliveries at once at the same time every day), the Amazon drivers do not, so must stand awkwardly outside the building until somebody maybe lets them in, but is usually denied access because letting them in is a violation of our building policies and can result in a large fine. This in turn results in many packages either being left outside the building on the ground, or not delivered at all.

I think the main problem Amazon is going to have with trying to vertically integrate into deliveries is that they alone don't constitute enough volume to keep drivers employed full-time, so they would have to open the service for outside consumption like they did AWS.

My biggest pet peeve with Amazon Logistics, is that some of the drivers just leave the package on the ground near the condo mailboxes, instead of walking down the stairs and leaving it at my front door.

To add on a bit, I frequently have packages delivered (edit: by Amazon delivery) to the wrong apartment or building entirely. I'm thankful my community now is friendly and it just takes a day or so for me to track down who ended up with my package (using the delivery picture and trying to match it with someone's doorstep). I've lived in several places where those items would have disappeared forever.

I get the feeling they need to provide training to those who are delivering packages. Or at least hold them accountable to actually make the delivery

This matches my experience as well. However, we live in a 15+ year old neighborhood.

It's been slighly annoying when they ring the doorbell to deliver at 9-10pm. The most surprising part of this has been looking out and seeing the whole family (including small children) in the vehicle.

Yeah, I had similar experience. The person who came to deliver did not know how to get packages into the package locker of the building.

here in the Seattle area (eastside) I see the AMZL being used for 1 day prime delivery, and traditional carriers used for "normal" deliveries.

I live at a difficult to find address (Fedex and ups often get confused) but amzl hasn't had a problem.

but they do always seem to deliver between 8pm and 9pm.

My experience has been fairly bad as well.

My apartment is up a flight of stairs, so they often just leave packages under the stairs or near a neighbor's door.

If Amazon wants to make this work, they'll need delivery feedback of some sort.

When we first started getting AMZL packages they'd show up at lunchtime when nobody was home and call me on my cell phone asking if anyone was around to pickup the package. That seems to have stopped, though.

Here in midtown Boston, my experience has been a stark contrast compared to yours.

It seemed much more reliable than USPS at all times.

Amazon uses USPS for Sunday delivery, at least on San Francisco

Same where I am

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