These are antecdotal, but if Amazon wants to catch up to a company like UPS, they have a ton of ground to make up. Delivering packages is really hard work, believe it or not, and underpaying someone to do it isn't going to bring about the results you're after, guaranteed.
I also wonder, in the drivers' defense, if the delivery schedule is unrealistic. I can better understand lobbing a box on the lawn if you're 10 deliveries behind.
Amazon would do well to paint their logo on the van, but maybe it isn't their van.
Branding matters.
Most of my deliveries have been in cars uber-like.
> "Soft" expenses such as uniforms
They do wear an unlabeled orange vest here. Maybe that is just for safety when crossing roads but it lets me know who they are.
When I order from Amazon and see that they're going to try to ship it on their own, I just groan. It's going to be painful for sure.
I get amazon packages every day or two for my startup. I don't ever remember any pain.
Good luck to those whose delivery location can't be easily located in the real world using <map app of the day>.
Shame that the company that uses the system seems really protective of the idea and might try to sue if someone were to come up with their own similar implementation. It's one of the places I believe that the profit motive actually gets in the way of innovation (the idea itself is simple enough that you could probably engineer a system to use it in a few weeks).
However, although it has been around since 2014, I've never seen any practical use.
- Delivery dates constantly getting pushed back 1-3 days (why even have prime?).
- Delivery notifications for packages that were never delivered, and not even attempted to be. Someone is almost always home and we have a security camera on all approaches to the house, they don’t even try.
- Completely lost packages.
- Our stuff getting delivered to the neighbors, and vice versa.
Amazon’s delivery has been an unmitigated disaster in our neighborhood.
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/03/the-spy-who-fired-me/?si...
They probably don't have many better options either given they were doing deliveries for UPS and FedEx. The employees responding to that environment will either accidentally or intentionally in spite do stuff like that. I've seen quite a few of those companies. You also get to experience more spite the less the company or customers care about them. The jobs that require slaving away for nothing under assholes are the most consistent in generating that effect.
These days I just have my packages kept at UPS and go pick them up.
This reminds me a lot of Amazon marketplace, where they took the core service (Amazon e-commerce) and opened it up to others without holding inventory. They can use other people’s orders to gain even more scale and drive costs down lower in the distribution network, commoditizing the complement layer (delivery, in this case UPS and FedEx).
I'm going to finally watch "The Wire" and a few other of their streaming offers that have been on my todo list, and then consider not renewing. (And... I'm wondering how onerous the process of effectively disconnecting them from my credit card will be.)