The Day I Drove for Amazon Flex
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It took 30-60 years of unions and labor rights before the problem was 'solved' - the non-monetary economics of that kind of production sucked (worker's comp + regulations for human rights) and those factories shipped overseas to where those things didn't exist.
The modern gig economy is really just scaling up distribution instead of mass production. On paper, it is cheap and scalable. But add in all the socio-economic components and you'll realize that it's not really that cheap, and not an economic engine that can survive long term past the initial stages, reason being that demand exists only because the price is subsidized.
Currently, shipping is extremely cheap, subsidized by Amazon, the government, and more recently, the individuals who due to lack of opportunities live with subsistence wages. If shipping was actual market price (where gig workers earned a fair wage), the cost would be much higher, which would shrink demand. (shipping was available as a function since forever, and wasn't ever a popular shopping option until today).
If we wanted free shipping as a standard of living, we would need to subsidize shipping on a governmental level, similar to how we subsidize food (especially meat). Americans don't realize it but meat is cheap in the US, much cheaper than the rest of the world. This is purely because of subsidies, which is a perk to allow the american standard of living: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-meat-and-animal-by-products-so....
If you want to make the american standard of living free package delivery, subsidize the wages from the US government, and force the tech companies to pay real corporate tax.
Routes with high volume usage can take advantage of this and have lower operation costs per unit because the cost is better distributed. So if shipping anywhere is a fixed cost, then yes, you are technically subsidizing less trafficked areas.
Volume and cost efficiency is a hard problem to solve, because getting the cost of shipping down is essentially optimizing for this.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
> Predatory pricing , also known as undercutting, is a pricing strategy in which a product or service is set at a very low price with the intention to drive competitors out of the market or to create barriers to entry for potential new competitors. Theoretically, if competitors or potential competitors cannot sustain equal or lower prices without losing money, they go out of business or choose not to enter the business. The so-called predatory merchant then theoretically has fewer competitors or even is a de facto monopoly.
> Predatory pricing is considered anti-competitive in many jurisdictions and is illegal under competition laws.
The question from me would then be, do subsidized meat vendors compete with farmers small enough that are selling individually on a farmer's market level? Does the subsidizing occur further up the chain, with tax rebates when purchasing cows?
So subsidized pricing would not be illegal as long as it isn't allowing for predatory pricing.
To clarify my original point:
As a competitive good, meat is priced a lot lower in the US than the rest of the world. The cost of producing meat shouldn't vary that much from country to country, so why is US (and Australian) meat so much cheaper?
Answer: they're both subsidized by the gov't. The effect of this is that Americans and Australians both enjoy cheap meat at a high consumption rate.
Why is meat subsidized so much? Is it because farmers are relatively organized?
I don't know exactly why meat is subsidized so much but I do remember that the US was very concerned about being self sufficient during it's isolationist period before WW1/2. This was the era of the great depression where a lack of stability in grain prices (really in the economy as a whole) put into question the nation's ability to feed itself, as farmers were going under and production was so volatile (dust bowl era as well).
This led to the US government stepping in to set up policies to control grain and food prices, stabilizing farmers and food production.
I think one unintended effect was the massive spike in production of cheap grains like corn. Because corn was in over abundance due to the profitability of it (due to subsidies), we needed other ways to consume it - corn syrup, corn starch, etc. Corn is also used as the primary feed for beef cows.
Some conspiracy people think that there's a huge farming lobby that makes farming extremely profitable. It's probably only a bit true.
The reality is that if meat got more expensive due to a reduction in subsidies, it could be a PR nightmare for the gov't administration due to the American love for meat, and a perceived standard of living drop. And while the American diet is changing, even healthy US diets still have a substantially larger quantity of meat in them than the rest of the world.
Weird about meat. But it would be more a food lobby than a farming lobby, right? Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure that farmers, especially livestock farmers, are just contractors these days.
In what ways are shipping subsidized by Amazon and the government?
For the government, some are saying that the USPS isn't charging enough. And the USPS makes a loss. But other say otherwise : https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/amazon-postal-...
If it's a good construction or scrap metal dumpster with a lot of nice material in it then defending it with a paintball gun is very much a dick move though.
I don't see why he's getting down-voted. He just said he knew a guy who did a thing. He didn't even imply whether he approved of it or not.
>”Kelly Cheeseman, an Amazon spokeswoman, told me that Flex is a great opportunity for people to be their own boss and set their own schedule.”
I note a similar thing here in the UK - most of the folks working 'gig economy' or more accurately 'single person zero guaranteed hour contractor' jobs are doing this stuff full time and are pushed hard to make a workable living out of it.
And yet the people who take those jobs are usually the folks who financially in not so great shape.
Of course, the internet wasn't what it is today, so you wouldn't have seen it on HN.
But, I'm not sure that the individual pizza deliverer sees quite the scale or encounters the scenarios of an independent contractor working for Amazon, including less predictable delivery times, variability of package types, etc.
I think Neal Stephenson's opening was that the two big items in the economy were software and pizza delivery ...
And part of the problem is that pizza delivery used to be a job for a high school student, paid accordingly. There were better jobs to be had once one was out of school. A lot of the better jobs seem to be gone.
Many buildings have some plan for deliveries from traditional delivery companies.
Deliveries so often don't show up that I have given up - I now use collect+, amazon lockers or get items delivered to work.
I think cities/bigger towns would eventually (in my idealistic world vision) have major highways/roads that go around them, and have primarily foot/bike/public transit traffic for everything internal.
How could you not know this? Have you never seen another delivery driver? Do you really need a training video to tell you that when you need to carry a lot of heavy packages, you should use a dolly?
Yes, you need.
Case in point, in the last half a dozen orders I've made that involved a somewhat heavy and/or large package, not a single delivery service used a dolly or delivery cart, even on orders from a certain multibational furniture store.
You expect your employees to do their job safely? Then you explicitly cover the safety procedure during training, and you directly and intentionally state that it's in their best interests to do so. Otherwisr you can't possibly assume they will comply with an implicit rule.
in the last half a dozen orders I've made that involved a
somewhat heavy and/or large package, not a single delivery
service used a dolly or delivery cart
Dollies are inherently a mixed blessing. You can pile more stuff on them - but if you've got to get up a kerb, you've still got to be able to lift that weight, and the dolly as well, and keep everything from sliding off at the same time.
And it's not just kerbs. They've got steps up to their front door? Can't use the dolly. Old flat/apartment without a lift? Can't use the dolly. Lift needs a key you don't have? Can't use the dolly. They've got a gravel path? Can't use the dolly. They've got a thick-bottomed UPVC door frame? Can't get the dolly through it. On a steep hill? Dolly will make things harder...
And it turns out, in a city like London, there are a great many buildings with one or more of these defects - and the worse the parking situation, the further away you park the van, the more kerbs and things you're likely to need to cross.
Hence, even though drivers are issued with dollies and trained in their use, many deliveries are made without the dollies because they don't make things all that much easier.
How are the dolly's wheels any different from the delivery person's shoes?
Sure and the only ones to ever use a dolly are ones delivering home appliances
Partly because they are trained and know their craft - but mostly because they are correctly paid, and so they are almost always long-term workers with learned expertise at driving and delivering.
(As opposed to the Atlantic writer, who did the job for a day, didn't know how to do it correctly, found it difficult, and whined about it. That's not actually telling us much of anything, when you think about it.)