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Comment by srj | Hacker News Reader

As a customer I don't like this as I've had these guys leave packages in my driveway in pouring rain when the covered front deck was only 20 feet away. They also frequently deliver my packages to my neighbor's house and speed around like maniacs.

On a societal level it's a shame that jobs that could actually support a person or family are being replaced by hustle economy types. My own parents never went to college and have worked service jobs their whole life, but could still own a house and eat dinner with us every night. They even bought a computer when I was a teenager in the 90s. I think in today's world they'd be driving for Lyft all night and I'd have grown up in a different town with a worse school system.

"Your margin is my opportunity." -Jeff Bezos

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Amazon put a flag on my old address to not use FedEx fulfillment because they had 100% failure rate. FedEx always managed to drop the package at a different but similar house number than mine (e.g. 698 or 588 instead of 598).

It was a single family home in a neighborhood of ~100 homes on 2 intersecting roads, so not really hard to find.

UPS, USPS, and Amazon had no problems finding my house. Even had a couple freight companies make deliveries on Amazon's behalf without issues.

I use to standby FedEx as my preferred shipper but they've really gone down hill since the early 2000s IMO.

> Amazon put a flag on my old address to not use FedEx fulfillment because they had 100% failure rate.

Amazon will let you do that with every other carrier EXCEPT Amazon Logistics. The only way to get them blocked is prove your home is a prison, military base, or have experiences so horrible they have pity on you.

I need to turn my apartment into a prison then.

It's incredible really. The Amazon logistics folks weren't able to accurately put packages into the parcel locker system at my apartment, and would constantly just leave them on the counter in the public area. This happened so much so that my apartment revoked their courier number to use the parcel system. The apartment management's idea: instead have them deliver directly to the door of each resident. As you can imagine, this has tanked successful Amazon deliveries to anyone in my apartment complex. I'm probably sitting at about a 66% success rate for getting my packages delivered AT ALL.

On the bright side, their customer service folks have added tons of $5 and $15 credits to my account because of how absolutely terrible their own courier service is at delivering.

For me it's a treasure hunt I never asked for.

- Was it left at my apartment door?

- Was it left in the 2nd floor mail room/lobby?

- Was it left in the 1st floor main entry/lobby?

- Was it left outside?

- Was it left in some side door?

- Was it left halfway between the 2nd and 3rd floor on a random stairway?

- Was it left in the office?

- Will I have to wait 3 more days so I can report it lost/stolen and try again?

So fun.

Not to get into the "Prime 1-day", which when I order three 1-day things at the same time means one shows up tomorrow, one the next day, and one the day after.

In my case they don't have access to the delivery locker (I am not sure why), so the packages end up going to the building leasing office. The office workers won't put it in the storage lockers, of course, so I have to go pick it up from their office during working hours.

I don't often finish work before this, so pick-up of these "One Day Delivery" packages are pretty much relegated to weekends.

I hope we close the loopholes that allows companies to take people that would previously have been employees and call them "contractors" and skirt all sorts of minimum wage, training, and safety issues.

You mean the loopholes that allow people to start their own business as contractors?

It’s a bit of a stretch to think of Uber or Lyft drivers like startup entrepreneurs.

I had a similar experience recently, and contacted Amazon. I talked to two separate people in two different departments, one that was supposedly a delivery logistics group. I was able to provide a statement regarding where to leave packages from now on. It's seemingly working so far, but we'll see what happens in a month or so.

I made a similar call after an Amazon courier recently left two packages on the roadside nowhere near my house (where they are normally left at the door).

They added instructions to my account indicating which door the packages should be left at. So far, about 50% of the deliveries have been at a different door, but at least they've made it to the house.

Honestly as someone who has delivered food, goods, etc finding someone's address can be difficult and sometimes down right annoying. Also consider that delivery drivers may not have full command English.

For example those nice looking cursive addresses instead of simple to read numerals are annoying.

Then there's missing numbers, or bad choices in color, or it's black and they don't have a light for it at night.

I think its largely due to globalization. Lots of the blue collar jobs went overseas. Thinking back I can recall all the transitions my employers did to adapt to globalization.

There is an ongoing monopolization trend of the entire world's economy, there is the recent phenomenon of overwhelming regulation of every market, there is an ongoing experiment of monetary distortion of markets to a level far higher than anything ever done before. Not to talk about bare corruption, that I suspect is at never seen before levels, due to large governments everywhere.

People are way too quick on pointing their fingers at automation and globalization. There is some evidence against those being the main cause of the current lack of low qualification jobs (that is worldwide, by the way).

I thought we were the only ones - they've left boxes sitting outdoors our apartment building even though they, like fedex and USPS, have codes to come in and put in front of our doors. What's even worse is that management put up a sign on the building entrance telling to put deliveries inside the building and they started leaving deliveries outside right in front of the sign.

The wealth you describe is now summarized as the “boomers” by the generation Z. Basically, the ability to be branch manager while typing with only two fingers (It won’t be possible to have such a career anymore with 7M people on Earth), while the kid struggles getting a flatshare after passing a masters’ degree. The generation that lived through full employment, bought a house for way less relative money than today, while all they left their kids with was govt debt and a polluted earth. All the while believing the Carpe Diem philosophy will “get you through tough times.”

I don’t even agree that much with those clichés (they had their sets of challenges, plus I’m Gen X) but it’s extremely important to remain aware of the various trends of the new generations.

Example with a popular symbol: https://www.bitchute.com/video/_16B2euF128/

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