How Amazon Hooked America on Fast Delivery, Avoiding Responsibility for Crashes

I agree; one thing I often see in articles critical of Amazon citing number is that they fail to account for the absolute absurd number of actors it employs, comparing more to large-scale societal elements like cities or small states rather than the generic corp that rents out the top 40 floors of a downtown skyscraper.

For some fun with with large numbers, Amazon currently employees more people than the state of Wyoming has residents(647,000 to 577,000). Over the course of four years Amazon has killed 10, (or hell, lets make it 50 to compensate for under-reporting) people by traffic accident; the population of Wyoming managed to achieve that rate of death themselves in about the span of a month (or six months for the larger figure) [https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D76/D65F000].

I think those are just direct employees too, if they are fanning out onto contractors I wouldn't be surprised if they are ultimately controlling Walmart levels of employees (2.2 million).

> A better investigation would count the number of miles traveled and compare the rate to the general population. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do: 37k people died on the road in 2017.

The alternative to Amazon's delivery contractors is not civilian drivers, so that comparison wouldn't be interesting.

The comparison should be against small-to-medium delivery trucks, as used by UPS, FedEx, and USPS.

Tangent: Did you make up the term "character piece"? I've not heard that before but I don't have a name for these kind of articles that include stories of specific people.

As the article notes:

That tally is most likely a fraction of the accidents that have occurred: Many people don’t sue, and those who do can’t always tell when Amazon is involved, court records, police reports and news accounts show.

> 37k people died on the road in 2017

In America alone 100 people a day are killed--give or take. Worldwide 1.25 Million a year are killed.

At least in the UK they are not directly working for Amazon, but an agency, who only handles Amazon deliveries. Many other industries work in a similar way, where the employee/contractor effectively works for one company, but is paid by another company, for example retail and commercial cleaning and maintenance staff.

You can't say they need to get rid of all "contractors", because temp staff are obviously beneficial around the holidays for these companies. What could work is to have a limit on how long the employee can be on a temporary contract, but such rulings would have ramifications on other industries (Julie is taking 1 1/2 years off for maternity leave and you need someone to replace her for that time). Plus I'm sure whatever new legislation is introduced, Amazon will find a way to work around (You get the benefits of a permenant employee after working for 6 weeks? Ok, after 5 weeks we don't need you anymore).

Are you going to legislate away all contractor work? Because every medium to large company and even government agencies utilize contractors.

You can't build and develop subject matter expertise on everything. And besides that, contractors are often used to scale when you have demand that you can't necessarily meet with your current capabilities.

I guess I don't understand how your "solution" to this problem scales to the regulatory world outside of Amazon.

> If someone gets all their work from amazon and is told by amazon when, how, and where to deliver packages, they're not contractors.

Legally speaking, they're probably not contractors in that scenario. In the US, a primary determining factor is whether or not the employer has the ability to dictate what and how the contractor does work. See for example https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

AB5, which is currently rattling around the California Senate, should dent some of the worst of these abuses.

No Walmart had three time the retail sales of Amazon in 2018.

https://stores.org/stores-top-retailers-2019/

> people aren’t getting compensated for accidents, by, e.g., car insurance companies

Car insurance doesn't cover 100% of costs. There's the deductible and, for many low-income drivers, the cost of lawsuits. A fully-loaded insurance plan is pretty expensive, and the unit economics likely doesn't work for a lot of these people unless they're insured with the bare minimum.

That idea does fit into the low-wage argument, because you're creating a race-to-the-bottom market among your delivery drivers such that the ones who want proper insurance aren't able to compete on price with the ones who are willing to take risks.

It isn't so simple. As a manager, it is easy to incentivize "deliver as many packages as you can" (e.g., pay per package). It is not so easy to incentivize "deliver 83%[=1/1.2] as many packages as you can."

Furthermore, people always optimize what can be measured, and measuring safe driving, on a day-to-day basis, is harder than measuring number of deliveries (not impossible, maybe, but much harder---also less transparent, easier to game, more intrusive).

As mentioned, there is a button to ship it slower where they usually give you $1 or so for a digital purchase.

I think they slow it down by packing it up with other orders along the way which is more efficient yet slower to deliver.

In my region, not only is there a slow ship option, there is also a delivery day option.

With delivery day, you can bundle up all of your orders for the week and have them delivered in a single large shipment on a pre-specified day, Monday through Saturday.

You pick your day, and you have the option to make it the default on all future orders, and then you get one big box.

I don't know if it varies by region but with my account they are prominently displayed radio buttons on the "Review items and shipping" part of the checkout page.

I get a slow ship option. Usually thrown in some sort of coupon too.

Though I suspect they just wait a while and then ship it fast anyway.

I've been hooked on No-Rush Shipping for a while now. The $1 digital item credit has helped me slowly build out my Kindle library, and it has the side effect of teaching me to wean off the instant gratification culture we have today.

I worked with routing in a logistics company in India. The whole last mile delivery had so many special cases that we stopped trying to model them all. Drivers would take routes to avoid cops, or go toward a cop they knew (they had paid off in the past). Drivers would not go into each others' territories (so 2 drivers working for the same company would not deliver if their areas overlapped). For delivery people on 2-wheelers, all road rules were optional. They would go down wrong way on one-way roads etc. (we could track them, we called them 'dirty routes'). Drivers would prefer their own routes even when we gave better routes. Sometimes better was vaguely defined, since we might think this route save 10% time so is better, and he might think my favorite paan shop is on that route, so the other route is better.

These "contractor" drivers are misclassified employees who are not trained to the safety standard of logistics providers like FedEx and UPS.