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Comment by duahncjak | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, Amazon drivers will mark packages as delivered when they haven’t gotten around to delivering yet. When I call Amazon to complain, they tell me to just wait and the package will show up later.

I suspect the drivers are given an impossible number of packages to deliver, and there’s a misalignment of incentives where everyone is better off pretending they delivered the package on time. It’s not hard to imagine how this situation would arise when the delivery company is also the merchant, and there’s a command from on high for everyone to get one-day delivery. If the package is marked as delivered, everyone up the chain makes their numbers. @bezos, are you paying attention?

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"In my experience, Amazon drivers will mark packages as delivered when they haven’t gotten around to delivering yet."

Packages delivered by USPS, the country's national mail carrier, are often marked as delivered 1-2 days before they are actually delivered.

The first couple of times this happened to me, I stepped outside after seeing the delivery notification from Amazon, and got worried that someone had taken the package. But now I know it's a common issue due to the way USPS collects and displays data:

https://immortalephemera.com/8970/usps-delivery-confirmation...

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/usps-tracking-info...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Silverbugs/comments/9hhx52/usps_tra...

I recently moved to a new apartment in a new city/state. It has one of those nice locker systems for packages. You can tell who are random contractors for Amazon deliveries based on their inability to access the room without help from apartment management.

Anecdote time. A few weeks after moving here, someone rang every single apartment buzzer one-by-one at 2:30AM. AM!! I assumed the first was a mistake. The second made me get up. By the third, I was angrily making my way to the callbox. Before I could answer, I heard my neighbor angrily screaming into the phone. Turns out, it was an Amazon delivery driver who clearly had no way to make a delivery at that hour. I suspect they did the mark as delivered “trick”.

That wasn’t the only time this happened since I moved here either. It happened again but this time at 6:00AM. I was expecting a package that day, but certainly not at that hour.

I’m not angry at those delivery drivers. Their job has unrealistic expectations and low pay. What does anger me is how Amazon is abusing the worker pool to the point where people need to behave poorly to accomplish their jobs. It’s pushing Amazon’s inability to deliver onto society. That is pushing the limits of what is acceptable to the point where I’ve recently started reconsidering purchasing from Amazon anytime I shop online.

Not saying where I learned this from, but the Amazon fulfillment services (fulfillment centers and their 1st party delivery services) have a greater than 30% month over month turnover in my region. No one taking these jobs has any intention of making a career out of it and most aren't even planning to work them for more than a couple months at most. That is exactly the kind of environment that encourages gaming the system in the way you describe because the risk of getting fired within the expected time period employment is so low that it isn't worth doing the job right.

I misread month over month as YoY. That's insane. I don't think even Uber has a lower turnover rate and drivers are independent contractors in that case.

It seems like something they could easily verify: they know the exact location of the truck when the package is marked delivered. If it doesn't correlate with the delivery address then something is up. Another clue would be a bunch of packages marked delivered at the same time that don't have tightly clustered delivery locations.

I agree with you about performance metrics being gamed, wouldn't surprise me.

I get pictures of the delivery on my front porch. I wonder if that is to prove to me that the package was delivered or to prove to Amazon that the delivery person delivered. If the photos are taken with a cell phone app/camera they will be tagged with location and time which would be pretty difficult to falsify.

I don't always get these pictures so I suspect it is Amazon spot checking their delivery people.

I was getting these for awhile on every single delivery, then they stopped. I wonder why?

I imagine the Ring acquisition has been helpful in that regard.

Amazon has GPS trackers in their cars and can tell you how far from you the delivery vehicle is. I doubt they would accept this trivial kind of cheating. Yet they seem to work their drivers to the bone.

That's just like lyft or uber drivers taggint themselves "As waiting for you" while they are still moving. A pure gamification of the system.

Complain in chat and you can get a $5 promo credit per package

Knowing amazon, this also includes support calls resolved as solved, thus good luck actually getting help on the issue.

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