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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

> No one blames FedEx for their late package these days, they blame Amazon.

As they should. FedEx's customer in this instance is Amazon, not the receiver of the package (who is a customer of Amazon, and Amazon alone). If anyone has the clout these days to hurt FedEx economically if they don't improve, it's Amazon. Amazon should be pushing FedEx (and their other shippers) to be more accountable for late, damaged, and lost packages.

These days both FedEx's and UPS's preferred delivery method seems to be to rake their hands over every single door buzzer to my apartment building, dump the packages outside (insanely unsafe), and run off before anyone has a chance to respond to open the door. They even do this for signature-required packages on occasion, forging the signature. I get that drivers' incentives are completely screwed up regarding how their performance is evaluated, but it's a terrible experience from my perspective.

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Amazon doesn't seem much better. Last week, they 'delivered' an item, marked it delivered. The problem with that is that I didn't get it, and the picture proof was not my house. I have no idea whose house it was. When I called to ask for a refund, they first told me to wait as sometimes they mark things delivered before they are. I told him about the picture. Then he asked me to go door to door in my neighborhood because maybe someone else has it. I told him in a not so nice way that was their job, not mine. In the end I -did- get a refund, but seriously, I can't imagine UPS or Fedex saying things like this.

Fedex keeps delivering other people's stuff to my mother in law's house. The correct addresses are within a few blocks. I can assure you that Fedex really doesn't care or help in this case, over several instances of it happening. I suspect that this issue like others being described can come down to the driver that does a route, and what they do.

I would be surprised if Amazon is not using their Ring doorbell cameras to check on deliveries. They will provide evidence of what really happened when customers and delivery dispute it. For example it is clear if the doorbell was rung, or in some cases if the vehicle even went down the street.

My Amazon delivery was pretty strange. I had an unknown number call my phone 2-3 times in a row (dumped to voicemail) then a few minutes later a frantic knocking on my door. It's two guys who were out of breath, they handed the package to me, and then jogged away down the apartment hallway.

I think I ordered socks or something... I couldn't care less. It was jarring, just leave the package in the lobby and send me a delivery notification... geez. Prefer FedEx over that experience.

Funny you should mention the door to door thing. I literally just got this email from a merchant that shipped via FedEx. The package went from being delivered on the 13th to lost in limbo at the regional hub. Yay me.

> In the meantime, I would recommend checking around neighbors and with any other potential members of your household to ensure the package was not incorrectly delivered.

Right? It's such a braindead thing to ask. Imagine having a package on your porch, and seeing someone walk up your driveway and grab it. That's a good way to get punched before you have time to explain.

Yeah, after the second time this happened I stopped ordering anything from Amazon.

> Amazon should be pushing FedEx (and their other shippers) to be more accountable for late, damaged, and lost packages.

sounds like, they are - by taking a LOT of business from them.

Fedex mentions this is not a material amount of business. How Amazon operates it's last mile logistical network is unsustainable. These people will eventually churn out of the open air sweatshop that is delivering last mile for Amazon (Fedex's requirements are much less onerous on the ground/home delivery side, based on my conversations with both Amazon delivery drivers and Fedex ground and home delivery drivers).

Very similar to the high churn Uber and Lyft experience with drivers. It lasts only as long as you can find people desperate enough to work in these roles.

After running the numbers from Amazon's presentation on starting your own delivery company, I came away thinking its a nice JOB. In order for it to be a good profitable business that allows you a life of leisure, you end up having to manage around 400 drivers and 200 trucks, and I'm not sure if that is possible to scale that high with their model.

Do a run with an Amazon driver and see the kind of job it is. I have, and it is not a job I'd have versus a traditional retail job. Agree with your point though that you're buying a job, not a business. Lots of better businesses to buy, lots of better jobs one could have.

The difference with Amazon running that way and Fedex/UPS is that Amazon has AWS to prop up other services that run at a loss. They can run their shipping service at very low or negative profit and use AWS to make up for it.

If they can find enough now, with unemployment at multi decade lows, then it seems that you could find them anytime.

It's going to take a while for the "you're not actually making money, the profits all go eventually into the wear and tear on your vehicle" thing to filter out into general public awareness.

We (my employer, Refund Retriever) has caught them just outright lying about deliveries before.

https://www.refundretriever.com/blog/FedEx-Tracking-Error

I've had plenty of flat-out lies from Amazon delivery before (e.g. they claim delivery attempted at HH:MM PM, while I was in the living room five feet from the door, and yet somehow I must have "missed" their knock), FedEx and UPS alike, although I've never been able to prove it. With the proliferation of people with Ring video doorbells, however, I am surprised that someone does not send footage.

"Oh, you tried to deliver at 3:13 PM? Well gee, my front door camera sure doesn't seem to show anyone approaching my door at that time!"

But again, you're already dealing with people that will lie to your face, so I can't imagine why video proof would compel them to change their strategy.

I don't think any of this has anything to do with Amazon, or at least it isn't limited to packages from Amazon. I've had several categories of what are almost certainly flat-out lies from various carriers throughout the years:

- Packages marked as being delivered, but they don't actually show up for another day or two. (I assume this is a driver who can't be bothered to make it to my building that day but doesn't want to get penalized.)

- Entire carriers who systematically fail to deliver. My current apartment building has a near zero delivery rate for packages from USPS that cannot fit in mail slots. UPS and FedEx generally deliver to our package room without issues, but USPS will just claim to have attempted delivery two days in a row then leave the package at their sorting facility for me to pick up (which I won't do). This is clearly a building-wide problem, because I see hand-written notes on our outside door begging USPS to deliver packages. I think the USPS package delivery person simply cannot be bothered to try, and is apparently not incentivized to do so. Thankfully this rarely affects me, because the only time I get larger USPS packages are from rare Amazon deliveries that for some reason use USPS.

- Packages that claim that the delivery was attempted on a Saturday, but are redelivered on Monday. This has bitten me a few times where I took care to rush a package to me when the shipper claimed it could be delivered on a Saturday. I suspect the weekend delivery person cannot be bothered to make it to my building. I can't really blame them. Saturday delivery is fairly new and I can live without it, I just wish the carriers wouldn't promise it then "attempt to deliver" unsuccessfully.

I just had USPS tell me a package couldn’t be delivered to a 24/7 staffed hotel because they didn’t have access to the delivery location.

My apartment building has a call box and someone will buzz them into the package room. When it says “delivery attempted” it’s almost always because the delivery person couldn’t be bothered to try.

I've been sitting at the door expecting a delivery that I paid to have delivered by 10am and saw a UPS driver run up to my door and put a note saying he missed me then running away. I opened the door and made him actually attempt to deliver. He didn't even ring the doorbell.

Except Amazon owns ring and all that cloud based video footage, so good luck getting far with that evidence.

Yeah, I've also had FedEx lie to me multiple times. Both times they claim delivery was attempted while I was home the whole day (and it was not, obviously). I've even noticed it within an hour of it happening, mid-day. I think sometimes if the drivers get behind they just skip houses and mark it as "attempted."

This is probably due to an overworked worker pushed to meet some metric saying something is delivered when it isn't. I'm sure amazon will do everything they can with software using gps, pictures etc to make it harder to do that.

The last time this happened to me, Amazon's CSR told me that "GPS says it was delivered nearby your building." To which I responded that there were multiple suites inside the building. She then asked if my suite had a mailroom, and I repeated that I had a one-room suite.

Indeed they are doing exactly that. I get a notification when the driver is a few stops away from me along with a map. They also take a picture of the package where they left it and it is all visible from the Amazon app.

In probably a dozen instances in the last two years, I've had premature "Delivered" statuses, with windows of an hour before it showed up, to two days.

2 have been FedEx, 2 USPS. The rest were Delivered by Amazon deliveries.

The only outright lie I've had lately has been USPS where the package didn't show up until the day after they said it had been.

OnTrac used to be horrible, but I haven't gotten stuck with them in quite a white.

I got a notification today that a signature-required package had been received by "signature not required".

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