Amazon acknowledges issue of drivers urinating in bottles in apology
reuters.com
reuters.com
The more you unpack this statement, the worse it is.
1) It's a lie.
2) It's tells you 'you're dumb if you believe [the truth].'
3) The problem they're lying about is a really awful one.
4) They seem to not even know what it's like to do this role (but that doesn't prevent them from confidently making things up).
5) It shows a worldview that's super, well, privileged. Whoever wrote that probably couldn't imagine not having the option to just walk away from a job.
6) Whoever wrote that apparently doesn't believe that anyone doesn't have the option to just walk away from a job.
They seem so incredibly disconnected from this part of their workforce, that I couldn't imagine them making good calls about what these workers should be doing.
> Our mission is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company. Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking.
I know of several people that were about to start working for Amazon and they had already started spouting this crap
If you want to make a proper attack, accuse them of modern slavery.
There are two groups that I would argue should be labeled "modern slavery victims"/"slaves". These are the illegal human trafficking victims and the legally (referring to national, not international, law) incarcerated work force.
Off the top of my head, the latter includes the inmates of the American prison industrial complex and the Uighur prisoners in China.
The applicability of the term "modern slaves" to these groups, and the clear difference in the extent of exploitation, between these groups and the Amazon workers, convinces me we must not apply the term "slavery" to the latters' employment.
It appears that you have an extremely poor understanding of the history of slavery - limited the US only.
It's universally understood that slavery was happening over 10,000 years before the US was even discovered.
The term "slave" even predates the discovery of the US by hundreds of years.
Slavery has manifested itself in many ways throughout history, I'm sure one could make an argument that this is some kind of modern day voluntary slavery.
I would also argue that the context (USA-based company labor dispute) is enough to anchor the term "slavery" to the very recent and very extreme United States enslavement of Africans. Using the term "chattel slavery" may be a serviceable method for communicating that you are not talking about "that slavery".
One can argue the warrhouse workers would happily work anywhere else than amazon. They work here because they have no choice and are underpaid.. hence the "modern slavery". No strong force but an economic system that leads to the same result
Manual labor has always been dirty, sweaty, etc. Somebody is emptying your stinking summer garbage can. My granddad worked at a feed company for much of his life and they were nearly always covered in sweat and dust (those giant siloes have to be emptied and cleaned by somebody). I can tell you why he did it, it was the money. Oh he liked his work mates well enough, but it was the money. The money that helped him pay of his house. The money that helped feed his wife and children.
I bet that given the choice between peeing in a bottle and getting a raise, a big chunk of the workers will choose the latter.
That is what working a manual job means.
TBH I don't blame private businesses. It's not like they are obligated to share their facilities with non-paying customers. It's just a shame London became like that.
Seems like a good deal all round, considering many businesses need to have toilets for staff and customers already. The sign makes them look like good citizens, the additional maintenance is probably very small, and some of the people who come in to use the toilet will buy something, so it acts like advertising too.
I don't know why everywhere doesn't do it.
The cost of dealing with the kinds of messes that happen in public toilets is exorbitant.
I'd rather just say "hey, let's do a family and friends get together and screw going out anywhere... come to my house, all the restrooms you can use here and no taxes or other non-sense!" There's probably $500-1k+ of revenue that local businesses didn't get that evening, but hey, it's better for my friends and family, we can save and invest that and be more comfortable.
For governments it doesn't matter, they can just shift taxes to where it needs to be. For businesses, it can seriously hurt your bottom line. I can't imagine operating a restroom is so costly to offset the lost customers that it's worth cutting off so many potential patrons, but maybe I'm wrong or maybe people will continue throwing their money in areas that aren't consumer friendly. It won't be me though. Also I'm not that old, the more elderly who tend to have more disposable income from wealth accumulation are also people who often have less ability to wait to use restrooms. They seem like another market to consider.
Anyway, if people can start a successful business around overpriced coffee, then I'm curious if it's possible to start a profitable chain of public restrooms.
I don't really want to make it like Chinas social credit score, more like you do these bad things and we take your good person card.
Starbucks doesn't anymore after the PR incident couple of years ago. There are 15k Starbucks in USA.
If the government makes it illegal to profit from providing a good or service, fewer people will provide that good or service.
My wife has it happen like once a month at least... Keep your dick in your pants around me or I'll hack it off.
>>My wife has it happen like once a month at least
Where the hell do you live??
Just wanted to point out that you _are_ able to pee anywhere, you might not be allowed to, though.
End of the day, it’s bad management on Amazon’s part. They’ve built out a distribution network very quickly, but being dependent on desperation on the part of a miserable workforce has pretty obvious drawbacks.
Now in London, and whenever I see men urinating on trees I cannot help but think "put the fricking urinals on the streets"
(Obviously these drivers are being put under time crunches, hence the bottles, and that is a separate issue)
Frankly, it's insane to me that we don't consider public bathrooms to be an important component of public infrastructure.
But that doesn't take away Amazon's role in the process either.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/opinion/sunday/public-toi...
The way we've built out our cities means that literally anyone who drives around all day is gonna have a bad time when it comes to relieving themselves.
This has nothing to do with how Amazon operates their business and everything to do with a dearth of public restrooms.
A humanely run business takes these things into account. And given that we as a society allow corporations like Amazon to exist through the granting of special-rights charters for limited liability etc., we should be expecting that they operate humanely.
But, they’re a massive company with the resources such that they could address this problem. They could also reduce the schedule pressure on driver’s and allow them to take breaks long enough to use a restroom. And they tweeted dishonestly saying it wasn’t a problem. So, I’m not really ready to just let them off the hook. Amazon has agency, and could fix or seriously mitigate this problem if they wanted to. Instead, they chose to ignore it and equivocate about it until it turned into a PR black eye.
When I was in high school, I did bread deliveries for a bakery. There weren’t really restrooms I could use when I was on my route in the mornings, but I was told if I ever needed to use the restroom and had no other options I could always return to the bakery and use our restrooms. I never peed in a bottle doing that job. I also never got in trouble for being 20 minutes late for having had to use the restroom.
It seems pretty obvious to me that some Amazon drivers, like other drivers, are going to pee in bottles from time to time. This doesn't seem like a fate worse than death, IMO, at least not for male drivers. But I do think it's a reason why Amazon shouldn't put cameras in its delivery vehicles.
Still, you would think that Amazon could maintain a bathroom depot in its major delivery areas. Maybe even their own gas stations.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse...
So the first malcontent that spreads feces all over the walls and blocks up the toilet with a syringe gets the whole thing shut down.
http://psmag.com/economics/dont-pay-toilets-america-bathroom...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/closure-of-pub...
The 'downtown development authority' provides public bathrooms in the (run down) commercial district.
Highways in the state have relatively evenly spaced public rest stops.
(in my region the nearest facility would pretty much always be a gas station, with people not getting worked up about it if you walk in just to use the toilet)
Our portable bathrooms don’t self clean well enough. We need to think about how to design a better one. I don’t know if that involves building in air vacuums that force pull in everything to avoid clogs, or if we need more high pressure water, or literal acid that floods the floor after someone leaves (self cleans the whole box, and automatically sprays disinfectant, vacuums down all the shit in 2 minutes, then unlocks the door). Maybe have one time plastic bags that seal up and then get flushed down (all automated). Some kind of hosing down of the whole thing with acid is still high on my list.
There’s got to be some tech we can make that would make rolling these out the most hygienic thing to do as a society.
It would let you keep great public access, keep toilets simple, and only pass the "costs" of bad-behaviour to those that deserve it.
Having ID to take a piss is a bit weird however.
Anyway, how would you identify who spoiled the bathroom?
[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/realid_costs_...
In reality, you've got an endless supply of people who will make a mess once with your unpopular system and not care, good faith accidents unable to make amends, people that refuse to show IDs and piss on the reader on general principle, people unjustly blamed by your system for someone else's mess with no appeal, fake IDs, and inevitable tie in to other delusional top-down systems that multiply these problems.
We just clean it up.
Just ask the proprietor for some paper towels and some spray and get to work and nobody will care. Frankly, one remarked that we would always be welcome even after the disaster because we left it better than we found it.
In this case, quite literally.
>borderline sociopath teenagers
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make.
Not only that, our subway stations and trains reek of urine more often than not. It's unpleasant, but I can't blame homeless people for it too much when there are zero restrooms nearby.
Anti-homeless policies like this are shortsighted; homeless people aren't going away just because you remove public facilities. They still need to eat, sleep, and do their business like anyone else. Better to both help homeless people improve their situations and provide facilities for basic human needs for everyone.
This isn't "shortsighted" at all for the individual restroom operator.
Merchants understandably don't want to provide free bathrooms to the general public even where homelessness is not the driving concern. It costs them money while not making any money, so they limit bathroom access to paying customers if they provide bathroom facilities at all.
Then the currently homeless can have an indoor toilet where they live.
I'm all for more housing, but solving homelessness doesn't actually put a full stop to a need for public bathrooms.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-hospitals-hou...
The rest of them will either get thrown out for drugs/mental illness or ruin the place they move into. And I need my neighbors to be quiet at night so that I can keep my job. That is hard when you need to have the TV on at max volume because you need it to drown out the voices in your head.
That said, if you close your restroom, they only go away from your area if there are other restrooms nearby. If there aren't, you're just making it that more likely that you'll find urine and feces outside somewhere near your business, and that older people and people with medical conditions avoid the area (and thus don't spend money at your businesses, by the way). Classic coordination problem: while it may be in your selfish interest to close down your restroom and push people to your neighbors, if everyone does that you're all worse off.
...and that's the situation we're in right now.
Legalize housing in cities, and this problem mostly goes away, along with many others.
...and I also mentioned the lack of bathrooms being an issue for people with certain medical conditions. I mean sure, I have easy access to a bathroom while I'm at home, but a big appeal of living in the city is being able to walk or take public transit to get places. That also means you're potentially 30-45 minutes away from home, though, not to mention the 30-45 minutes that it took to get there; if you're like me and you don't know for sure that there will be a bathroom you can use somewhere along the route, it's a huge disincentive to go there.
But I also agree that I'm sidetracking the discussion :)
> First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers.
Nowhere in the tweet did it mention fulfillment centers:
> 1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
And WOW. At the end of the blog post, there are tweets of people saying it's not just Amazon. So, "we're sorry, but it's not just me, so it's not that bad."
[0]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/our-recen...
How about they pay staff to go through security screenings?
How about they pay staff for time transiting to and from the break rooms?
That's the floor. The bare ** minimum Amazon should be doing. Their staff are not slaves, or servants. They are human beings and deserve far more than the spiteful pittance Amazon provides them.
Say using the bottle shaves off 15-30mins compared to the bathroom. I’m sure many would still prefer to get home 15-30min early.
Because if enough people start going home 15-30min early, management gets excited and raises the bar by adding work, so now you do the extra 15-30min of work (by peeing in the bottle) or risk not keeping up. I'm sure many would prefer peeing in the bottle to risking not keeping up, but that isn't the kind of choice where we say 'great, let them do it, it makes them happy.'
I, for one, having been in similar situations, would rather get home fifteen minutes later, or an hour, than shit in a bag. Or piss in a bottle.
I didn't even know Amazon emoloyed delivery drivers.
(This is of course separate from people who drive actual Prime delivery vans, who seem to be everywhere)
I live in Downtown Brooklyn and between here my last place in Midtown and my work's offices in Kips Bay I've never seen an individual deliver with a private vehicle in
Doesn't really make sense unless the building itself just isn't getting that many orders
Except for the Amazon Flex program where random people can run small routes in their own cars, those people are indeed not-really-independent contractors. But they account for a very small fraction of packages delivered.
That does not mean that people who are correctly informed about this thinking that it would also include delivery drivers are wrong.
But, all that ignores a few things:
1) Look at that original tweet. So dismissive of the POSSIBILITY that anybody would EVER do such a thing. "Amazon is such a great place to work! Who could ever believe such an absurd claim!" The people who work in corporate clearly are so disconnected from the lives of their drivers that they have no idea how this is a weekly occurrence for a large percentage of drivers. Imagine what being so disconnected means in terms of setting policy for those drivers! Now apply that to a million other policies. People who do office work have no idea what it's like to do the job.
2) There were level of managers out in the field that were very aware of this. The official policy, if you read the emails, was (a) stop pooping in the Amazon bags, they'll trace you if you do, and (b) don't leave your piss bottles behind for other drivers to find. This is related to the first point, but what does it say about communication that something so commonplace didn't spread up the chain of command as a problem?
3) Amazon is saying they don't know the solution, but they'll try to come up with one. This scares me. The most likely scenario is a crackdown on drivers, as opposed to giving paid time for this purpose. Keep in mind, it could be that a driver is half an hour from a public restroom. This is expensive to solve. But what's not expensive is a crackdown on drivers. Look out for "zero tolerance" policies for those who get caught. It won't have an effect on occurrences of it happening, but could at least stop people from leaving their piss bottles behind as frequently.
It's pretty ridiculous that all the journos/politicians are only focusing on Amazon "doing this" when it's literally (by your own admission) done by anyone who drives all day long.
I don't know why you're focused on whether Amazon should be given "leeway." Even if you only care about corporate Amazon, then maybe it's not in their best interest to have no idea how their company actually functions in the real world? There were stories before, just like there had been about UPS, Uber, etc (helpfully linked in this "apology") -- but this only super blew up when they issued their snarky denial to a member of Congress that anybody would ever pee into a bottle, and implying that the Congressman was a fool for believing such a tall tale.
Also, the fact that the tweet was snarky is irrelevant. Twitter is a place for snark.
If a delivery driver wants to use a restroom they ought to have the liberty/permission/time to do so. But if a delivery driver prefers to take a leak in a bottle and use some hand sanitizer afterwards, that doesn't strike me as a problem. Call me crazy.
I noted that when you snark and get the facts wrong, that it'll get more attention.
For example, I live in a very big city, at the city center but there are not any public restrooms nearby. People with emergencies are have to do their business in the public.
This seems more like social hangups making our lives more difficult.
If you spend a bit of time travelling/living in a van, or maybe camping in sub zero temperatures, you'll quickly come to appreciate the humble pee-bottle.
Having a job / working environment that pressures you into not taking breaks is obviously wrong though.
It's shameful that our society tolerates such an anti-human behavior from an organization.
The people making decisions about this policy should have to adhere to it themselves.
There's a huge difference between using a pee bottle as a choice/convenience vs. to avoid some kind of workplace consequence.
It's practical for half the population.
> This seems more like social hangups making our lives more difficult.
I wouldn't consider "sanitary conditions" a "social hangup" or taking an appropriate bathroom break "making life difficult."
> or maybe camping in sub zero temperatures, you'll quickly come to appreciate the humble pee-bottle.
I have never urinated in a bottle while camping, even in extreme weather.
> Having a job / working environment that pressures you into not taking breaks is obviously wrong though.
Hiring people and then failing to plan an appropriate amount of time for them to take a break is wrong, and should be illegal.
> Hiring people and then failing to plan an appropriate amount of time for them to take a break is wrong, and should be illegal.
Totally agree.
"We are sorry that everything except our impossible scheduling algo enforced by AI-backed driver surveillance causes employees to pee in bottles."
But having met drivers (taxi, truck, etc) from around in world and in different countries. This is quite common.
Again, not great.
But a fairly "standard" thing in the transportation industry.
I remember seeing bottles in New York City yellow cabs and wondered why they always had empty bottles beside their seats -- until one day a friend told me.
I was grossed out. But then I noticed it more and more and more.
One day I was driving from Portland, Maine to New York City and I had to go, but the next rest stop was miles away, and this was a place in Connecticut that literally had no place to even pull over. It was that, or...
I looked around and there was a bottle, and I did it. Hehe.
In Sweden, the equivalent of the US presidential debate takes 3 hours, including pre-greating and post-interview. As a man, supposedly gifted with a larger bladder, I would need a lot of planning to be 100% sure not to need a toilet break for 3 hours.
I can't help wonder: Is Sweden selecting the prime minister based on leadership skills or bladder size?
[1] https://www.tena.nu/vardpersonal/produkter/slip-allt-i-ett-i...
Note: I would not want to be forced to do that by my employer.
It is true that a lot of public toilets have been closed for the past year but these complaints go back to long before that happened.
I don't know where you live, but where is there a bathroom to stop at? The US isn't filled with public restrooms everywhere along driver's routes with convenient parking right outside.
To use a public restroom could easily mean a 10 minute drive, 5 minutes to find parking and walk to the bathroom, a 10 minute wait in line when it's separate bathrooms like a Starbucks, and another 10 minute drive back to resume your route, like 35 minutes total. Yikes.
I mean sometimes you might get lucky where there's a gas station right along your route and you can pop in, but most delivery routes snake through residential neighborhoods. There aren't any public bathrooms to be found anywhere.
Where I've lived in several smallish cities in the Midwest it is generally not hard to find bathrooms. I've had jobs that involved driving a van between customers' houses and never had trouble finding one. They're not in the residential neighborhoods but the routes would always go reasonably close to at least a few gas stations a day.
But even here where we do have bathrooms fairly readily available the drivers still pee in their vans. I know because I used to work in one of the local Amazon warehouses and we would find bags the drivers had returned with pee in them.
I'm not defending Amazon's general financial screw-turning, but I think the "peeing in bottles" has only become a meme because the idea seems gross to everyone who hasn't spent a long time alone in vehicles.
You can find bottles filled with yellow liquid all along major highways.
Peek a little deeper and the reasons are clear. The American philosophy of urban design is broken at its core.
Public infrastructure enables low cost amenities by distributing costs over the number of intended users, ie. residents of said geographic plot. 'Density' is a non negotiable prerequisite for quality infrastructure that won't spiral a nation into debt.
A public restroom can only be maintained if the users/restroom is high. The exact same logic applies to literally everything. There is an inflection point (Mumbai, my home town, being an excellent example of excess density), but no American city comes anywhere close to it.
________
I am usually cautious about boiling down complex problems to single causes. But, this one I feel confident about.
Over the long run, nothing has (and will continue to) hurt the US more than the galaxy brained American dream of an R1 zoned car centric town.
I am curious what others think of the veracity of that statement, it leaves me scratching my head a bit. Agreed on the last sentence though.
Outside of the NE corridor of Boston-NYC-Philly-DC, I don't think any other major US city has the density for a high coverage public toilet network.
qualifier City of Boston and SF are fake cities. The real cities of Boston and SF extend far beyond their city boundaries which capture a tiny group of neighborhoods. The real city of Boston would also fail my criterion. Small cities like Portland, Maine do well-ish, but my focus is major cities.
Furthermore, even in American, geographically spread out, “driving cities”, there could still be public toilets people drive to.
So... I would be willing to bet it would not be too hard to find workers at warehouses/fulfillment centers who have peed in bottles too. They seem to be setting themselves up again to me...
I mean, this is just me googling, finding this story from 2018..
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-hav...
Aha, and this story has a reddit post of a picture from a driver claiming he found a pee bottle accidentally left in a tote put on his truck "I've found piss bottles from other drivers, but now from the warehouse too" https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7amyn/amazon-denies-workers...
There is an obvious reason driver-employing companies don’t do this, which is that it would raise costs and increase delivery times, two things that all customers (both shippers and receivers) absolutely hate. The shipper that implements this unilaterally will instantly become uncompetitive vs shippers that maintain the status quo.
Honestly this is a classic case for top-down regulation. Because it forces all companies to solve the problem simultaneously, it should have little effect on the competitive balance. And companies with unhappy customers could blame the government. That also makes it hard to get regulation done. Voters essentially would have to support raising their own prices in order to help truck drivers.
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/you-cant-trust-amazon-whe...
oh dear
I tried it once, and found it so convenient I’ve done it multiple times now. These Amazon workers may be onto something. All those times I had to urinate so badly while stuck in traffic, I never realized a bottle could be so easy to use. I imagine if you’re in a delivery truck where you could stand up walk into the back it would be even easier, almost trivial. So what’s the big deal?
To discard the urine, I will typically pull over to the side of the road and open the door slightly to empty the bottle discretely. I’m trying to think what the best bottle to keep in the car for this purpose could be. Something made of glass and with a long neck is ideal, to avoid spills. A wide mouth is also helpful. Maybe something like a yellow hydroflask.
From now on, when I do a long road trip, urination will no longer be a reason for me to have to stop and pull over. If this saves me time, I imagine it would save an Amazon driver time AND money.
SoBe bottles are available at many gas stations. Not the biggest mouth, but having fresh bottles makes up for it.
The tricky thing is that in this context, the fact that drivers are peeing in bottles is likely a symptom of a broken system that is exploiting workers and forcing them to spend all the time they can on the road. Definitely have no interest in defending profit optimisation at the expense of people.
Often it is senior execs who are advocating for this approach (saw rumors it was Bezos himself pushing for it at Amazon), and at some point it becomes impossible for the PR team to say “no” to their boss. Someone has to do the dumb thing anyway and see what happens, or resign.
I bet this case study gets pulled out by the PR team within Amazon for years and years whenever someone asks them to “be more aggressive” or whatever.
EDIT: Oh, I guess is it illegal in the USA to install a paid bathroom facility. I think that's dumb.
Ignoring the startup cost, if you have a paid bathroom in a relatively public area, and it costs say, 1 dollar for a usage, conservatively with 2 minute usage time that's about 30 bucks an hour.
Surely 30 bucks an hour revenue minus expenses to have someone refill water/pump out waste/occasional clean would make this a decent business similar to like a vending machine biz?
(put a TV and vending machine in the front room and you are charging for the facility and not the toilet)
Make it a membership instead of pay per use and you are even further away from a 'public pay toilet'.
[1] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/gud/de/index/gesundheitsschutz/...
[2] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/stzh/gud/Deutsch/UG...
Some freight trains do not have toilets for the drivers, and they ended up peeing at the back of the cabin.
The goal of the internship was: "find a way to deal with the corrosion on the floor induced by repeated urination from the drivers".
Invent "a better piss bottle" for drivers. Extra points for accommodating female drivers.
* personal opinion based on living in these 2 cities
"peeing". On live TV.
The scheduled bathroom break time would have to include time to drive to a usable restroom. Others in this thread are discussing challenges related to that.
I had thought at the time Amazon was a company that would work to correct the metrics or training that caused this to happen.
Much of the feedback here was that Amazon is a company that cares nothing for its contracted agents and would fire this individual due to my action.
I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what I had done, the pee, the fate of the driver and Jeff Bezos.
I took two actions:
1. I drafted an email to Jeff:
--
> Jeff,
An Amazon delivery person poured a container of pee out in front of our house in Portland on Saturday.
I read an article that said you authored this tweet:
"You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us."
In the first photo attached, you can see it is broad daylight, and they poured the pee directly out of the window.
In the second, you can see the white patches of pee foam that lingered well after they had been on their way.
I shared my story on Hacker News yesterday and people got really angry that I reported the driver.
To clarify, I do not want this person to get fired. I do want you to know that this did happen and I'm a longtime Amazon customer.
I would appreciate it if you would work with your team to make any necessary changes to your delivery logistics metrics or improve training to prevent this from happening again.
I am upset that Amazon has put me in a position where I look like a jerk for not wanting one of your people to pour pee out in front of our place.
Someone in that thread above called this Amazon gaslighting and given the tweet above and my personal experience it kind of feels like that.
I'd appreciate a note that this has been read and that my truth has been heard.
—-
I received the following reply:
> This is (). with Amazon Executive Customer Relations. Jeff Bezos received your email, and I'm responding on his behalf.
I’m sorry to hear about your poor delivery experience, and I appreciate you making us aware of it. At Amazon, we pride ourselves in being the world’s most customer-centric company.
I’m personally collaborating with the team to investigate this matter further and take the appropriate actions.
—-
The second thing I did was read up about Amazon drivers, pee bottles and the Amazon executive leadership.
What I found was a solid amount of articles describing the situations that are unfair to drivers and prevent them from being able to comfortably relieve themselves while working. In particular, women who must use SheWee style funnels in addition to bottles to keep up with men.
I looked for the performance metrics and found that drivers are expected to do 180+ stops per day to meet metrics.
I did not find investigative reporting that gave any detailed account of what that meant in real terms, such as estimates on the percentage of drivers that have metrics that are not realistically achievable.
In looking at the executive leadership, in particular Jeff Bezos, I found that a significant portion of leadership is turning over right now.
I am guessing that tweet came directly from Jeff and he did it out of anger. I presume he was angry because he is competing for his own personal goal around the amount of wealth he can “create” during his time at Amazon.
I decided his tweet represented an attitude that is not sustainable and that there had to be many in the company that know this. I presume many are waiting for Jeff to depart from day-to-day operations because he is running things way too hot and it’s burning everyone down to the guy who poured pee out in front of my house.
I think this apology is a good sign, though the company has much to prove that it will make changes to make the need to pee in a bottle a thing of the past. Given how common it is in drivery logistics, it appears Amazon will need to show a lot of leadership and create new defining standards of care for its employees and agents.
I would say my view toward Amazon has gone from largely positive to negative as a result of this experience. I’m interested now in how GoPuff or other companies with stronger worker protections can come in and take business away from Amazon.
There is a much bigger story to tell about economic inequality. I see this apology as an important artifact of this rising problem.
I’m hopeful for the driver. That they kept their job or chose to leave it and found something better.