Packages dumped in wrong lobby, resident tried harder to correct it than Amazon
cambridgeday.com
cambridgeday.com
That bin of 'just throw it away' packages is a pretty good visualization of the cost asymmetry of reverse logistics. That, and how the delivered cost of an item is often 4-5x over the 'ex factory' cost, so altogether it's cost effective on average to abandon mis delivered products as long as your error rate is low enough. I'd wager that the cost to handle the support ticket that reported the delivery issue alone may start to approach the ex-factory replacement value of the cheapest goods in the pile...
Source needed. I would expect Amazon to have shipping between major hubs well figured out. The only cost that they may be unwilling to pay is the last mile pickup cost of packages like this (if the expected used value of the item(s) in the package is lower than this cost). But that's not 20x expensive, should be comparable to shipping costs.
- stuff isn't packed as good as from the supplier - stuff has to be unpacked, checked, graded, re-packed, re-labelled and re-stored - stuff isn't delivered in bulk, it is delivered in small, more often tan not, single-unit quantities making goods receipt and in-bound ops more expensive
No idea if it is 20x, but it is considerably more expensive.
What that price difference is exactly is impossible to tell without exact numbers. And those will never be publicly available.
The cost to put one extra box into a shipping container containing thousands of identical units, the pick up of which is scheduled months in advance (so utilization of the overall cargo ship is near ideal), is negligible. Similarly, the cost to break down the incoming shipment, warehouse it and check it in is small, because the factory ensures the correct bar codes are on the outside of the boxes. The worker checking them in is completely stateless - scan a barcode, stick the box in the rack with a light, move on, thus the worker is not specialized and cheaper. From there individual orders are scheduled and collated overnight into trucks that carry hundreds of boxes to individual cities, which are then broken down into the last mile courier.
Now, to arrange the reverse logistics within a bounded amount of time (less than two weeks, say), you are likely to have to send an empty truck to the end address; if you're lucky the route has other packages, but you can't count on it. The reverse logistics sender may not be there when the pick up arrives, so you either have to arrange multiple pickup or risk leaving the item unguarded. Then the box arrives at the local warehouse, with no specific routing information to where the rest of the inventory is, so you have a specialist inspect the box and also make sure there isn't fraud going on - eg people ordering phones and returning similarly weighted bricks. Then if you want that box to make it all the way back to the overseas factory where it was produced, you're probably booking it on an airplane, and not a cargo ship.
20x is actually on the low end. A wall wart power supply might run an incremental cost of about $1 to ship from Shenzhen to your door. Sending that same thing back to the factory by FedEx - a process that takes about a week with customs and pick up delays - probably north of $50 for the 'rack rate' retail shipper.
A consumer->Amazon->factory should be about twice the singleton shipping for a domestic source and destination compared to the reverse shipping path.
Amazon could in theory ship returns to sellers like they would be consumers ...
No special inside information or anything here, just my personal opinion.
Handling exceptions might require a business day or two of admin time just to handle the baseline exception. Multiply 16 hours by salary, and you're at big bucks.
Plus, you need processes for oversight. That costs /a lot/ more. Ownership sounds great on paper -- where any support rep can grant an exception -- but in practice, that gradually leads to a culture of abuse. It starts little, and once that's part of the culture, increases over time.
Getting misdelivered items back to our warehouse and sorted back into stock was a nightmare, and generally we tried not to if at all possible. Whenever a member of the public called us to report they had received a package intended for one of our customers, we would generally ask the caller if they wanted to buy it from us for a large discount. If they declined, we would either let them keep it for free, or if we felt the value of the item justified it we would make an attempt to get it brought back to us. However, between couriers not turning up to collect it on multiple occasions (presumably because there was no real incentive for them to turn up), the homeowner not being at home when the courier arrived, the item being stolen from the homeowner's driveway before the courier getting to it and the courier "losing" the item in transit, the percentage of items that actually came back to us was quite low. In addition, it was then all but impossible to put the item back into stock, since the product line may have come to an end, the package may not be complete, etc. Generally the item would be sold off at a massive discount to staff members. The admin costs through this process would be considerable.
If you still don't believe me, go to Fedex.com and quote the price to ship a large screen TV from your home to Shenzhen.
The customers will tell Amazon they never received the items. Amazon will replace them free.
If the items sold were from an FBA seller, Amazon won't eat the cost but will charge back the FBA seller.
The contracted carrier may or may not ever hear about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonSeller/comments/9d9owl/a_ton_...
I once got a parcel delivered, but the driver was confused as the same tracking number was on two parcels. Amazon had printed an extra label and stuck it onto another package. He just had me pick one of the two.
I picked wrong, and ended up with some window treatments that Amazon refused to collect. I reordered my stuff (which likely went back to Amazon as undeliverable anyway) and that was that.
Amazon just writes it off as a business expense.
I have only every gotten one package stolen, and it was Amazon store brand Presto paper towels, a value of ~$30. Because it was Amazon brand, I got transferred three times, they flat out said that for their products they need to investigate. They created a case number and had me call back in a week.
Other people I know, and even in this thread talk about how trivial it is for a return. Apparently Amazon only cares about lost packages if they have to actually eat the cost.
Why does this remind me of that old Firefly episode where they steal the medicine from the Alliance hospital. They justify that "the Alliance will have it replaced by the end of the day".
I watched it because I played the awful board game. "This game is awful" I said but the guy who'd bought it insisted it was great because it was so like the TV show. Watched the show, checks out, they've precisely imitated the show's "I don't deserve to suffer the inevitable consequences of my own actions. I am the protagonist in my story so the rules shouldn't apply to me" attitude.
This is why I wish they were required to take a picture of all deliveries.
That way I could contact them, have them pull up the picture of the wrong house, and have them compare that to all the other pictures of all the other deliveries.
Then it would be a lot easier to make them either send a new one to the right address, or they have to go to their misdelivered address and pick up that package so that they can send it to me.
Sigh….
Got Cc'd on an E-mail chain from the assistant to some senior VP at DHL once, where the threat that said SVP wanted updates magically caused a package that support had claimed was already on a freight ship across the Atlantic in the wrong direction back to the sender to turn up in a depot five minutes from my office.
I'm currently getting screwed on a >$20k purchase and the ebay dispute resolution response has been idiotic -- basically demanding documentation from UPS that AFAICT isn't something UPS provides, when it wouldn't matter in any case (seller admits that the merchandise is currently in his possession).
It's taking an issue that reasonable people could resolve in ten minutes minutes and going to make it end up in litigation for no good reason.
(I posted a description on /r/ebay: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ebay/comments/qprepp/ebay_customer_... )
Maybe tossing people into a bureaucratic maze just makes them go away when it's a low value purchase, but that isn't going to happen in this case.
Honestly, I don't blame the drivers in the slightest. If I were treated the way they were treated and paid what they were paid, I wouldn't care about doing my job the right way either. Hell, they're so monitored by algorithms and surveillance devices that they probably don't have time to do it the right way even if they wanted to.
Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job.
This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's.
Everyone knows this already - though the lowest rung is occupied by the undocumented, and no one wants to help them.
They're not demented. They know it. They do not give a flying fuck.
Then again, in the US it's very hard to focus your vote like this due to the two-party system. So... work on getting a better political system in place?
Funny enough that logic never applies to corporations. If some corporations behave badly, murdering people, overthrowing democratically elected governments, kidnapping children, well, that's just how it is, we can't abolish corporations, even regulating them is criticized.
Unions help the small guy though, so those are okay to trash.
"Move somewhere better" is the response of the (relatively) rich. It says "I'm OK with this problem, as long as I don't have to be near it." That's an OK position to take sometimes—we have to pick our battles, and can't right all the ills of the world—but it's not really taking a moral stand.
China is the reason Amazon is so big.
Some industries may be able to get away with it and still be competitive - ones that can replace people with robots. This would cause mass layoffs though.
Decent guaranteed basic income could be a solution but something makes me think that North America would rather commit suicide than let people have something "for free" on large scale.
>"China is the reason Amazon is so big."
It was the decision of many US / other western manufacturers to outsource production to China. China was smart and used it to catapult itself from relative nobody to superpower it is today. The true reason is not China but a simple greed.
I'm lucky that Fred Meyer (my preferred local retail store) is unionized.
More over, I tend to shop at mom & pop stores, if possible.
Maybe it's different where you are?
You sure this is only Amazon, and not also USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc?
I'd sooner blame your apartment complex than delivery companies.
Anecdotally, I've had so few problems with delivery drivers, that I can't recall specific examples.
On the other hand, the amount of lousy experiences with apartment complex management companies and their policies would fill a long twitter thread.
For example, ordered computer equipment from Newegg. It was delivered to my apartment complex mail room, which closed at 5pm. I left work early to pick it up, only to find out that the staff had closed down and went home early (4:45p).
Then it’s definitely not Bezos’s fault!
Ahem, the society is not only middle and upper middle class, even (I believe) in US. These drivers themselves use Amazon and other “cheap” services, I mean do you realize they sometimes need to buy things too? That’s obviously not a counter argument to your conclusions, but something to account for before raising the prices.
BS. I didn't ask for the lockers, or even want them - because I knew what would happen. I've never signed up for Prime service for the same reason. Tell me again, how is anything my fault?
Agree.
> Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job.
Disagree. This is entirely the fault of yes-men/pie in the sky management at Amazon. Any manager with the slightest bit of autonomy at Amazon is making six figures and is willing to throw their employees under the bus for money. They will do literally anything to avoid admitting that a problem that exists that can be solved but will cause a KPI to go down. Absolutely no one is willing to go to bat for ideas that cause temporary productivity decrease but a quality and productivity increase over the long run as the company gets better at solving the problem.
In Germany a friend of mine told me that if they're not home at time of delivery Amazon's shipping partner will intentionally deliver to her neighbors, smaller city though but I guess culture is indeed different.
It's common to such a degree that many of the shipping forms on webshops have a dedicated field to indicate that you don't want this, though I've never felt the need to use this; definitely more convenient to walk over to the neighbours than to a pickup point.
We don't talk to strangers, we don't have the kiss on the cheek thing, we stand in well formed distanced lines, we avoid interaction at "any cost".
I would love it if this delivery thing was the normal procedure in Sweden, it builds trust and relationships in your surroundings. These days unless you live in a teeny village you don't really know your neighbors, other than what car they're driving, so that you can buy a more expensive one with borrowed money next time.
Our national anthem says something like "I wanna live and i wanna die in the Nordics", yeah nah!
I agree that your solution is great.
My wife and I used to live in a street where we were usually the only people at home during the day. All the delivery companies quickly realised we would take in anyone's parcels, so our living room was often like a mini sorting office!
Also, my neighbours are no more likely to be at home than I am.
Edit: forgot to specify that this is in Norway.
It's quite common in Germany to accept parcels for neighbors - but that's also because in Germany, a lot of people live in flats in small-ish housing blocks where you know your neighbors. So, like 6-12 flats per house, not high-rises.
But we have the same problems in Germany as described in the article: especially Amazon's own drivers frequently just don't try to ring but instead just leave the boxes outside or just throw them into the hall.
The German postal system has pretty good public lockers, years before we got Amazon Lockers here. Used them a lot, but lately due to fragmentation of the delivery market and those DHL lockers being reserved for the postal system, I more frequently have to drive to some bar or kiosk to fetch my boxes when the sender chooses a different logistics partner.
Nobody here would even consider leaving it outside, despite our crime rate being waay lower than somewhere like the US, where people seem to be 100% fine with that idea.
It was also really uncomfortable because I definitely don't want delivery drivers walking anywhere around my house except for the path from garden gate to front door.
For example: https://img1.etsystatic.com/055/0/7471543/il_fullxfull.74786...
What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing?
I know Amazon already don't bother to process their own returns, instead selling those off in bulk lots for potentially far below the market value of the items (sort of like creditors selling off bad debts rather than trying to collect on them themselves.)
Both situations suggest a paradigm where human labor is by far the most expensive part of any logistics process, such that margin can always be increased simply by replacing workflows that involve even a little bit of human labor with fully-mechanized/externalized workflows, even when that brings service quality down.
This is the sort of situation which happens so infrequently that literally the solution is you ask whoever calls about it to "read me off the TBA number off the tracking label", look up which DSP was responsible, and tell them to divert someone to go pick those up. Any DSP worth its salt always has some number of drivers on rescue or, failing that, one of their dispatchers will go pick it up. In short: DSPs are incentivized to maintain personnel to handle problems on route, and this is exactly the sort of thing they can and should handle. Either way those packages are going to be marked missing/undelivered and the DSP will get dinged for that driver's fuckup, so they might as well send someone out to pick them up and get them properly delivered.
Excuse me? There's like a pile of boxes in the way. Amazon should clean this up, quickly. So you say it's better that random people living there should be made responsible for getting rid of a pile of boxes instead of Amazon who put them there?
What if I "abandon" a sh*tload of poo in your front garden because that's cheaper for me?
But Amazon isn't going to just abandon the people who bought stuff. They're going to get a different item. This is just Amazon signalling that it is cheaper to deliver a new item than to collect a lost item.
Remember, these parcels aren't being sent through the postal system (where you legally release ownership of mail to the Postmaster General by sticking something in a mail slot, which is how it can be a federal offense to tamper with their mail—undelivered mail is the government's legal property!)
Instead, these are parcels going through Amazon's own logistics carriers. Amazon never released ownership of these items—they don't do that until the item hits the recipient's door. These items are legally Amazon warehouse stock, that happen to have shipping labels printed on them.
Maybe it does, but isn't this because of a _negative externality_, i.e. the "indirect cost to individuals" (1) who deal one way or another with the pile of abandoned packages?
So Amazon is like an river polluter in that regard, dumping the problem because it's cheaper _for them_. It should be clear that this is not a net good thing.
I get 'free stuff' except it's absolute garbage. Somebody else gets to abuse Amazon reviews, hyping that stuff under my name for the purpose of jacking up its review scores. Once I looked and the thing was rated #1 in its category.
Don't assume you've figured out the true costs of externalities: anything that is clearly a broken system is also going to be harming people in its brokenness.
It's typically not "free stuff" to the recipient, it's junk, a hassle, and in the way.
(Compare: the liquidation stores that run entirely off of a business model of buying Amazon returns lots, tossing out the broken crap, and selling the rest. Those stores make a profit, and they're receiving pallets where half the stuff is unusuable. If they were receiving pallets where everything is new from the warehouse [valuable or not], they'd likely cry for joy.)
Remember, whoever gets this stuff doesn't have to personally have a use for it. They could just call up their local charitable thrift store to drive over and pick up the whole lot, if they wanted. But that's still net-positive ROI — they get a warm feeling of having donated a bunch of stuff; and the charitable thrift store gets a lot of free stock that they know how to resell, to turn into money for their charity; and a bunch of people who each wanted one particular thing, can now find it at that thrift store for much less than they would have paid for it on Amazon. It's exactly the same as if Amazon donated a bunch of random crap directly to the charitable thrift store, save for the necessity of making one phone call, and the possibility of the caller skimming whatever nice items they like off the top before they make that call.
It's not. Delivery works with a hub and spoke model. Simply get it back to the nearest local distribution point and it will be dealt with.
However, the loss just isn't tracked by Amazon. "Unable to recover packages due to atrocious processes" will be indistinguishable in their reporting to "van flooded/burnt, packages lost". So they don't see the problem and can't see any reason to fix it.
How I can tell - the customer service couldn't even figure out how much the packages were worth. No cost benefit calculation was performed.
What if killing the natives just has plain-old higher ROI for an oil company than trying to work with them? What if operating an illegal taxi business just has plain-old higher ROI than following the laws in place? What if kneecapping the competition just has plain-old higher ROI for an ice skater?
If the government doesn't like it, then provide sufficient incentive not to do it.
Amazon's not the first one I'd look at for this, but still. At some point you have to look at how things actually function. Not unlike critical theory. You ask, 'this is the rule, what's it like in practice though?'
And, because this stuff has value, it will very likely all get reused (i.e. resold or donated into the secondary market), not thrown away. Which will satisfy some of the demand for the products Amazon is selling, replacing an order someone would have made for a new product. Which means this act doesn't even have any externalities for the environment—nothing is going to landfill that otherwise wouldn't.
So I honestly don't get your comparison.
Hope that prevents future confusion.
You're asking the capitalization to do a lot of work.
Well, in the case of your apartment complex and its package locker, it could be either/or. If it's an Amazon brand locker and they're just dropping the packages then chances are the locker was full and the app told them to just drop them there because that was a safe location. If it's a Luxor or some other offbrand locker then they either may not have codes needed to access it or they were trying to shave a few minutes off their time by just dropping everything in the lobby. That might sound horrible but when everyone is incentivized to piss in a bottle and not take their breaks in order to make their deliveries and nobody at corporate ever bothers to investigate then these sort of things are going to happen.
That being said...
> This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's.
Yes. This is the correct answer. :D
These were not dropped outside a locker at the intended delivery address; they were at the wrong address entirely.
Mind you, I'm not saying that's what happened here, but that's one possibility.
You don't need to ask me; it's in the article, starting with the first sentence:
> Amazon – the logistics expert the world has come to rely on for everything from groceries to furniture – abandoned an entire cart of packages meant for delivery to Forest Street in a Fernald Drive lobby on Wednesday. …
> Fernald, in Neighborhood 9, and Forest, in the Baldwin neighborhood, are a five-minute drive apart.
Store manager: So what do you want me to do with those packages.
minimum wage clueless phone support person staring at a support script: throw it in the bin.
Store manager to night shift employees: Gifts for everyone!
I had ordered new M1 macs and monitors for some new workers, plus an order of some snacks I cannot get on the island. If I had to guess, likely 10-12 total boxes. Amazon swears up and down it was delivered. I provide multiple CCTV feeds of the delivery date, testimony of the two posties that the independent delivery agent (NOT Isle of Man Post, who does a superb job) left it at the other location despite being told by residents and their postie that it was for my complex. The door it was left near is who I suspect took the packages but I’ve no way of proving it as I cannot get CCTV for that location.
After months and months, Amazon ends up closing the matter and saying I need to pay for all new items if I want them shipped. I cancel prime and go ahead with having my credit card dispute the transaction. Amazon closes my account and tries to fight my dispute, despite my massive documentary evidence (that they were aware of) showing without a shadow of a doubt they made a mistake.
Funnily enough, I eventually caught one of the boxes (sans goods) in a recycle bin near my place (small town) and the shipping label, despite what was on my Amazon account, was indeed for the other complex (but my unit number and postal code). So it can’t even be blamed on an overworked delivery driver - it was all a cock-up on Amazon’s end.
Did you grab a photo of the shipping label on the box that turned up? Mental drain notwithstanding, I theoretically wonder if you'd get a different response if you randomly cold-reopened the case with the new evidence. Sounds like the credit card dispute went through, in any case.
Reading this, I also thought briefly that it would be really cool to make a site for people to publicly file open-and-shut substantiated claims as a sort of "name and shame"... but of course enforcing submission quality would be impossible (firehose), and the majority of the "neat" cases would end up being fraud. Sigh. :(
TIL about the idea of having CCTV pointed at my front door and letterbox though. I've seen plenty of Ring clips at this point of "ha ha the delivery person yeeted the package in the general direction of the front door" but I never really thought that it makes it possible to be able to incontrovertibly go "...what delivery?". Definitely adding that to the todo list...
I'm completely with you in terms of the cost being potentially ruinously significant. Yep, this is definitely a broken situation.
At the end of the day, I think the canonical solution with situations like this is to go viral on social media, as awkward as that is. Network effects and virality are unpredictable and it sometimes takes a while for things to take off, but if you've still got some mental energy left and motivation to seek closure, the data you've collected presents what appears to be a very open-and-shut case which will help to elicit a "wat, what gives" type response, and the relative cognitive simplicity/neatness of the case would very likely encourage knee-jerk sharing. I guess it would just be a question of figuring out how to summarize everything and where to put it - here? FB? Twitter? etc.
There's a very minimal chance the Web Archive saved a view of your Twitter feed with the replies visible, and a similarly low chance the Tweet(s) ended up in an archive somewhere... that's still available. Yeah, this is definitely pushing it.
Ah, yes, the really narrow definition of ‘the world’. Meaning the US, as everyone knows.
I don't remember ever having seen _any_ security guards in a grocery store before, let alone armed ones! It's possible I've mistaken some for regular employees if they wore the same uniform, but I'm fairly certain I would have noticed if they were carrying weapons...
I don't think their purpose is to deter shoplifters; it's really to deter assaults on staff. Shoplifting is just part of the cost of doing business as a grocers.
I once saw a couple of armed cops in my local grocers; UK cops are generally not armed, but these guys were carrying big old pistols as they wandered through the aisles looking for sandwiches. I'm not keen on sharing supermarket aisles with gunmen, even if they're in uniform; so I complained. Armed cops should disarm (e.g. leave their guns in the cop-car) if all they're doing is shopping for lunch. I was treated with scorn.
I rather politely told them to fuck off. (We can do without militarisation of our police service thankyou.)
Larger stores in the suburbs definitely do, and my understanding is something like whole foods would be similarly sized to those.
I guess I would would love to know why they dont want it back
Also, it helps to remember that many products are simply 'fulfilled by Amazon', not something Amazon stocks in itself. Thus, returns can incur additional restocking costs from having to reroute that product to the appropriate warehouse.
Thus, it makes sense that for some products that they just cannot reasonably verify the resellability of, or for products that are just plain too low margin to bother with, it makes sense to just tell people to 'keep it'.
That said, there's nothing to stop them from at least having the courtesy to call up the DSP that made the mistake, make them pick it up, and have them dispose of it. Make THEM bear the cost.
Hope that helps.
The merchant should always be able to verify that, be it for pants or complex electronics. Verifying a laptop hasn't been tampered with and reinstalling the OEM OS is easy.
> products that are just plain too low margin to bother with
The margin is irrelevant, the cost is what matters. Throwing away an item that cost 300k to make costs 300k, no matter if the margin is 10$ or 100k$.
The intended recipient called the cops and FedEx tracked it down. It turned out to be several packages of gift cards, which is super sketchy, but other than a confusing experience with the police, I guess it turned out ok for everyone except maybe the driver.
Addresses were mailed out to: Jane Smith (my fiance) 1234 Our Apartment St, but lacking an apt#, yet they were still delivered to us at the front desk.
I check my credit card statements later and start seeing some unauthorized charges from Amazon. My card was not linked to my fiance's account. No idea what really happened here so I had to call the CC company to alert of fraud and cancel my card.
In India, all such Credit Card purchase needs to be validated via OTP and PIN. Passwordless purchase is only possible for some cards and they require physical access to PoS machine and low purchase amount to work.
- Can they deliver a written notice that we can use it?
Common scam here in Blighty where a "courier" later turns up to collect the laptop from you.
Isn't this great? Amazon probably records their calls so above said Andrea Norman could just have a huge bag of goodies for free. Take whatever you want and donate the rest. The vendors probably are going to reship/refund to the customers and Amazon will pay. Isn't this cool?
How do we refactor our economy such that this is no longer possible? What actually needs to happen?
If it costs more to pick up and redeliver than it does to leave free gifts for random people, what's the downside of leaving free gifts?
Because when every decision by a company ultimately comes down to cost/profit, we lose the planet.
> If it costs more to pick up and redeliver than it does to leave free gifts for random people, what's the downside of leaving free gifts?
1) the ethics are wrong here. Those gifts were intended for different people
2) Amazon "own" delivery here, and they failed; the cost is on them
3) a solution like "it's cheaper to post new ones" is anti-ecological (and thus probably also unethical)
4) Amazon is showing a very subtle disregard for its staff here. Technically, the staff member had responsibility for this delivery and they failed to manage that. Amazon enabled this misbehaviour (they probably enforced it through ridiculous targets). This removes the agency of the delivery staff. A "good" company would use individual staff members' agency to improve conditions for both the company and its staff (like how "good" engineering firms foster learning and career development). Whilst there may not be a career ladder with many rungs in delivery, those on the ladder should be afforded respect and their responsibility championed. Amazon failed here too.
'Free gifts for random people' isn't gifts, it's pollution.
Asking someone to either throw the items away or keep them is the exact opposite of littering.
> This might actually be something for small claims court. The building can pay to dispose of/deliver the packages and take Amazon to small claims to recover costs.
Since Amazon told them they could keep the stuff or throw it away, they'd have to go to some elaborate lengths to actually suffer damages as a result of what Amazon did.
For a commercial enterprise, throwing something away is rarely free. And if there are electronics in those boxes, proper disposal might take more than a modicum of effort.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
> As used in this section, “litter” means the discarding, dropping, or scattering of small quantities of waste matter ordinarily carried on or about the person, including, but not limited to, beverage containers and closures, packaging, wrappers, wastepaper, newspapers, and magazines, in a place other than a place or container for the proper disposal thereof, and including waste matter that escapes or is allowed to escape from a container, receptacle, or package.
They could make a law specifically for this type of dumping, Amazon would probably lobby against it and it would sway about zero voters, and the cost to enforce would probably be greater to the public than if they just dealt with it especially if these companies wanted to be uncooperative about it.
https://medium.com/knowledge-stew/when-nasa-received-a-400-f...
"Around July 19, 1979, the US space agency team that was in western Australia searching for debris was issued a citation for littering by the Esperance Shire Council in the amount of $400. Though the citation was in jest, the council hoped NASA would pay the fine as a gift for their museum. They didn’t pay. But the fine was finally settled on behalf of NASA in 2009 by a radio host named Scott Barley of Highway Radio when he got his morning listeners to donate the funds."
I rebought all the items and waited another week for them to be delivered, only to have them all stolen again by the driver.
Now I had to go through hours of talking to multiple agents again, them pleading with me to wait just a few more days in case it was a glitch, before I got a refund so I could again spend more money to reorder everything and wait yet another week for it to be delivered.
To make matters worse, one of these people refuses speak to me even I am stood immediately in front of him; the other parks her car in such a manner that I have to pay to park in a public space down the road despite polite requests for her to park in a more considerable manner. I've also had to soundproof my office at my own cost because of her barking dog (that she isn't supposed to have).
The added irony being that if I order stuff from amazon I have it delivered to a nearby locker because I don't like waiting all day for the buzzer to go.
So, yeah, not much sympathy from here. And, yes, I do still accept their parcels. Just because some people are **holes doesn't mean I have to be one too.