UPS and the package wars
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
USPS employees are clearly more cheerful in the countryside, the guys working in the cities have "dead fish" eyes with no light.
Something I would suggest to everyone: Get friendly with your drivers. Greet them with a smile and thank them for their work; simple signs of appreciation might seem small but they go a long way. Exchange some jokes and make small talk if they are the social type. If they look tired, see if they want a can of coca-cola or something; ask if they want to borrow the restroom if you have one available for guest use. Make sure any pet(s) don't get in the way of your drivers.
To those who ship stuff out frequently: Ask your drivers if there's anything you can do beforehand to make their work easier; things like attaching/inserting shipping documents a certain way, writing the tracking number on the box somewhere, etc.
To those who ship/receive high volumes: Help your drivers with loading and unloading if they're okay with it. Being a deliveryman is back breaking work, so most drivers really appreciate having extra sets of hands.
We're all human, so for better or worse we're all going to treat friends better than strangers. Becoming friends with your drivers is important for everyone involved with your packages.
it took a little while before they trusted it (understandably), but it caught on after a bit and really made for some great moments. We became pretty close with some of the folks on our route. The red bull was far and away the most popular but buying in bulk made it affordable.
Fast forward, I've made a series of purchases on Ali Express and they've all started getting returned; turns out whatever system they were using screwed up our address on like six packages. I mentioned the trouble to my USPS person who we'd become familiar with due to the fridge - she asks me for the tracking numbers and said she'll see what she can do.
She saved something like $350 Worth of packages that would have just been lost to the aether.
Unrelated to providing snacks/drinks - I find USPS support to be absolutely stellar. The amount of effort they've gone through for us to track down packages in the past is amazing.
The other day I had a visit from a USPS worker who noted that one of their delivery drivers' scanner had died while performing their duties and a package meant for us had not been scanned. They were simply following up to make sure the package had actually been delivered.
Obviously there are some HN readers that will detest this suggestion, but for those who believe, please save a word or two for them.
I've had nothing but problems with UPS actually delivering stuff to my house, and the idea of driving to an industrial park to pick up a package at a shipping center is a joke. I've had no problems with the amazon couriers.
I assume this is on the back of the employees. And I support a model where I pay the true cost of delivering stuff, meaning appropriate pay for delivery workers.
But I think the writing is on the wall for UPS and other legacy carriers, and a strike is only going to accelerate that. They've already lost the goodwill of the public. Most won't even notice if the rest of their business goes to the Amazon focused couriers.
The problem is what it will do to the broader shipping networks. Presumably without ups, shipping will get even more expensive and have worse service for smaller businesses
I live in a small rural town and the Amazon delivery model endangers residents and our roads. Every town in my State (NJ) is on high alert that an Amazon warehouse is going to sneak into our neighborhood.
I hope government wakes up to how screwed up and dangerous Amazon’s model really is.
The amazon model isn't to drive horribly and park badly. They just pay too little and try to insulate themselves from accountability by hiring contractors while overworking their drivers to the extent that they have to piss in bottles to get through a shift without being punished.
Have you complained to anyone about the problem you've seen with drivers? Called the police? UPS, Fedex, and USPS can have the same problems when it comes to bad/overworked/inconsiderate drivers. Governments just have to do better at holding companies accountable for the behavior of the drivers working on their behalf.
These are not mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary, I would say they're precisely equivalent.
If you cannot give people an appropriate workload to do a good job, and they'd end up homeless if they quit, then the result is that they will do a bad job.
And the reason it's the most profitable model, is that they've insulated themselves from accountability, and everyone else pays for the negative externalities of crashes and such.
That is 100% their model.
UPS, USPS and FedEx drivers do not show this level of dysfunction. There are issues, but they are isolated. With Amazon, I fully expect nearly every driver to be a menace.
Why not? Even if there’s one sherif have then spend a few hours each week ticketing these vans.
Since there’s an army it should be easy to find them breaking laws and ticket them. If they are fined then they will change their behavior. And the upside is if they don’t change their behavior, then they can just hire a new officer who tickets full time.
This is a solvable problem if communities want to solve it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/zsmgug/amazon_nyc_dist...
Other than the manure, is that a bad thing?
What does government have to do with this?
Source: Do Flex on the side.
I have never had UPS want me to pick up a package from a hub. The only times it happened is when I requested it.
FedEx always drives on my neighbors lawn(we don't have curbs) and leaves stuff on the lawn uncovered
Amazon will say the package is delivered before it is, and they ignore my requests to leave it on the porch more than half of the time.
USPS has broken 3 trashcan lids in the last 4 years, and insists on giving me junk mail.
As far as I can tell, this is an outright fraud they are committing against their own delivery metrics. It's such a ubiquitous problem with Amazon specifically and no other carrier that it can't be just an accidental oopsie. I wouldn't be surprised if they get sued for it in 2023.
That or it's individual actors within the shipment centers doing it to prevent getting fired, in which case I have a lot more sympathy for them even if it makes it hard to know where your package actually is.
They went out of their way to lie to my face about delivery time.
Thankfully though I have a Canada Post location literally next door to my apartment, so when I need to do returns, it's usually pretty easy as long as it's done via Canada Post.
Intelcom (gig-economy delivery used by Amazon from their fulfillment centers) was pretty bad when they first got started a few years ago, but it's smoothed out significantly since. The only problems I've seen is when they deliver to rural areas and the drivers aren't familiar with the dirt roads, they tend to give up trying to deliver pretty quickly. But their support via email has been okay.
Here in Norway, UPS and FedEx have deals with local corner shops and similar. If I'm not at home they'll bring it there. I live on the outskirts, but I've not had to walk more than 15 minutes.
The worst part is that if you just want the package held at the hub in advance then it’s still $5.99 now, even though they didn’t have to actually deliver anything! It’s crazy.
So just wait. I’m sure UPS Norway will soon be coming for your money too.
The QR codes are not the magic. The real magic are the systems that select routes (Why was WA5 was selected from BOI2) and how Amazon fills it truck for optimal utilization. There are so many processes you need to plan and execute flawlessly with a very temporary workforce. Replicating this needs a lot of cash, a lot of talent in system and process design, good local leadership, and insane focus on operational efficiency.
If you want a brown UPS truck to deliver your package you have to choose one of their "regular" service, like Ground or one of the air services.
Or, take some coffee roasters. I suspect they are going to use SurePost, so I give my address as my PO Box. Their system rejects PO Boxes. So, I use my street address. The package gets transferred to USPS and ends up at a post office in the wrong town, since I don't have a mailbox at my residence.
The USPS won't let me create a mail forwarding address in my residence town, since "I don't have a mail delivery address there", Catch-22. In addition, SurePost claims to accept PO Box addresses, but the vendor's software doesn't know that.
And, I don't have a way to tell the SurePost system what my postal address is. Same deal with the Fedex equivalent.
I have a feeling it's a super cheap service, and USPS just sits on it til it has a light load or something. Still, I'd put the blame on the original shipper, they know what they're signing up for.
This is complex and a slightly unfair comparison.
Amazon packages all come from a few central locations- the fulfillment centers. That network has spokes- Sort Centers and Air Hubs. But Amazon has optimized that in most cities, the item you're ordering is typically in a warehouse near you. The bigger the city, the more likely. From those few locations they can do rapid sorting and send packages to the last mile delivery stations.
UPS and FedEx have to pick up from everywhere. That gives them a "first mile" problem that Amazon doesn't have.
UPS, FedEx, DHL and company are perfrctly able to do last mile deliveries. Some are better in some regions than others.
Back the day, Amazon Germany was DHLs biggest global customer. So yes, existon carriers will feel if all their business goes to Amazon logistics. Which it won't, because of risk diversification, and a ton of other reasons.
We don't really deal with Amazon couriers in a business sense, but I find them a nightmare to deal with personally. Since I don't know ahead of time how it will be shipped, I can't make intelligent choices about where to ship to. If I ship home, it shows up during the day with a legacy courier; if I ship it to my work, it ends up with one of those Amazon couriers that just toss the packages at the front of the building in the middle of the night or on weekends. Neither option is great, and it's a major factor in me using Amazon less now.
I do not understand the logic behind devaluing the FedEx brand like that, especially since a FedEx express driver will not pickup a FedEx ground package and vice versa. They expect customers to keep track of this?
I've not had to go pick up a package in basically ever, in a low population county in the US. I remember 20+ years ago my brother and I went and drove to get something, but I think it was Fedex.
As far as online shipping, vendors seem to split between UPS and USPS for me. There's a Fedex distribution center like 6 miles away, so not sure why they don't seem to be in the mix.
Back In The Day, couriers treated every parcel as if it contained a high-end laptop worth several weeks' wages - it either gets signed for by someone in the right building or it goes back to the depot. And if you want to collect from the depot, you'd better have government-issued photo ID matching the name on the package.
Leaving such a valuable item just sitting on someone's porch? Without a signature? Unthinkable!
And as the deliveries were conducted 9-5 Monday-Friday, if you were in work those hours every parcel would end up at the depot, no matter how many redelivery attempts they made.
Of course in the modern age, where a courier knows they might be delivering a $2 tube of toothpaste instead of a $2000 laptop, things are different.
So we contacted them, they sent us a UPS label, I printed it out, went to the UPS website and told them to pick it up. It was pre-paid, and they agreed to pick it up between 9:30AM and 5:00PM that day. But they never did. So I figured they’d come the next day. Nope. So I called and they said it had been picked up. I had to explain that, no, I was looking at it right now. It’s definitely still in my home. So they set up pickup for the next day and said, “But we’re going to have to charge you for it.” I said, “Well, I’m not the one paying for it, Staples is, so go nuts.” They never showed up. In the end, I drove to the local Staples (not the one it was supposed to be sent to), which also does UPS shipping and just had them take it for UPS.
So where I am delivery is pretty good, but pickup is complete trash. I think it’s just the luck of the draw and the number of packages they have to deliver on a given day vs. the number of drivers available.
UPS is union, so none of this is surprising or unexpected.
So do I. Unfortunately, this is a cost not everyone can shoulder, so we won’t see anything like this happen.
I heard a good quote about capitalism adjusting for endless efficiency, recently. Maybe someone knows the saying. It essentially means we’ll never go backward on cost.
While the article is expectedly one-sided, it does touch upon the changed environment in the delivery sector and labor in America in general. This is no longer a David vs Goliath contest like the last UPS strike in the 90s went. Amazon is now the Goliath. The gig economy is the Goliath. UPS itself is helpless in the face of these developments. A striking UPS driver with stable hours, a 6-figure salary, benefits and a pension/retirement fund is going to get far less sympathy from the public today than 20 years ago. But then is there any alternative other than to sit by and let their job become another Amazon or DoorDash?
Striking can definitely backfire. How many UPS customers will ship with other companies during the strike? How many of them will stick with their new choice and never come back to UPS?
When a market gets disrupted like this, the worst thing the incumbents can do is refuse to accept change and double down on their old model. They need to innovate and change. I know that’s not easy, but it’s the only thing that works.
they are trying to destroy competition by the service equivalent of illegal dumping, using their AWS profits to eliminate competition by taking a loss on every single other part of their business.
thats not really what is meant by a free market.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/236503/amazons-annual-sh...
[2]: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/true-cost-convenience-amazons-...
[3]: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/will-amazon-convert-shipp... although it notes that you can change what numbers one uses and lie with statistics
That kind of subsidy of the average American would be very nice of Amazon. Alas, it's highly unlikely. See https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2017/Hendersonpreda...
Ah yes, the mythical world where the assets of an enormous but deteriorating corporation are just sitting around on a shelf for purchase by any plucky entrepreneur with enough vision, bootstraps, and good old American sack, who will of course be able to restart the whole enterprise immediately, and, having purchased the whole thing on the cheap, will have so greatly reduced average cost that they can immediately call the predator's bluff and restart the same price war, this time with the upper hand and victory in sight.
Of course this argument makes no sense except in a world of spherical cows and perfectly rational actors.
The more plausible argument against Amazon operating their logistics business at a loss is the obvious fact that they have invested enormous resources into squeezing efficiency out of their logistics business, to the point of being now-infamously abusive of their delivery drivers and warehouse staff. Keeping marginal cost as low as possible clearly matters a lot to Amazon management. What's more likely is that they have invested in keeping marginal cost down specifically in order to run their logistics business at a very small but positive margin and still compete on price in order to establish and maintain dominance and high volume. Don't forget that they are also skimming value off of several points in the e-commerce lifecycle, basically at every point except actually charging customers for shipping, but that's probably more than offset by all the Prime accounts that people renew every year but never get their money's worth out of.
Then again, this is just speculation. I haven't actually looked at their financial statements, and maybe someone with more finance expertise can weigh in on whether there's anything more to be learned there.
Seems like a good thing!
> Ah yes, the mythical world where the assets of an enormous but deteriorating corporation are just sitting around on a shelf for purchase by any plucky entrepreneur [...]
Well, blame all the laws and regulation that make 'hostile' takeovers so hard.
I think it is. However they're engaged in plenty of other sketchy and unethical practices, so let's maybe hold off on the ticker tape parade hailing our great Job Creator Bezos as a national hero and success story for laissez-faire "free" market economics.
(Otherwise, war and destruction of any kind would be the best thing ever..)
This is the equivalent of saying "that plane isn't flying because gravity holds things down".
The real solution here is sectoral collective bargaining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining
It's good for people to be able to enjoy cheap shipping.
> It's good for people to be able to enjoy cheap shipping.
Yes, that's why sectoral bargaining laws are so important - they force firms to compete on genuine innovation and efficiency, rather than undercutting pay and working conditions.
Package delivery still exists in countries with sectoral collective bargaining. No government payments are involved - all that's different is industrial bargaining laws. The companies are competitive - they just compete on actual efficiency rather than undercutting worker pay and conditions.
> The conditions and wages that the market can bear aren't some physical universal constant that exist in a vacuum - they are a product of labor market laws and regulations.
It's wrong.
The conditions the market can bear are based on market demand. If the demand isn't there, businesses will have nothing to offer, so it wouldn't much matter what kind of regulations are in place.
Regulations don't produce demand, unless they require people to buy things they would not otherwise buy.
Regulations can only work with the demand that exists in the market. For example, if the market demand for delivery services would only be enough to support a wage of $5/hour for workers, but the law said the minimum wage must be $10/hour, the result would be that all delivery companies would fail and there would be no jobs for delivery workers -- unless the government stepped in with subsidies as I mentioned before.
Wages aren't set by the government in sectoral collective bargaining.
Suppose there are two delivery firms:
- Firm A develops innovative delivery routing software that cuts delivery costs by 20%.
-Firm B is rubbish at software, but really good at underpaying workers and getting away with it, such that they reduce costs by 30%.
Without sectoral collective bargaining and stronger labour rights more generally, Firm B will win. But the better outcome for workers and efficiency is for A to win.
Amazon is definitely not Firm B, although I suspect that is what you were driving toward. Amazon has invested more in being competitive than any other company it competes with in almost every area, and despite the nonsense you read in the media, it offers above-average pay and benefits in the industries it is involved in. Despite that, all warehouse and delivery jobs suck and are dangerous, but that says a lot more about those jobs than it does about the company.
In any case, you've missed the point. If Amazon is competitive and better than others on pay and conditions as you say, sectoral bargaining would be good for them, because it would stop them getting undercut by worse employers.
> Firm B would be pretty easy to compete with, because it would end up with the worst human capital out of all of the firms, and a firm with better people would find a way to add value that Firm B could not.
This is obviously not true. Plenty of companies pay terribly and get away with it, and plenty of companies thrive because treating employees badly is their primary innovation. Uber, for instance, has found success through paying "employees" effectively below minimum wage.
Yeah, but think about why.
Specifically, why doesn't Uber have any competitors that pay better? The only other major player in the US market is Lyft, which is such a clone of Uber that a lot of drivers work for both of them.
This happened because the market won't bear the kind of prices Uber, Lyft, and any other entrant in the market would need to charge in order to pay the drivers more.
This is a perfect example of my previous point about how regulations can constrain the market but don't create demand in themselves: if the government said all Uber and Lyft drivers needed to be full-time employees with benefits and a higher wage, even though the market won't bear the prices needed to make that happen, Uber and Lyft would go out of business. Instead of having low-paying jobs those workers would end up with no jobs.
In countries with sectoral bargaining, where bargaining power is higher, workers get much higher wages and conditions for those same jobs. And yet, those jobs do not cease to exist. You must be very puzzled at how this is possible.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by underpaying? If people are willing to work for a company, and everything is as promised, what's wrong with that? (If things are not as promised, the legal system can help.)
Read what I wrote again. The point of sectoral bargaining is to remove downward competition on wages as a possible competitive advantage.
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by underpaying? If people are willing to work for a company, and everything is as promised, what's wrong with that? (If things are not as promised, the legal system can help.)
What’s wrong with that is: low wages are bad. Your conceptual mistake here is thinking that jobs are “voluntary”. Most people are forced to do jobs in order to pay for food and shelter.
If they could, they would.
There is danger with a strike, but it might be more limited than you've suggested. Yes, companies will try and keep shipping things with alternatives during a strike. Yes, some might want to stay with that alternative. However, there are two complications with that. First, I don't think people will decide to boycott UPS because they had a strike. I think shippers want to minimize their costs, not punish a shipper because they had a strike. Companies aren't going to pay FedEx more just because UPS had a once in a generation strike (and it looks like that last one was in 1997, 26 years ago). Second, do competitors have the capacity to pick up the slack? Yes, companies can expand over time, but they probably can't for the duration of a strike. Amazon started shipping its own packages years ago and is still UPS's largest customer. Amazon can't just scale up operations overnight and they're Amazon. I'm sure that FedEx, Amazon, and LaserShip/OnTrac will make a play for marketshare, but if they're able to get a reasonable contract, I don't think others will be able to move fast enough to really take marketshare in the short term.
Now, if the contract puts UPS at a big disadvantage over the long-run, their marketshare will simply dwindle. However, as it stands, FedEx and UPS are making similar amounts of revenue (UPS is around 7% higher), but UPS is often making 2-3x the profit. Trailing 12 months: $10.2B vs 3.5B. 2021: $9.4B vs 5.6B. 2020: $5.1B vs 1.6B. 2019: $5.6B vs 0.8B.
2.9x more, 1.7x more, 3.2x more, 7x more. That's a nice run of much higher profits while having only marginally more revenue.
It kinda looks like UPS has a good business model and that the union wages haven't been a hinderance to that model. UPS is valued at 3.2x more than FedEx despite having the same revenue and UPS's P/E ratio is actually a tiny bit lower - 14.24 vs 14.86. People are paying over 3x more for UPS stock because they're making great profits that justify being worth $157B to FedEx's $48B. Wall Street isn't the kind of place where they're going to love your stock because you're a union shop - probably the opposite. However, they do like the profits that UPS is bringing in compared to FedEx.
Yep, my instinct was that UPS's fundamentals would be bad compared to newer and non-union shops. Turns out that they're making money way better than their main rival with better margins. It's surprising, but I'd say there's money for the union to go after. I'm not saying they can have unlimited demands, but if UPS is earning 2-3x what FedEx is on the same revenue, there's room for improvement in salaries. Even if the workers take only half the difference between UPS and FedEx and we look at the worst delta between the two since 2019 ($3.5B in 2020), we're talking $1.75B. Divide that by the 250,000 union workers and that's $7,000/year in more money. Even if we're talking about the 500,000 global workers, that's still $3,500/year. If UPS is looking at more expansion in the next few years (which seems likely), maybe the union can go for a bit more. Note: this isn't talking about bringing UPS down to zero profit. This is about bringing UPS down to 1.5-2x FedEx's profitability rather than 2-3x. With increases in package volume, maybe UPS could be back to 3x FedEx toward the end of the contract.
UPS's business just looks strong. They have a similar employee headcount as FedEx and similar revenue, while having way better profits.
But when I read : "Sean M. O’Brien, the Teamsters’ general president, has said, “We’re going to take that contract, and we’re going to show the Amazon workers what you get when you join the greatest organization in the world.”"
It reeks of hubris and I wonder how it will end up ...
If I ship something important or for business, I want either UPS or FedEx Express or USPS to take care of it.
Amazon and doordash is for low value trinkets, and I do not trust random people enough to even order food from doordash or whatever.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/22/business/ups-going-public...
Did the current employee-owners get the big windfall they anticipated in that pre-IPO article?
> Mr. Kelly said that U.P.S. needed to issue stock to the public to maintain its competitiveness against rivals like the FDX Corporation, which owns Fedex; DHL and several increasingly aggressive foreign postal services that are also planning to issue stock soon.
Well... that's one story.
I wonder how working conditions and salaries changed after they went from employee-ownership to public ownership... I have a guess of course.
The methods which is mentioned in the article is literal instructions on how to safely do your job if you could physically adhere to them while maintaining production would actually be really great because they're pretty thoughtful, however, it's easy to cut corners and do things that speed you up slightly at the cost of increasing injury.
One thing that would be really great for my production is small packages because smaller packages = more pph which means less boss aggro. One thought that I've had is that Amazon gives all UPS the junk packages which we would call large cube or irregulars which were either exceptionally large boxes or super heavy boxes > 70lbs. (Btw they say you won't have to pick up more than 70lbs, that's a straight lie).
Anyway wanted to give some additional perspectives.
It's annoying sometimes that they knock once and leave with a notice but it's still better than losing packages like FedEx.
I've always been curious how Uber has lasted this long with such an awful mapping platform. But I assume it has to do with Google Maps/Waze (I've never used Bing or Apple Maps) having such an advantage over Uber that they are just years behind.
Every time I've had an Uber driver that forwards locations to Google Maps I know I won't be circling the block twice, after going down two extra side roads.
Up-to-date address DBs seems to be an easier problem than taxi routing though.
> As Shatan noted, in a recent report on delivery companies’ performance, UPS came out on top, with an on-time-delivery rate of ninety-seven per cent.
I've experienced positive and negative experiences from all three (including USPS, though Amazon makes 4 now), but have definitely had more negative experiences from FedEx.
The drivers are given utterly unrealistic quotas and there's appears to be little incentive for packages to actually get delivered. There's also no way for a consumer to escalate delivery issues to anyone who'd actually be empowered to fix mistakes.
[1]: https://twitter.com/MikkiHEL/status/1549027653906272257 (be warned, it's a thread with hundreds of tweets. In English, though)
[2]: https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000008955913.html (in Finnish)
Amazon drivers do an adequate job but often look stressed and burnt out. They never look me in the eye. I feel really bad for them.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z348y9/amazon-drivers-are-st...
It's true for warehouse workers too. They also poop in bags. I guess that's what it takes to make 130 billion in revenue per quarter.
Giant corporations never have your best interests top of mind.
That said, I'd also like to see law enforcement enforce double parking violations of delivery trucks, even if that means it costs more for delivery.
The amazon trucks in particular in SF, really don't give a fuck who they're blocking. They'll block a main artery in the city during rush hour and they'll even block it right next to 3 open spaces meaning they could have pulled up to the curb and not blocked traffic with 15 to 40 cars piled behind them if all they'd done is pull over. I have multiple videos of this happening.
I certainly have sympathy if they're getting rushed by management but I want the law enforced and management to get the message that double parking is not acceptable. Certainly not on main arteries.
I will say Fedex Express seems to have retained some of its character, in the way that UPS Air has not (some of those >9PM packages have been Next Day Air 10:30AM service). The worst is being unable to reach an actual human. If I'm calling, it's not because I want to listen to a computer voice read out the tracking information. (Although one of their tracking websites has been straight up "unavailable" for months, so maybe it's not a stretch).
The reward for worst offense probably goes to UPS, for delivering a crushed box that started off containing 4 gallons of oil paint, very obviously leaking everywhere. That was also at 9PM, so nobody to even try to get ahold of until the next day well after I had been forced to deal with it. I donned disposable gloves and carefully poured them into a 5 gallon bucket and got 3 free gallons of paint and 20% discount on the reship from Home Depot. I guess dealing with the fallout is the real price we pay for goods getting delivered? The sheer wastefulness continues to be obscene to me. We have such abundance that we don't even bother handling goods properly to avoid squandering them.
What I really don't get is why none of these companies have tried batching deliveries onto fewer days per week. I get that they they're not in the business of storing packages, but instead of having drivers race around to do one package at each of many houses, they could make fewer stops. If the buffering would take too much room, do ingress policing that requires shippers to only ship to specific destinations on specific days. If we're going for cheapest possible rates, that seems like a straightforward optimization.
I’ve had their automated system hang up on me! I semi-regularly have to send a pre-paid box back to Apple to recycle an old device. I go to FedEx’s website to get a pick-up, and it always says that the tracking number isn’t valid. (Apple must send literally millions of these boxes a year - why would the tracking number be invalid?) I then call and the person on the phone fixes it and the package gets picked up as expected. But one day they changed their phone tree and the old options didn’t work. If you asked for a representative or agent, it would just hang up on you! I eventually figured out that you have to follow the prompts that say, “Problem with the web site” and then “something else” after that and then you get a human who can fix the problem or escalate it. But they’re clearly trying to get you to hang up and go away.
I feel like not that long ago, overnighting a letter was a $15-20 expense (as long as you weren’t opting for one of the “very first thing” delivery slots).
I don't know if that's just because they like keeping out the "retail riff-raff", they like having your credit card on file, that juicy "data", or what, but it works.
Guess which he chose?
Shipping prices are weird.
I wonder if the end results will be a temporary boost for current employees, but at the expense of new ones as UPS loses more and more market share.
Heh. Most UPS workers are working-class in traditional classification.
"American middle-class" is extremely stretched concept.
An individual making that amount is in the top 20% of earners in the US. How high of an income do you think people need to attain middle class?
working class: the social group consisting primarily of people who are employed in unskilled or semi-skilled manual or industrial work.
Upper / middle / lower class is about wealth. In a society with little income inequality, the middle class can become quite large. “Working class” is a class related to a type of work. In most places, the jobs that make up the working class are low paying, so the working class is also lower class. But this didn’t use to be the case in the US.
> The modern usage of the term "middle-class", however, dates to the 1913 UK Registrar-General's report, in which the statistician T.H.C. Stevenson identified the middle class as those falling between the upper-class and the working-class.
"Middle" literally stands for "between" working-class and upper-class. What do you think it's in the middle of?
You can also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class#Academic... for a comparison of different contemporary models of the American middle-class specifically (all of which place the middle class in the middle of working-class and some other class, obviously).
See also sibling subthread.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to belabor this point but would suggest reading the entire page or at least the first paragraph:
> Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation's income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%
You accuse me of not reading the entire article but you don't read it or even my comment?
> > Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation's income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%
Your quote says that the size of the "middle-class" group varies, not that it overlaps the "working class" group.
I don't understand where you are stuck. In case you lost track, here is the comment that you are seemingly supporting:
> Working class and middle class are not mutually exclusive
1. The class of people who live of their work but owns their own means of production (e.g. independent professionals like dentists, lawyers, or independent tradesmen like plumbers, electricians). This definition sits in the middle between the working class (who has to work for an employer) and the ruling class (who employs others to work for them).
2. The class of people with the middle earnings, regardless of how they earn their money. This definition sits in the middle between the poor and the rich.
So, if you are comparing middle class and working class you are clearly using meaning #1, in which case they are mutually exclusive by definition.
To be clear, not everyone who works is working class, the working class is just those who have to sell their labor to a middleman because they don't own the means to work directly to a customer.