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Comment by Scubabear68 | Hacker News Reader

To me Amazon delivery people are a menace. I have seen them take out garbage cans and mailboxes in feats of horrible driving. They will park on dangerous blind curves. They will block small but important local roads. They hop out of their driver’s side of their vans right into traffic.

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.

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> 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.

We are a town of around 6,900 people over 30 square miles. There is an army of Amazon vans invading our town. Our local officials and police have no capacity to deal with this.

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.

They have the capacity, they just don't have the laws to do the job. If Amazon is effectively forcing their drivers to disobey the law, the solution is simple: have escalating fines for violating the law. The fines for most petty violations are based on the idea that the violation was most likely a mistake or an exceptional circumstance. If the violation is deemed to be just a cost of doing business, make the cost of doing business higher. If Amazon needs to routinely violate the law in order to operate, let them negotiate with the city to come up with a safe and reasonable plan. Otherwise, the city should make it unaffordable to routinely violate the law.

You probably don't even need escalating fines. Just having police stop to warn/ticket the drivers would be enough to throw drivers way behind schedule. The costs of constantly having to hire/train replacements for all the drivers not meeting their crazy metrics would be costly enough for amazon that they'd probably start looking for better options, but I'll admit that would have a much larger cost on the employees when its the employer we want to punish.

Amazon doesn't employ the drivers though, they're all contractors for a third party firm. Start investigating the driver company and they just shut down and reopen with a new name.

> Our local officials and police have no capacity to deal with this.

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.

Fedex also uses contractors to deliver parcels. A friend and her husband run a small biz that does nothing but Fedex deliveries in the Midwest.

I talked to a few folks who do this extensively, particularly for fedex ground. My understanding is they actually pay is a decent amount at the end of the day minus expenses, it’s just long hours, but nothing like whet Amazon does with their contractors

Yup, my brother did this for a couple years and after seeing how the contractors handled (or threw, or kicked, etc) the packages, I avoid FedEx like the plague. Unfortunately their content employees are amazing.

> 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

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.

It's downright chaotic how they operate in denser cities. They make the city feel like its the 1800s again with random commercial activity taking place in the middle of the manure laden road and everyone having to deal with it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/zsmgug/amazon_nyc_dist...

> They make the city feel like its the 1800s again with random commercial activity taking place in the middle of the manure laden road and everyone having to deal with it.

Other than the manure, is that a bad thing?

Urban people both love and resent chaos. I personally find it best to embrace it as default and try to adapt around it, rather than ostensibly rejecting it while pretending it won't still exist via supply & demand. But that rarely flies in municipal politics or online rant-driven forums.

Its a bad thing when you do things like block bike lanes people rely on to travel safely. Accessibility is important for a city.

I haven't been impressed by Amazon drivers, but I haven't been impressed by any other delivery drivers either. My house has a new garage door thanks to Purolator (a package delivery subsidiary of Canada Post).

> I hope government wakes up to how screwed up and dangerous Amazon’s model really is.

What does government have to do with this?

Then there is the smell. Amazon packages delivered by private vehicle frequently smell strongly of dryer sheets or Febreze that make me nauseous.

This is largely because some of the packages they give Flex drivers are downright nasty smelling, and as a result they have to use Febreze or the likes to deal with it.

Source: Do Flex on the side.

I am confused. Why do the packages smell bad?

Could’ve gotten wet in transit, in a station, their contents (I had a package that was wet cat food that was on top of everything else at the station, it leaked..). A ton of reasons. I did preload at UPS two years ago during peak season, station sorting can do crazy things to packages heh.

that sounds amazing. i'd pay a premium for that!

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