At no point does "preventing random people in your garage" required a greedy middleman in the path between you and whoever you want to give your garage door access code.
Of course, I changed my code after that, but drivers still tried to get in with my code code. I opened countless tickets with Amazon to get this reference to my code removed from their system. They gaslit me many times saying it was removed. They were incredibly rude to me when told them they were lying to me, and now I sometimes get delivery drivers getting pissed off at me (for some reason) that the code doesn't work after they ring my doorbell.
What I want people to get from this story is, don't give Amazon your code. Get a separate delivery box instead or even a storm door works to hide most packages.
Since Amazon clearly has no idea what they are doing, I would put up a note next to the keypad saying “Amazon drivers: just drop the package, there is no code”
Amazon's problem is that they outsource the delivery and there is such a terrible turn-over problem with delivery drivers (and delivery contracting companies) that nothing works at their scale.
Nowadays that seems so hopelessly quaint.
I'm not sure what hell these jobs are that turns drivers into such shitty people, but I feel pretty confident that it is the system turning them into shitty delivery drivers rather than exclusively shitty people applying for delivery jobs.
Some are amazing, mail is delivered perfectly, etc.
Others cannot for the life of them match number to address, and it doesn't seem to matter who is delivering as the attitude spreads across the office.
I think a huge part of this is missing actionable feedback messages.
If USPS/UPS/FedEx had better channels for "my mail was screwed up" reporting, to a granularity necessary to isolate bad branches, I think things would clean themselves up.
As-is, customers learn to live with it and the mothership is unaware the branch is screwing up.
No more anything like this "I sometimes get delivery drivers getting pissed off at me (for some reason) that the code doesn't work. You can cut into any their speech with "English, m****r, do you read it?".
Gig workers quite possibly don't, or at least it's a significant effort for them to.
No one will ever question it.
I once bought a book delivered to a company (where I dont work anymore) and this address cannot be deleted. Multi billion company. LOL
On a side note, Amazon's interface is so much worse than Allegro
No kidding. Allegro isn't perfect, and seems to get worse every iteration, but they're miles ahead. Amazon - they're down there with eBay, worse than AliExpress. I literally only order Kindle books from Amazon, and that's only because I mastered the "google a book, switch to Kindle edition, click the 'buy with one click' button" flow, which they managed to not break just yet.
Ergo, both things can be true: Amazon cleared it on their side (customer support sees it cleared) and the delivery drivers still see it (using the subcontractor's system).
Probably because nobody at the sub-contractor's (outsourced) IT/system saw fit to implement a "As a customer, I want to change my note after initially setting it" user story.
This is fairly complicated to do locally and securely. If any e-commerce website/app could add tracking numbers as PINs to your smart lock via the local network, that would be a security nightmare. You'd also have to provision domains for every smart lock so that every lock can get Let's Encrypt certs and accept requests from web browsers without configuration. Not to mention most tracking numbers are easily guessable because they consist of a destination code and an auto-increment integer.
Also a lot of companies don't assign a tracking number until the package gets transferred to the last mile carrier. Again, if you're willing to manually copy-paste the tracking number after you get the shipping notification every single time you order something, you're clearly not part of the target demographic
They could afford to give away the openers if they could win that revenue stream.
And Amazon would dump them in a second if consumers could instead click "Link your Home Assistant for secure deliveries and get $0.30 digital credit". Or more likely, Amazon would throw directly wired Dash buttons at consumers to enable secure deliveries.
I don't know what Chamberlain has to gain by sticking it to that particular demo. For HA to be a threat to the "partnerships" like Amazon, it would have to have an audience sizeable enough that Amazon would consider incentivizing adoption.
I would say it seems dumb to piss off the most passionate fans of home automation when you're a vendor of equipment that such people might want to buy, but Chamberlain has such a stranglehold on the market that I think they figure that even if they royally piss off that 5% of the garage door opener market, those suckers (or their garage door installers) will be forced to buy the gear from them anyway.
Yes and no. At the scale Amazon operates, I can see value in being able to automate the process rather than requiring each driver to find and operate the keypad for each garage.
Automation, if implemented perfectly (which it obviously won't be) also prevents one form of bad actor. An Amazon delivery driver who uses your code in the future to gain unauthorized access to your garage. Automation allows this code to be limited to a single use.
Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage.
In the one house I lived in that had a security system, that garage-to-interior door was also wired into the system and arming it would treat it like an exterior door.
Having said that, I still wouldn't want random delivery people entering my garage without my knowledge.
Likewise, but even if it's actually locked, no lock is impenetrable, and a closed garage provides a thief with the privacy to pick it at leisure or even break down the door. Burglary deterrence advice sometimes includes tips like adjusting your landscaping so your front door is visible from the street and locking gates to your back yard. Letting the thief into your garage thoroughly defeats the point of that...
Also, I keep stuff (bikes) in the garage that I don't want stolen.
Most people keep cars in their garage. Which last I checked were usually more expensive than bikes.
Joke aside, people keep a lot of valuable stuff in garages. Hell, tool chests can easily be worth thousands of dollars and are easy to pawn.
I've been thinking lately about how quickly the world has changed and I think it's a bit underappreciated. I mean cellphones only became a household item 20 years ago, smart phones about 15. Or closer to home, at least for me, generative models went from barely making small black and white human faces (Goodfellow invented GANs mid 2014) to being able to create some fucking good quality images on consumer hardware in a few minutes (not counting all the prompt engineering required. But unconditional is still pretty good). Not to mention that access to these things isn't homogeneously distributed and so rural and poorer regions tend to get thrown into the deep end rather than wade their way in. I think from that perspective a lot of drama makes sense. Especially when we're talking about how people are not very tech literate. Hell, I have a hard time convincing people in my CS PhD department that hate Facebook's spying to switch to Signal or even switch to FF (we see the same stuff here on HN. More excuses than explanations). If the "friction" (even if 90+% mental) is high among tech experts idk how novices can handle all this. At least with my family they're more willing to believe Facebook's app uses an always listening microphone rather than believe me when I explain that they can figure out you're friends and interested in gardening if you just stand next to someone or walk around with them for 30 minutes in the gardening section of Home Depot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (sorry, this took a tangent, but I know you think about some of these things too)
Sure, but I've probably locked it barely more than twice.
I don't know if that would do much.
It's one thing to be sawing up a front door that is in plain sight of the street -- passer-bys might call the cops if they saw that.
But if you're doing it from inside a garage? You could shut the garage door and saw away. Nobody would report saw noises coming from a garage because that's super normal.
1. I know it's a broad generalization, also location-dependant
Personally, I hope that Amazon doesn't play ball. You can TRY and seek rent from the world's largest retailer, but you need them, they don't need you.
My main takeaway is that Amazon should offer a discount to deliver packages to buildings with staff to accept the packages. They never go missing, so less refunds, and the building staff does not charge Amazon to receive packages.
The business dynamics are pretty interesting, though. It could be that paying this company reduces missing packages so much that it actually saves Amazon money, which they pass on to consumers in terms of lower prices. Or, it could be that they charge $1 per access, and Amazon passes that on to the customer, and then people are disincentivized from using Amazon. Meanwhile, a competitor (say, Walmart?) brokers a deal where they hide that fee, and take enough customers away from Amazon that Amazon has to play ball (and now the price is $2 per access). Costs go up for everyone.
The phenomenon of partnerships like my hypothetical above are very interesting to me. Every so often I check what I can use my credit card rewards points for, and most of the offers, to me, seem like "failing retailer desperately needs a customer" rather than anything I actually want. Thus, the partnerships must be a pretty important tool for companies that are not in first place.
Finally, I think about the long term effects of this sort of thing. Everyone wants a % of every transaction. "Oh, you turned your lights on when someone came to deliver a package? Pay the manufacturer of the light bulb $1 and your electric company an extra $1." This will look like "economic growth" to each of those intermediaries, but in the end, they just devalued the dollar. ("Inflation.") We end up with bigger numbers, but actually decrease the amount of "value" floating around.
The only term that comes to my mind here is cancer.