Many people already have a keypad mounted outside that will open the garage door. You can set up a guest code there and give to Amazon, or anyone you want. There is zero need for internet-enabled smartness in the garage door opener here.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.