I can't say it's the greatest experience.
I'm not looking for a "delivery experience".
I've spent whole weekends waiting in at home for a delivery from Amazon Logistics only to get emails at 7pm each evening telling me they tried to deliver and failed.
Yodel are worse than useless, and I can't see this being much better.
Everybody has jobs. Everybody finds it annoying to buy something on line. You never know when it's going to turn up. You have to take a day off, and hope your driver is competent at his job.
Why can't you just say "I'll be at home on Thursday after 5pm. Call me on #555-333-9999 if you have any issues". Courier delivers the package after 5pm on Thursday.
One delivery. No wasted delivery attempts. If an attempt is failed, charge me for it.
On the other hand, by having Amazon control the to-the-door experience, that gives them incredible granular controls over how things are done, when, by whom, and how they do it, including how they are supposed to treat you at the door (if you're there), what to say, etc. etc. As well as any additional things that could come in the future.
For example, what about a 5-minute tutorial for a new product you just ordered?
These are just the tip of the iceberg that Amazon could do with this.
I see this becoming more like China -- which has a truly impressive courier system. There there is no branding or uniforms for the most part. Just guys on scooters who ring up and drop off your package. It works great.
E-commerce businesses do however have strong incentives to ditch the completely unreliable delivery companies, because they cause a lot of mess on the business end (besides angry customers, you waste a lot of time finding the package and scolding the delivery people). As a result, most delivery options suck equally.
[1] I'm aware of Amazon Locker, but I don't live in Seattle, the Bay Area, or Manhattan; and dealing with yet another pickup point for a specific merchant just seems like an annoying hassle.
Worked for Uber...
Oh, and it's shit. Order next day delivery at 9AM Monday? Delivered 7PM Tuesday! Get it Wednesday because the post room in my office closes at 6PM.
For example, delivery services routinely leave packages at my garage rather than my front door, because it saves them 15 seconds of walking. This is less convenient for me but more convenient for them.
But that's not all! Once they put a package low to the ground and not out of the way, so that when I went to drive somewhere, I backed over it.
I once saw a delivery guy deliver to a neighbor. He dropped the package at their garage door, knocked on the garage door, and left. I assume they are required to knock but it doesn't say where.
And of course because they never knock or ring my doorbell, the only way I know a package has been delivered is if I sign up for electronic notifications, or I discover it on my way out.
In other instances, I've had packages simply delivered to the wrong house, I guess because numbers are hard. Once I had a package delivered to the wrong city.
Usually it works well enough, but there's plenty of room for improvement for me.
The "magic" is the stuff that happens behind the scenes, all of these companies, from the frontline employees to the backend systems have a lot of details.
Examples of why your experience would suck:
- Late packages
- Lost packages
- Stealing of your stuff
- Damage to your stuff
- Lower-tier people learning your habits
- Generally high level of fuckups.
IMO, Amazon's path here is a sign that they are in trouble. In the late 90's, ecommerce players looking to cut costs did stuff like use Airborne Express (later acquired by DHL) and the company that become Fedex Home/Ground. Both companies used contracted out delivery drivers or courier companies, and both were big fuckups.
UPS/FedEx/USPS are pretty efficient at this stuff, so the final frontier for Amazon is exploiting the workforce to cut costs. So you'll have folks driving their mom's car to deliver packages Uber-style, with inadequate insurance and insufficient income to maintain a vehicle suitable for the purpose.
Trying to get any sort of resolution out of Amazon is impossible, as they insulate their logistics department from any customer service complaints. All you can do is point out that it happens nearly every delivery.
Plus it's just plain weird, that some guy in joggers turns up and hands you a package. There's no way to associate the courier as a courier, and as such my first thought is usually "Why does this man have my stuff? Did I just let a random guy into my complex?"
I've also had problems with companies using alternative shippers for cold-packed stuff, presumably because it was cheaper. Then it sat in someone's hot car for 12 hours and was delivered with room temp ice packs. Sure it was delivered on the right day, but not well.
A few times a delivery guy stole my packages (>1000€) and most of the time it gets simply placed in the hallway without further notice...
Insurance covers this, but it's aggravating non the less :\
On the other hand, right now I am waiting on a parcel being delivered by DPD on behalf of Amazon. They have given a one hour window, I can track the location of the van online, and I could have text them this morning to rearrange the delivery of the parcel or provide different delivery instructions. And the drivers wear uniforms!
I'd be interested to read an account of someone who has actually done this "job"* (*technically self-employed, therefore treated like "unemployed" to most financial institutions and don't receive normal benefits like holiday time).
Yodel offer 50-85p per parcel: http://codforum.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11911 Amazon Logistics in the UK: http://codforum.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11936
There is also lifestylecouriers.net for anyone who wishes to delve deeper into Yodel, co (requires registration)
In the past, I've had private car deliveries from Amazon, but I think they were generally LaserShip.
Echoing the author's sentiments, I had one delivery guy that looked sketchy. I forgot I was waiting on a package, and a guy showed up in my driveway, idled there for about five minutes (which my dogs alerted me to), then started lumbering up the driveway with a package in hand, smoking a cigarette, which he disposed of in my garden. The guy wasn't obviously from anywhere, in that neither his clothing nor car indicated any company affiliation whatsoever, so I stopped him and asked him his name and employer, and it was LaserShip, not Amazon.
If the rest of their uniform were neutral, it might work out.
Prime is an important part of Amazon's strategy, if they're not going to actually deliver packages properly then they're screwing themselves over.
I'll see how it goes but if there's many more problems I'm cancelling Prime.
EDIT: WTH am I getting d/ved for?
Ether I or my wife buy something once a month 'next-day'. Amazon fail to deliver it, we complain to customer service, and demand a free month of Prime.
Rinse/repeat.
No idea, so I upvoted you.
Now don't downvote me people just because I'm commenting about it. I didn't start it so it's not fair.
i have my packages delivered to a friendly shop nearby - to my house, it's a nightmare.
The collect+ system also works reasonably well, i take that option if offered. (where it's delivered to a local cornershop or similar and you walk to pick it up)
I really feel there should be a gap in the market for "last mile" delivery to be solved properly, but i suspect there's not enough money to slow things down, and residential delivery is inherently difficult anywhere that doesn't have regimented street layouts.
Try addresses for all lo - if no reply, deliver to pre-arranged local shop. Text/email alert allowing redelivery to address or changed address within an hour or two, for a premium fee (bicycle couriers and other instant courier delivery)
that would solve all of my issues anyway..
They have someone at their office 24/7 to receive packages and another guy that does the "last mile". Once I urgently needed a package that arrived out of office hours on Friday - I sent them an email and they bought it to my house on Saturday. It's awesomely convenient!
They provide a one-hour delivery window, a map with local van tracking, and the driver usually arrives in the earlier half of the time slot.
You can choose an alternative date or delivery to a neighbour right until the van rolls up.
Short of Star Trek teleportation or Magic Drone Technology[tm], it's probably as a good a service as it can be.
The only time I have any real issue is when it requires signing for e.g. speciali delivery, in which case I have to go collect it.
Saying that, I did have a delivery (ebay purchase delivered by courier) that was stolen. they must have watched the driver try to deliver and when there was no answer he went to the shop and dropped it off there. a few minutes later someone went in and asked for the parcel and the shop gave it out. not their fault and it should have been signed for so I was able to claim a refund.
But as to it not being the greatest experience, well, yes they are not always as professional as real courier companies. And a lot of the time they've just said "User24?" while handing me the package, so Amazon probably need to put a bit more effort into training. And I wonder how easy it would be to provide fake ID to Amazon and just steal a whole load of admittedly random packages? But, maybe that was the point of this possible trial, to identify issues like that so that the launch experience would be better?
I vastly prefer their own couriers to USPS (the increased usage of which has caused me to consider cancelling Amazon Prime multiple times now -- loved Prime when it was basically all UPS here, USPS finds new and interesting ways to screw up my Amazon package deliveries on a monthly basis).
One day I lost a 512 gig Samsung 840 Pro to this as someone walked off with the package as I was out. Amazon sorted it next day but that's not the point.
Seems on-time or faster with no damage is all that's needed. I prefer not even having to see/interact with a person for it.
At least Amazon customer support is great.
Does your UPS package get delivered in an hour? Do you tip a pizza delivery driver?
Personally I think it depends on how much work the person doing the delivery did before the delivery to help get it done fast. So for food delivery, usually the drivers will not cook the food, but will put together the bag, double check everything, and add in any extras like sauces, utensils, rice, etc. So if the person for Amazon Now is the one putting the order together and double checking it before loading it into their car, I would think that they are more in line with food delivery than UPS drivers.
Also something that takes away from how much I would give is that restaurants usually share some of the tips with in store workers who made the food. With that in mind I'd definitely tip less.
If what you are paying for with Amazon Now is rapid delivery service, then why would you tip for the service you are paying for. UPS delivers in a time set by the level of service that is paid for. Presumably, Amazon Now does the same thing.
> Do you tip a pizza delivery driver?
I did before pizza parlors started adding an additional separate charge for delivery service, which signals that it is now service compris.
In general, outside of that, I wouldn't normally pay for delivery that already has a delivery charge built in. But then, I'm sure some people are more inclined to tip a dollar or three for random personal services than I am even when the services are utterly routine (i.e. the driver didn't do something special for you).
In this case, the driver is just driving from a facility to my door.
But the twist here is, I do not expect nor even WANT the driver to put in "extra" effort to drive that route faster. Just follow the speed limit, and pick a reasonable route. That's all. I want you to drive exactly like a robotic car would. Those are my streets you're driving on, I don't need any maniacs striving for the best tip.
It makes the delivery much more awkward and transactional. Probably one of the most brilliant things Uber did was eliminating tips.
With that being said I'm also not feeling the whole tip thing because the wages should cover all that.
* How would you rate the delivery experience? (multiple dimensions here)
* Do you want to tip your courier?
Last week I got a phone call: "Hi, are you home right now?"
It turns out it was actually an Amazon Logistics delivery person, but that still isn't a question I really want to answer over the phone to some random person.
Nearly every time I've used Amazon, they've surprised me with something crappy and I'm left wondering how they're so popular. Recently, they displayed a "guaranteed delivery by this day if you order within the next 45 seconds" on the checkout confirmation. I had been paying attention to the cutoff time and the time had just previously said 40 minutes. All the digging I did supported the conclusion that both times were a fictional dark pattern to drive order completion.
Never mind the clingy stalker follow up spam when you price check an item outside of incognito mode.
Actually - not completely crazy - how willing would you be as a passenger to take a few detours to get a saving on your taxi bill?
I'm actually curious if anyone knows how well Uber Pool is working? I've never used it for a few reasons, but a big one is that I don't want to risk another rider pickup causing me delay in getting to my destination.
Maybe something like milkthemiles.com - make the retailers agree to your demand pricing not the inverse (tm)...
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/uber-is-quietly-testing-a-m...
The problem would be making sure that people can easily find their packages, and that they don't steal others' packages (which would be easy to check)
If you have a bunch of parcels in the boot of your car you deliver them when you are nearby on an Uber call or when you have no uber work.
Ditto on the mixed results. Although they once delivered a package to us at like 9PM on a Sunday. Unfortunately it was nothing exciting, hah.
Two is that 1 m2 of a solar panel converts around 15-20% of insolation to electricity, whereas 1 m2 of random plants gets about ±0.5%, most crops around 2% and the top performer is sugarcane which is still at just 8%. Typical diet however would probably be 2% efficient crops, a lot of which is then wasted before it gets on your plate, not in the least due to a lot of agricultural output going towards animals who turn it into 'meat-energy' in another inefficient process known as life with food-conversion rates of anywhere between 1.5 feed for 1 poultry, to up to 20 to 1 for cattle.
Lastly while we have regeneration capacity in our feet when say running, when cycling downhill or breaking we regenerate nothing, whereas electric motors can have 20-40% electric regeneration efficiencies when going downhill or breaking.
In short, electric bikes and likely small electric vehicles in general probably beat cycling in terms of energy. Of course this is a pretty narrow perspective. One can argue that solar panels and electric bicycles require massive investments which is an opportunity cost for other energy-efficient processes. One can argue that the cyclists fuelled by food will reduce their other activity (e.g. going to the gym) and thus don't expand any excess energy, or that most electric vehicles today wouldn't be powered by the sun, whereas the vast majority of food (excluding some greenhouses, hydroponics and pot installations) today is. But it's also pretty clear that powering the world with plants (excluding oil etc) doesn't make sense in the long run at significant scale.
https://www.side.cr/under-the-hood-a-look-at-sidecars-on-dem...
"Just remember kids, you can do anything you set your mind to, as long as Jay Leno doesn't also want to do it."
Substitute Amazon for Jay Leno in that!
But, it also calls out the need for government programs to stop assuming that workers will have a single long-term employer. Obamacare already started this process. We should be developing analogous policies for sick leave, family leave, and retirement savings that are decoupled from your employer.
Nick Hanauer has done good work thinking about what these programs will need to look like: http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-need-a-new-social-c...
Vehicles depreciate a fair bit when they roll straight out of the parking lot.
Vehicles depreciate over time staying parked in your drive way/garage.
Racking up miles on the odometer will definitely inflict wear and tear, especially in wintery climates (read: salt water corrosion), but depreciation will occur regardless.
Where do most personal vehicles end up? Does everybody resell to dealerships or friends/ family/ co-workers/ random people on Craigslist?
Most people have accepted that the resale value a vehicle will be significantly lower than the purchase price, and honestly I think depreciation should be the least of our concerns.
And with regards for sick leave, family leave, and retirement savings that are decoupled from the employer -- look outside of the US and you will find it.
Here is a superb article showing that depreciation (and fuel) costs 19% of an Uber driver's pay: http://citypaper.net/uberdriver/
So, that's $14.58 to $20.25 instead of $18 to $25.
* ~$0.30 is for gas, but if you're driving a fuel efficient Prius then your actual per mile cost is lower ($3.00/gal / 50mpg = $0.06/mi; though offset by battery replacement cost, don't know how much that costs or how often) * If your car is over 5 years old, you wouldn't be able to claim depreciation on it. But the standard mileage rate includes depreciation, so you're getting to deduct additional cost if your car is >5 years and you use the standard mileage rate.
That's not to say wear and tear isn't a significant cost...just that your actual cost is usually much lower than the standard mileage rate.
Disclaimer: I don't like Jeff Bezos and would not work for Amazon barring extraordinary circumstances.
In fact, my neighbour's home was broken into last year. Turns out (unbeknownst to us), he apparently had a safe in his home with nearly half a million in value (watches, diamonds etc. Huge surprise to us because we know him as a chubby, nerdy government worker who drives an electric bicycle to work, never would've expected him to have some kind of tony montana thing going on in his house haha). Anyway so we spoke to him and the police after and apparently a small crew broke into his home and went straight for the safe with specialised equipment, i.e. they knew exactly where to go and someone had told them, and they made a massive, massive haul. Imagine you worked at Amazon Flex and delivered a rolex, that's valuable information.
Anyway there are the usual problems with this that you see at eBay or the SR (how do you escrow payments on what obviously must be an illegal online service with anonymous owners, and if you don't have escrow how do you establish trust between merchant and buyer), added to the fact it's pretty easy for the police to trace it back to a delivery man if it happens often enough. Anyway wouldn't be surprised to see it happen within a few years.
- a stretch luxury purchase for the average person -- I'm going to expect white glove service from a high end jeweller. Or possibly a shady Craigslist deal. - a 1%er is going to send their personal shopper to pick it out and bring it to them
I agree there is a certain amount of risk in crowd sourcing this, but I can't see the "data" being super valuable.
Of course, one could argue that moves like this and pushing us towards the gig economy are a net negative for our future economy. They seem to be compensating fairly (for now?) at least.
Have drivers handle the driving side, and dispatchers pay when they need someone to deliver a person or parcel. There's no reason they have to be linked.
here we go again with this... What's wrong with such jobs ? AS mentioned by Amazon you don't need to work 9 to 5, you can just work for extra if you need. Even if you HAD basic income this kind of part-time job could make sense to make a bit more money that the nothing you would get to survive on your own.
0: See INTEGRITY STAFFING SOLUTIONS, INC. v. BUSK, http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-433_5h26.pdf
I hate buying something from someone online (eBay for instance) and then they ship USPS. If I can't let the mailman into my apartment they won't leave the packages. So then I end up having to sit in line at the post office on Saturday morning and hope they can find the package for me and pick it up.
I don't know if Uber / Amazon actually DO this, but if so, that mileage fee would be on top of whatever their actual pay rate is.
I don't think there's anything special about 57.5 cents per mile when it comes to compensating employees, either. That figure is the rate at which you can deduct vehicle-related expenses from your taxes, which doesn't have to be the same as how you compensate your employees.
Uber doesn't pay any sort of mileage fee beyond the driver's 80% share. The driver can deduct 57.5 cents per mile driven for Uber on their taxes, thus reducing their tax liability.
Smart move by Amazon to refrain from making any Bay-area city one of its test markets. It's like Amazon is saying "we don't need to prove this will work in the bubble; let's base our test data set on realistic markets."
I'd also argue that since most co's start in SF, there is very little brand loyalty (95% of my friends use the ridesharing service that's currently not surging) so it's hard to make your mark anymore.
As someone who previously ran ops at a similar on demand company, they're probably testing a cross section of markets. E.g. does this work in a big city with difficult traffic (NY), a smaller city that has tech savvy millennials but isn't a tech haven (Indianapolis), somewhere in between (Chicago). I'm sure their fulfillment center locations also played a role in the location choices.
I don't think they're avoiding CA due to lawsuits. Labor laws are very similar in other states (except for MA, which is oddly one of the few states that has ruled pro-contractor recently). The class actions are happening here since the co's have the largest presence, started here, and labor laws are definitely pro-employee. Even the DOL at a federal level released a paper basically saying "if there is any element of control, they are an employee".
[Edit: added last paragraph about laws.]
http://www.amazonfulfillmentcareers.com/amazon-fulfillment/l...
Lots of delivery services will be competing for freelancers (Shyp, postmates, favor, amazon)
http://horizoncu.onyourway.com/62-of-american-jobs-pay-less-...
That's a solid job to most people. Granted, issues like benefits, hours, and whether you really make that much are in doubt, but those numbers are certainly something to hang your hat on.
My guess is that those are estimates including tips, so the reality would be lower for many.
For a job with little educational background, fairly free ability to set your own schedule, etc., its fairly good (even with the additional cost overhead that comes with independent contract work, as I assume is the case here.)
For most of the people on HN, sure, its pretty horrible pay compared to their alternatives, but HN isn't exactly the target audience.
glovoapp.com and www.stuart.fr
Stuart has not released yet but are hiring quite agressively[1].
I don't think Amazon entering this space means they are dead but quite the opposity. If FLEX enters the European market will make the concierge delivery space grow. And this can only be good for competition.
* Urban environment. Lots of deliveries in a short period of time.
* Amazon DH is conveniently located near I-95 for easy access to the city as well as I-695 and surrounding suburbia.
* Traffic actually isn't that bad compared with other urban areas.
To deliver in the evenings on a large scale they'd have to compress the work they do in the 8-9 hours of the normal working day (more in some cases where they do actually deliver in the evenings giving them almost 12 hours of delivery time) into the ~3 hours between 6-9 (starting at 6 because who actually gets home at 5 with commute times). All that goes to say if you want evening deliveries you're going to have to a lot pay more for deliveries just because it will require a lot more drivers (who will want better pay for working evening when they'd otherwise be home).
