I don't think this is a huge problem though, as it forces the use/development of things like delivery lockers, last-mile bike/foot delivery, pickup stations, and just generally pushing back on the idea that a car should be able to go everywhere until a human is absolutely forced to get out of the car and walk.
I think cities/bigger towns would eventually (in my idealistic world vision) have major highways/roads that go around them, and have primarily foot/bike/public transit traffic for everything internal.
Domino's recently opened up some shops in Vienna, Austria and they gave a lot of their delivery people e-bikes. UPS also seems to have people delivering last-mile with e-bikes. Seems to work out great and they aren't clogging up the streets with delivery cars parked everywhere, blocking entrances, etc. like most other delivery services.
It's not so great on the other end, either. My house has a gate to get to the front door. The gate is very easy to operate and never locked. A driver (I have to assume Flex) instead _threw_ a 20lb box with an ice maker in it over the fence and into a rose bush that was clearly visible (the fence is just wrought iron). It crushed a lot of roses and thankfully didn't damage the ice maker. My wife was literally 20' away in her office when it happened and says the driver simply drove up, threw it over, and drove away.
I know a person that uses a paintball gun to keep people out of his apartment building's dumpster (identity theft from documents stolen out of trash is a huge problem where he lives) and also to tag delivery trucks and (yikes) delivery drivers that do this kind of hit-and-run delivery. He'd had enough of things being broken in this way.
I'm not defending the GP's acquaintance but getting hit by a paintball is lower than the typical risks you accept when you dig around in a dumpster. Generally speaking dumpster diving isn't trespassing unless it's behind a gate or something. It really depends on the dumpster in question.
If it's a good construction or scrap metal dumpster with a lot of nice material in it then defending it with a paintball gun is very much a dick move though.
I don't see why he's getting down-voted. He just said he knew a guy who did a thing. He didn't even imply whether he approved of it or not.
Same situation where I live. At least a dozen times I've contacted Amazon with a link to video of a delivery person lobbing a package over my 6' fence gate (which is so easy to operate, we have to chase young children out daily that enter to pet the outdoor cat that chills on our patio). Cameras help immensely with this kind of thing. The last time I had a problem was well over six months ago. And Amazon has extended my Prime membership for free my as many months as times I've had flying, over-fence deliveries.
That makes sense in some clearcut ways and a lot of generally concerning ways. I wonder if the sentiment from how it affects peoples’ lives is at play or if it’s just Amazon being so big. It seems similar to Wal-Mart rage, which was mostly the former.
There were complaints (and lawsuits) about Domino's drivers creating dangerous situations trying to beat their old "30-minutes or it's free" guarantee.
Of course, the internet wasn't what it is today, so you wouldn't have seen it on HN.
But, I'm not sure that the individual pizza deliverer sees quite the scale or encounters the scenarios of an independent contractor working for Amazon, including less predictable delivery times, variability of package types, etc.
It was about 1980, I think, before the pizza stores realized that could get delivery drivers to use their own vehicles. (Source: I spent a month or so in the early 1970s delivering pizzas, chicken, etc.) I was disgusted to find out that the stores were having their drivers use their own vehicles.
And part of the problem is that pizza delivery used to be a job for a high school student, paid accordingly. There were better jobs to be had once one was out of school. A lot of the better jobs seem to be gone.
Pizza delivery tends to pay well above minimum wage (before expenses, still definitely better than minimum after expenses) and you usually get paid hourly when you're doing work in the store. If you've got good shifts (weekend evenings, not delivering to a college) pizza delivery can be far more lucrative than waiting tables at an restaurant of similar class.
The security guard at the front door of the office building chastised me for carrying the box, and told me that I should be using a dolly to transport it. (None of the 19 videos I had to watch to be a Flex driver recommended bringing a delivery cart or a dolly.)
How could you not know this? Have you never seen another delivery driver? Do you really need a training video to tell you that when you need to carry a lot of heavy packages, you should use a dolly?
> Do you really need a training video to tell you that when you need to carry a lot of heavy packages, you should use a dolly?
Yes, you need.
Case in point, in the last half a dozen orders I've made that involved a somewhat heavy and/or large package, not a single delivery service used a dolly or delivery cart, even on orders from a certain multibational furniture store.
You expect your employees to do their job safely? Then you explicitly cover the safety procedure during training, and you directly and intentionally state that it's in their best interests to do so. Otherwisr you can't possibly assume they will comply with an implicit rule.
in the last half a dozen orders I've made that involved a
somewhat heavy and/or large package, not a single delivery
service used a dolly or delivery cart
I work for a company called Ocado that does grocery delivery right to people's kitchens (unlike Amazon Flex, our drivers are employees, paid by the hour, and drive company-owned vans). I've been out with drivers several times. Drivers are issued with dollies and trained in their use.
Dollies are inherently a mixed blessing. You can pile more stuff on them - but if you've got to get up a kerb, you've still got to be able to lift that weight, and the dolly as well, and keep everything from sliding off at the same time.
And it's not just kerbs. They've got steps up to their front door? Can't use the dolly. Old flat/apartment without a lift? Can't use the dolly. Lift needs a key you don't have? Can't use the dolly. They've got a gravel path? Can't use the dolly. They've got a thick-bottomed UPVC door frame? Can't get the dolly through it. On a steep hill? Dolly will make things harder...
And it turns out, in a city like London, there are a great many buildings with one or more of these defects - and the worse the parking situation, the further away you park the van, the more kerbs and things you're likely to need to cross.
Hence, even though drivers are issued with dollies and trained in their use, many deliveries are made without the dollies because they don't make things all that much easier.
Only one person wears the shoes and (maybe) takes care where they walk. Many people use a single dolly over different shifts and don't know what the last user did with it.
Yet when I search Google for "UPS Driver Street", 10 out of the first 12 pictures that show a UPS driver on the street show him with packages on a dolly.
UPS drivers are all about timing. They know precisely what they can carry, and what amount of time it will take them to manage the packages, with or without the awesome heavy-duty UPS convertible hand truck.
Partly because they are trained and know their craft - but mostly because they are correctly paid, and so they are almost always long-term workers with learned expertise at driving and delivering.
(As opposed to the Atlantic writer, who did the job for a day, didn't know how to do it correctly, found it difficult, and whined about it. That's not actually telling us much of anything, when you think about it.)
I brought 16 packages for 13 people to one office; one was so light I was sure it was a pack of gum, another felt like a bug-spray container.
Or, while we're speculating, maybe instead of a pack of gum it was a 512 GB SDXC card weighing like less than 20 grams including the cardboard packaging.
How dare these coddled tech people order small packages online!
and also battling a growing rage as I lugged parcels to offices of tech companies that offered free food and impressive salaries to their employees, who seemed to spend their days ordering stuff online
The 'gig' economy reminds me very much of the state of factory workers in the early 1900s. For businesses, it was very clear that forcing workers to work in a very unfriendly way (doing a repetitive task as part of an assembly line) was a multiplier for scale and productivity. However, associated with that was the "price" unfair wages, long hours, stress, strain, and injury.
It took 30-60 years of unions and labor rights before the problem was 'solved' - the non-monetary economics of that kind of production sucked (worker's comp + regulations for human rights) and those factories shipped overseas to where those things didn't exist.
The modern gig economy is really just scaling up distribution instead of mass production. On paper, it is cheap and scalable. But add in all the socio-economic components and you'll realize that it's not really that cheap, and not an economic engine that can survive long term past the initial stages, reason being that demand exists only because the price is subsidized.
Currently, shipping is extremely cheap, subsidized by Amazon, the government, and more recently, the individuals who due to lack of opportunities live with subsistence wages. If shipping was actual market price (where gig workers earned a fair wage), the cost would be much higher, which would shrink demand. (shipping was available as a function since forever, and wasn't ever a popular shopping option until today).
If we wanted free shipping as a standard of living, we would need to subsidize shipping on a governmental level, similar to how we subsidize food (especially meat). Americans don't realize it but meat is cheap in the US, much cheaper than the rest of the world. This is purely because of subsidies, which is a perk to allow the american standard of living: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-meat-and-animal-by-products-so....
If you want to make the american standard of living free package delivery, subsidize the wages from the US government, and force the tech companies to pay real corporate tax.
Speaking of subsidizing shipping, i seem to recall that the price of postage is fixed no matter the distance and remoteness with the calculation that more trafficed areas then subsidize less trafficed areas.
Shipping is weird because of cargo loads. It is similar to the airline industry in that as long as you ship enough at a price to cover the operation cost, anything else can theoretically be shipped for free.
Routes with high volume usage can take advantage of this and have lower operation costs per unit because the cost is better distributed. So if shipping anywhere is a fixed cost, then yes, you are technically subsidizing less trafficked areas.
Volume and cost efficiency is a hard problem to solve, because getting the cost of shipping down is essentially optimizing for this.
> Predatory pricing , also known as undercutting, is a pricing strategy in which a product or service is set at a very low price with the intention to drive competitors out of the market or to create barriers to entry for potential new competitors. Theoretically, if competitors or potential competitors cannot sustain equal or lower prices without losing money, they go out of business or choose not to enter the business. The so-called predatory merchant then theoretically has fewer competitors or even is a de facto monopoly.
> Predatory pricing is considered anti-competitive in many jurisdictions and is illegal under competition laws.
This is a relatively uninformed thought/analysis, but I would guess that the US meat subsidies are given to all of the factory farms, and because they only 'compete with each other' and you don't really have, say, an Italian grocer trying to sell meat here, it's valid?
The question from me would then be, do subsidized meat vendors compete with farmers small enough that are selling individually on a farmer's market level? Does the subsidizing occur further up the chain, with tax rebates when purchasing cows?
So subsidized pricing would not be illegal as long as it isn't allowing for predatory pricing.
Meat subsidy affects the national market as a whole, so it is not predatory pricing unless you consider the global market. In the global market, US and Australian meat is better quality and cheaper than local meat in many countries (true in Hong Kong). However, while it does undercut some competition, the reality is that meat exports is a bit risky due to shipping costs and time. It does substantially affect other meat producers in other countries, just not sure at what scale.
To clarify my original point:
As a competitive good, meat is priced a lot lower in the US than the rest of the world. The cost of producing meat shouldn't vary that much from country to country, so why is US (and Australian) meat so much cheaper?
Answer: they're both subsidized by the gov't. The effect of this is that Americans and Australians both enjoy cheap meat at a high consumption rate.
I would imagine it's because rural areas of the country are over represented in Congress per capita, plus it's not farmers but large corporations like Tyson who produce most of the meat?
It is pretty late. I mentioned early 1900s to capture the steel era, which was when unions became popular in the US. You had a lot of worker's movements in Europe long before then (french revolution anyone?).
I don't know exactly why meat is subsidized so much but I do remember that the US was very concerned about being self sufficient during it's isolationist period before WW1/2. This was the era of the great depression where a lack of stability in grain prices (really in the economy as a whole) put into question the nation's ability to feed itself, as farmers were going under and production was so volatile (dust bowl era as well).
This led to the US government stepping in to set up policies to control grain and food prices, stabilizing farmers and food production.
I think one unintended effect was the massive spike in production of cheap grains like corn. Because corn was in over abundance due to the profitability of it (due to subsidies), we needed other ways to consume it - corn syrup, corn starch, etc. Corn is also used as the primary feed for beef cows.
Some conspiracy people think that there's a huge farming lobby that makes farming extremely profitable. It's probably only a bit true.
The reality is that if meat got more expensive due to a reduction in subsidies, it could be a PR nightmare for the gov't administration due to the American love for meat, and a perceived standard of living drop. And while the American diet is changing, even healthy US diets still have a substantially larger quantity of meat in them than the rest of the world.
Makes sense. I actually assumed that was exactly why you said 1900. Of all the history Americans were mistaught, I wish more of us just understood how long we lagged behind the civil progressions of Europe. I would have thought slavery would be a more effective eye opener but most Americans don’t even comprehend how recent our civil war was.
Weird about meat. But it would be more a food lobby than a farming lobby, right? Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure that farmers, especially livestock farmers, are just contractors these days.
>Currently, shipping is extremely cheap, subsidized by Amazon, the government, and more recently, the individuals who due to lack of opportunities live with subsistence wages.
In what ways are shipping subsidized by Amazon and the government?
Not GP, but some critics say that it's unclear if Amazon makes money on free shipping or if it's a loss-leader that Amazon can afford due to its valuation.
This mostly. Shipping also uses a public good (roads) which you can claim that companies using these public goods are not paying their fair share for them.
>Because of the way Flex works, drivers rarely know when blocks of time will become available, and don’t know when they’ll be working or how much they’ll be making on any given day.”
>”Kelly Cheeseman, an Amazon spokeswoman, told me that Flex is a great opportunity for people to be their own boss and set their own schedule.”
I note a similar thing here in the UK - most of the folks working 'gig economy' or more accurately 'single person zero guaranteed hour contractor' jobs are doing this stuff full time and are pushed hard to make a workable living out of it.
58 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] threadMany buildings have some plan for deliveries from traditional delivery companies.
Deliveries so often don't show up that I have given up - I now use collect+, amazon lockers or get items delivered to work.
I think cities/bigger towns would eventually (in my idealistic world vision) have major highways/roads that go around them, and have primarily foot/bike/public transit traffic for everything internal.
If it's a good construction or scrap metal dumpster with a lot of nice material in it then defending it with a paintball gun is very much a dick move though.
I don't see why he's getting down-voted. He just said he knew a guy who did a thing. He didn't even imply whether he approved of it or not.
Of course, the internet wasn't what it is today, so you wouldn't have seen it on HN.
But, I'm not sure that the individual pizza deliverer sees quite the scale or encounters the scenarios of an independent contractor working for Amazon, including less predictable delivery times, variability of package types, etc.
I think Neal Stephenson's opening was that the two big items in the economy were software and pizza delivery ...
And part of the problem is that pizza delivery used to be a job for a high school student, paid accordingly. There were better jobs to be had once one was out of school. A lot of the better jobs seem to be gone.
How could you not know this? Have you never seen another delivery driver? Do you really need a training video to tell you that when you need to carry a lot of heavy packages, you should use a dolly?
Yes, you need.
Case in point, in the last half a dozen orders I've made that involved a somewhat heavy and/or large package, not a single delivery service used a dolly or delivery cart, even on orders from a certain multibational furniture store.
You expect your employees to do their job safely? Then you explicitly cover the safety procedure during training, and you directly and intentionally state that it's in their best interests to do so. Otherwisr you can't possibly assume they will comply with an implicit rule.
Dollies are inherently a mixed blessing. You can pile more stuff on them - but if you've got to get up a kerb, you've still got to be able to lift that weight, and the dolly as well, and keep everything from sliding off at the same time.
And it's not just kerbs. They've got steps up to their front door? Can't use the dolly. Old flat/apartment without a lift? Can't use the dolly. Lift needs a key you don't have? Can't use the dolly. They've got a gravel path? Can't use the dolly. They've got a thick-bottomed UPVC door frame? Can't get the dolly through it. On a steep hill? Dolly will make things harder...
And it turns out, in a city like London, there are a great many buildings with one or more of these defects - and the worse the parking situation, the further away you park the van, the more kerbs and things you're likely to need to cross.
Hence, even though drivers are issued with dollies and trained in their use, many deliveries are made without the dollies because they don't make things all that much easier.
How are the dolly's wheels any different from the delivery person's shoes?
Sure and the only ones to ever use a dolly are ones delivering home appliances
Partly because they are trained and know their craft - but mostly because they are correctly paid, and so they are almost always long-term workers with learned expertise at driving and delivering.
(As opposed to the Atlantic writer, who did the job for a day, didn't know how to do it correctly, found it difficult, and whined about it. That's not actually telling us much of anything, when you think about it.)
Or, while we're speculating, maybe instead of a pack of gum it was a 512 GB SDXC card weighing like less than 20 grams including the cardboard packaging.
How dare these coddled tech people order small packages online!
and also battling a growing rage as I lugged parcels to offices of tech companies that offered free food and impressive salaries to their employees, who seemed to spend their days ordering stuff online
It took 30-60 years of unions and labor rights before the problem was 'solved' - the non-monetary economics of that kind of production sucked (worker's comp + regulations for human rights) and those factories shipped overseas to where those things didn't exist.
The modern gig economy is really just scaling up distribution instead of mass production. On paper, it is cheap and scalable. But add in all the socio-economic components and you'll realize that it's not really that cheap, and not an economic engine that can survive long term past the initial stages, reason being that demand exists only because the price is subsidized.
Currently, shipping is extremely cheap, subsidized by Amazon, the government, and more recently, the individuals who due to lack of opportunities live with subsistence wages. If shipping was actual market price (where gig workers earned a fair wage), the cost would be much higher, which would shrink demand. (shipping was available as a function since forever, and wasn't ever a popular shopping option until today).
If we wanted free shipping as a standard of living, we would need to subsidize shipping on a governmental level, similar to how we subsidize food (especially meat). Americans don't realize it but meat is cheap in the US, much cheaper than the rest of the world. This is purely because of subsidies, which is a perk to allow the american standard of living: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-meat-and-animal-by-products-so....
If you want to make the american standard of living free package delivery, subsidize the wages from the US government, and force the tech companies to pay real corporate tax.
Routes with high volume usage can take advantage of this and have lower operation costs per unit because the cost is better distributed. So if shipping anywhere is a fixed cost, then yes, you are technically subsidizing less trafficked areas.
Volume and cost efficiency is a hard problem to solve, because getting the cost of shipping down is essentially optimizing for this.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
> Predatory pricing , also known as undercutting, is a pricing strategy in which a product or service is set at a very low price with the intention to drive competitors out of the market or to create barriers to entry for potential new competitors. Theoretically, if competitors or potential competitors cannot sustain equal or lower prices without losing money, they go out of business or choose not to enter the business. The so-called predatory merchant then theoretically has fewer competitors or even is a de facto monopoly.
> Predatory pricing is considered anti-competitive in many jurisdictions and is illegal under competition laws.
The question from me would then be, do subsidized meat vendors compete with farmers small enough that are selling individually on a farmer's market level? Does the subsidizing occur further up the chain, with tax rebates when purchasing cows?
So subsidized pricing would not be illegal as long as it isn't allowing for predatory pricing.
To clarify my original point:
As a competitive good, meat is priced a lot lower in the US than the rest of the world. The cost of producing meat shouldn't vary that much from country to country, so why is US (and Australian) meat so much cheaper?
Answer: they're both subsidized by the gov't. The effect of this is that Americans and Australians both enjoy cheap meat at a high consumption rate.
Why is meat subsidized so much? Is it because farmers are relatively organized?
I don't know exactly why meat is subsidized so much but I do remember that the US was very concerned about being self sufficient during it's isolationist period before WW1/2. This was the era of the great depression where a lack of stability in grain prices (really in the economy as a whole) put into question the nation's ability to feed itself, as farmers were going under and production was so volatile (dust bowl era as well).
This led to the US government stepping in to set up policies to control grain and food prices, stabilizing farmers and food production.
I think one unintended effect was the massive spike in production of cheap grains like corn. Because corn was in over abundance due to the profitability of it (due to subsidies), we needed other ways to consume it - corn syrup, corn starch, etc. Corn is also used as the primary feed for beef cows.
Some conspiracy people think that there's a huge farming lobby that makes farming extremely profitable. It's probably only a bit true.
The reality is that if meat got more expensive due to a reduction in subsidies, it could be a PR nightmare for the gov't administration due to the American love for meat, and a perceived standard of living drop. And while the American diet is changing, even healthy US diets still have a substantially larger quantity of meat in them than the rest of the world.
Weird about meat. But it would be more a food lobby than a farming lobby, right? Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure that farmers, especially livestock farmers, are just contractors these days.
In what ways are shipping subsidized by Amazon and the government?
For the government, some are saying that the USPS isn't charging enough. And the USPS makes a loss. But other say otherwise : https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/amazon-postal-...
>”Kelly Cheeseman, an Amazon spokeswoman, told me that Flex is a great opportunity for people to be their own boss and set their own schedule.”
I note a similar thing here in the UK - most of the folks working 'gig economy' or more accurately 'single person zero guaranteed hour contractor' jobs are doing this stuff full time and are pushed hard to make a workable living out of it.
And yet the people who take those jobs are usually the folks who financially in not so great shape.