Wonder if they have a heads up of the Bessemer results and are trying to save face? This PR strategy (or lack thereof) will be studied for decades to come. Mayhaps an inflection point in Amazon’s trajectory?
> First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers.
Nowhere in the tweet did it mention fulfillment centers:
> 1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
And WOW. At the end of the blog post, there are tweets of people saying it's not just Amazon. So, "we're sorry, but it's not just me, so it's not that bad."
How about Amazon slightly reduces the expectations that they place on drivers and allow them unpunished time to take piss breaks on the clock?
How about they pay staff to go through security screenings?
How about they pay staff for time transiting to and from the break rooms?
That's the floor. The bare ** minimum Amazon should be doing. Their staff are not slaves, or servants. They are human beings and deserve far more than the spiteful pittance Amazon provides them.
Another way to say it is that they'd rather get an extra 15-30 minutes of work done.
Because if enough people start going home 15-30min early, management gets excited and raises the bar by adding work, so now you do the extra 15-30min of work (by peeing in the bottle) or risk not keeping up. I'm sure many would prefer peeing in the bottle to risking not keeping up, but that isn't the kind of choice where we say 'great, let them do it, it makes them happy.'
How about we ask the drivers how they like taking a shit in an unairconditioned truck in Texas summer heat and if they'd rather have the time allowance too stop at a rest stop along their route?
I, for one, having been in similar situations, would rather get home fifteen minutes later, or an hour, than shit in a bag. Or piss in a bottle.
No, they're probably going to keep doing exactly what they've been doing because they know that these PR embarrassments are far more ephemeral than their market position. The consumer base cares more about cost and convenience than Amazon's ethics, and will have forgiven and forgotten within a week.
I live in Downtown Brooklyn and between here my last place in Midtown and my work's offices in Kips Bay I've never seen an individual deliver with a private vehicle in
Doesn't really make sense unless the building itself just isn't getting that many orders
The drivers themselves are not independent contractors. They are employees of "Delivery Service Provider" companies that contract with Amazon.
Except for the Amazon Flex program where random people can run small routes in their own cars, those people are indeed not-really-independent contractors. But they account for a very small fraction of packages delivered.
Well, obviously if you didn’t know that Amazon employed (or subcontracted delivery drivers) you would not think the tweet was referencing delivery drivers.
That does not mean that people who are correctly informed about this thinking that it would also include delivery drivers are wrong.
Most of these complaints are not from/about truckers (though they probably pee in bottles too), it's about the delivery van drivers. The issue is that the route schedules they are given are so tight that there is no time to stop at a bathroom.
It is true that a lot of public toilets have been closed for the past year but these complaints go back to long before that happened.
I don't know where you live, but where is there a bathroom to stop at? The US isn't filled with public restrooms everywhere along driver's routes with convenient parking right outside.
To use a public restroom could easily mean a 10 minute drive, 5 minutes to find parking and walk to the bathroom, a 10 minute wait in line when it's separate bathrooms like a Starbucks, and another 10 minute drive back to resume your route, like 35 minutes total. Yikes.
I mean sometimes you might get lucky where there's a gas station right along your route and you can pop in, but most delivery routes snake through residential neighborhoods. There aren't any public bathrooms to be found anywhere.
There are definitely a lot of cities that do not have enough bathrooms available, and there is not much Amazon or other employers can do about that.
Where I've lived in several smallish cities in the Midwest it is generally not hard to find bathrooms. I've had jobs that involved driving a van between customers' houses and never had trouble finding one. They're not in the residential neighborhoods but the routes would always go reasonably close to at least a few gas stations a day.
But even here where we do have bathrooms fairly readily available the drivers still pee in their vans. I know because I used to work in one of the local Amazon warehouses and we would find bags the drivers had returned with pee in them.
During Covid, why would you want to use a public restroom if you can avoid it? In fact, thinking about this makes me want to put an empty bottle in the car in case I end up needing to go sometime on the 2 hour routine trips I've been doing, despite there being plenty of rest stops.
I'm not defending Amazon's general financial screw-turning, but I think the "peeing in bottles" has only become a meme because the idea seems gross to everyone who hasn't spent a long time alone in vehicles.
It's funny that in America, we consider a Starbucks toilet public. In most countries, there are real public toilets, not tied to a business. Sometimes they take a coin, but some are free too.
Needing to pee while on the road isn’t totally unique to Amazon drivers; and decades of anti-homeless policies mean there are very few places in many cities where you can just run in to use the bathroom. Many of these drivers operate in the suburbs, where door codes aren’t as common on bathrooms, but it still made me think.
(Obviously these drivers are being put under time crunches, hence the bottles, and that is a separate issue)
I mean, it kinda does take away Amazon's role, no?
The way we've built out our cities means that literally anyone who drives around all day is gonna have a bad time when it comes to relieving themselves.
This has nothing to do with how Amazon operates their business and everything to do with a dearth of public restrooms.
It only takes away Amazon's role if you remove their agency for not scheduling people to such a packed degree where they can't go use a restroom.
A humanely run business takes these things into account. And given that we as a society allow corporations like Amazon to exist through the granting of special-rights charters for limited liability etc., we should be expecting that they operate humanely.
Sure, if Amazon didn’t have any resources to help mitigate the problem, didn’t have control over the schedule pressure they put on drivers, and didn’t tweet dishonestly about the problem then I could see letting them off the hook.
But, they’re a massive company with the resources such that they could address this problem. They could also reduce the schedule pressure on driver’s and allow them to take breaks long enough to use a restroom. And they tweeted dishonestly saying it wasn’t a problem. So, I’m not really ready to just let them off the hook. Amazon has agency, and could fix or seriously mitigate this problem if they wanted to. Instead, they chose to ignore it and equivocate about it until it turned into a PR black eye.
When I was in high school, I did bread deliveries for a bakery. There weren’t really restrooms I could use when I was on my route in the mornings, but I was told if I ever needed to use the restroom and had no other options I could always return to the bakery and use our restrooms. I never peed in a bottle doing that job. I also never got in trouble for being 20 minutes late for having had to use the restroom.
I recall the peeing in bottles narrative to have begun with a story three years ago regarding warehouse workers who allegedly didn't have time to go to the bathroom.[0] So when I saw the tweet about whether to "believe" the peeing in bottles thing, I assumed that the PR person was using an internally approved line of defense about that, and was simply too incompetent to realize that the conversation about delivery drivers is similar but not the same thing.
It seems pretty obvious to me that some Amazon drivers, like other drivers, are going to pee in bottles from time to time. This doesn't seem like a fate worse than death, IMO, at least not for male drivers. But I do think it's a reason why Amazon shouldn't put cameras in its delivery vehicles.
Still, you would think that Amazon could maintain a bathroom depot in its major delivery areas. Maybe even their own gas stations.
The reason there's no(few) public bathrooms in the US is that we're not allowed to charge for them (with the noble goal of human rights) as opposed to the EU/UK.
So the first malcontent that spreads feces all over the walls and blocks up the toilet with a syringe gets the whole thing shut down.
rest stops tend to be far outside of cities, and are pretty remote. a delivery driver isn't going to be using one of these during the course of their day. very odd thing to bring up as an example in this context.
It's an example of public accommodation, I certainly didn't mean to imply that a delivery driver would navigate to one.
(in my region the nearest facility would pretty much always be a gas station, with people not getting worked up about it if you walk in just to use the toilet)
I think it depends on the council and the location itself. For instance,I live in, what could be called, reasonably managed borough with a central library that has toilets.. It's a huge facility that can accommodate hundreds of people. So instead, people were adviced to use the public toilet just meters away from it.. Then the toilet got closed and now Burger King is the target destination. In the same borough,some parks have toilets,while others don't,etc. There's not much logic in this at all.
I’ve actually thought about this a little too much. When I take my dog for long walks, there’s literally no where I can use the bathroom. I can’t even go into a McDonald’s (no dogs). I’m sure homeless people are denied this basic human right everywhere.
Our portable bathrooms don’t self clean well enough. We need to think about how to design a better one. I don’t know if that involves building in air vacuums that force pull in everything to avoid clogs, or if we need more high pressure water, or literal acid that floods the floor after someone leaves (self cleans the whole box, and automatically sprays disinfectant, vacuums down all the shit in 2 minutes, then unlocks the door). Maybe have one time plastic bags that seal up and then get flushed down (all automated). Some kind of hosing down of the whole thing with acid is still high on my list.
There’s got to be some tech we can make that would make rolling these out the most hygienic thing to do as a society.
I hate to say it, but universal ID and a deny-list would stop it easily. You let the bathroom verify your ID, and if you leave the place a mess the you no longer have bathroom privileges.
It would let you keep great public access, keep toilets simple, and only pass the "costs" of bad-behaviour to those that deserve it.
I'd guess the type of person who would trash a public restroom is also pretty likely to just relieve themselves in the street after being banned. not sure what problem this solves.
If you hate to say it, then don't say it. Sure, it seems like everything would be so much simpler if we could merely sort everybody into two groups of good people and bad people, and punish the bad people. That's the tired old authoritarian fallacy.
In reality, you've got an endless supply of people who will make a mess once with your unpopular system and not care, good faith accidents unable to make amends, people that refuse to show IDs and piss on the reader on general principle, people unjustly blamed by your system for someone else's mess with no appeal, fake IDs, and inevitable tie in to other delusional top-down systems that multiply these problems.
There is the possibility that someone has sudden intestinal distress and simply loses the foot race. There’s a moment between pants down and butt in place where this could happen. According to an anecdote told by the person who had been responsible for calling in the cleaner when it happened to our colleague years ago. So yes, crazy people may be doing this on purpose, but drivers might be finding themselves unintentionally in this position even when they readily find a restroom.
As a parent, I've had to deal with my children's explosive diahorea impromptu Jackson Pollock reductions on the bathroom wall.
We just clean it up.
Just ask the proprietor for some paper towels and some spray and get to work and nobody will care. Frankly, one remarked that we would always be welcome even after the disaster because we left it better than we found it.
I've worked jobs where I was on the road a lot. Sometimes you just gotta pee in a bottle. I don't think my employer (not Amazon) was doing anything wrong, or that there was anything they should have been doing differently. When ya gotta go ya gotta go.
Yeah, and this lack of public restrooms affects everyone. Due to health reasons, sometimes I end up having to plan my trips in the city around places I know have easily accessible restrooms.
Not only that, our subway stations and trains reek of urine more often than not. It's unpleasant, but I can't blame homeless people for it too much when there are zero restrooms nearby.
Anti-homeless policies like this are shortsighted; homeless people aren't going away just because you remove public facilities. They still need to eat, sleep, and do their business like anyone else. Better to both help homeless people improve their situations and provide facilities for basic human needs for everyone.
That's why there's a need for public bathrooms. We are de facto privatizing bathrooms in a way that ends up being an anti homeless policy.
Merchants understandably don't want to provide free bathrooms to the general public even where homelessness is not the driving concern. It costs them money while not making any money, so they limit bathroom access to paying customers if they provide bathroom facilities at all.
Solving homelessness would make a lot of things much more manageable for society generally while being a kind and compassionate response. There is substantial evidence that homelessness is very expensive, to the point where it's just cheaper to give people housing than to, say, keep treating them constantly in the ER.
Good luck getting them to stay there. No doubt there are those who are willing and good you housed them.
The rest of them will either get thrown out for drugs/mental illness or ruin the place they move into. And I need my neighbors to be quiet at night so that I can keep my job. That is hard when you need to have the TV on at max volume because you need it to drown out the voices in your head.
I'm thinking primarily from a local government perspective here. You can either provide for the basic human needs of your citizens, or you can hope businesses in the area do it for you. If you choose the latter and they don't, well...
That said, if you close your restroom, they only go away from your area if there are other restrooms nearby. If there aren't, you're just making it that more likely that you'll find urine and feces outside somewhere near your business, and that older people and people with medical conditions avoid the area (and thus don't spend money at your businesses, by the way). Classic coordination problem: while it may be in your selfish interest to close down your restroom and push people to your neighbors, if everyone does that you're all worse off.
As DoreenMichele mentioned in a sibling thread, remember that the issue that spawned this discussion was about the lack of bathrooms for delivery drivers. Solving the problem for the homeless doesn't remove the need for public restrooms.
...and I also mentioned the lack of bathrooms being an issue for people with certain medical conditions. I mean sure, I have easy access to a bathroom while I'm at home, but a big appeal of living in the city is being able to walk or take public transit to get places. That also means you're potentially 30-45 minutes away from home, though, not to mention the 30-45 minutes that it took to get there; if you're like me and you don't know for sure that there will be a bathroom you can use somewhere along the route, it's a huge disincentive to go there.
Well, I think solving the homeless situation will open up a lot of of public restrooms that are now closed because they become overrun by desperate vagrants.
But I also agree that I'm sidetracking the discussion :)
> Amazon said in its blog post, adding that its previous response only referred to staff at its warehouses or fulfillment centers.
So... I would be willing to bet it would not be too hard to find workers at warehouses/fulfillment centers who have peed in bottles too. They seem to be setting themselves up again to me...
I mean, this is just me googling, finding this story from 2018..
Aha, and this story has a reddit post of a picture from a driver claiming he found a pee bottle accidentally left in a tote put on his truck "I've found piss bottles from other drivers, but now from the warehouse too" https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7amyn/amazon-denies-workers...
But having met drivers (taxi, truck, etc) from around in world and in different countries. This is quite common.
Again, not great.
But a fairly "standard" thing in the transportation industry.
I remember seeing bottles in New York City yellow cabs and wondered why they always had empty bottles beside their seats -- until one day a friend told me.
I was grossed out. But then I noticed it more and more and more.
One day I was driving from Portland, Maine to New York City and I had to go, but the next rest stop was miles away, and this was a place in Connecticut that literally had no place to even pull over. It was that, or...
I looked around and there was a bottle, and I did it. Hehe.
Not sure if it's a turning point for unionisation, but it's definitely a turning point for talking about biological needs.
In Sweden, the equivalent of the US presidential debate takes 3 hours, including pre-greating and post-interview. As a man, supposedly gifted with a larger bladder, I would need a lot of planning to be 100% sure not to need a toilet break for 3 hours.
I can't help wonder: Is Sweden selecting the prime minister based on leadership skills or bladder size?
I can't help but comment rudely here that one of the world's largest manufacturers of devices designed to help discretely in this situation, Tena, is Swedish -- maybe that is your answer! ;-) [1].
I wouldn't put it past them that some politicians are so power hungry and sociopathic that they would use a pee bag in order to show that they are stronger than their opponent.
What exactly is wrong with peeing in a bottle? It's a practical solution to a very easily solved biological need. Hygienically, peeing is very different from pooing, and can be dealt with much more easily. If anything, having to beg some business to let you pee in their flushing ceramic bowl seems pretty ridiculous.
This seems more like social hangups making our lives more difficult.
If you spend a bit of time travelling/living in a van, or maybe camping in sub zero temperatures, you'll quickly come to appreciate the humble pee-bottle.
Having a job / working environment that pressures you into not taking breaks is obviously wrong though.
I keep 2 to 3 empty water bottles in the car just for the purpose of peeing -- they're very practical and convenient. Then they get tossed in the bin a the next gas station. Much more convenient and sanitary than finding and using a filthy public space.
Are the bottles sanitary? Are they washing their hands before returning to public contact work? Do they carry the bottles around or leave them somewhere? What if they don't have a bottle or suddenly need another? What about the #2 issue? Is the lack of bathrooms more difficult for women, older workers, or some other protected class?
It's shameful that our society tolerates such an anti-human behavior from an organization.
The people making decisions about this policy should have to adhere to it themselves.
Oh yeah, definitely should never be a situation where someone's working environment penalises them for using a bathroom. And you're right, there are lots of things that might make someone less able to work around a lack of toilet facilities.
There's a huge difference between using a pee bottle as a choice/convenience vs. to avoid some kind of workplace consequence.
Not being a woman I can't speak from experience, but I've heard that it is totally possible to learn to do. Obviously not with a narrow necked drinking bottle, but with a Nalgene or similar. There was an interesting podcast on the subject by a mountaineer talking about the need to be able to pee without leaving your sleeping bag when on Everest (or similar climbs where the cold is a serious risk to contend with).
> Hiring people and then failing to plan an appropriate amount of time for them to take a break is wrong, and should be illegal.
Ignorant question: Is it as easy for women to do as men? I would imagine not, but I don't have the equipment to say from experience. If you set the bar too high, does that mean it's only achievable by men peeing in bottles?
EDIT: Oh, I guess is it illegal in the USA to install a paid bathroom facility. I think that's dumb.
Ignoring the startup cost, if you have a paid bathroom in a relatively public area, and it costs say, 1 dollar for a usage, conservatively with 2 minute usage time that's about 30 bucks an hour.
Surely 30 bucks an hour revenue minus expenses to have someone refill water/pump out waste/occasional clean would make this a decent business similar to like a vending machine biz?
We have 107 paid and free public toilets here in the city of Zürich [1] and the free ones are relative clean most of the time. There is even an app to find the closest toilet. There is also a complete list with pictures, layout etc of every toilet currently installed [2]. Yes, it costs tax payer money but this is a basic need people have and private businesses are not always open or can be expected to provide such infrastructure.
It's a viable business only where there is plenty of traffic. (Assuming constant occupancy is not conservative!) In such places in the US there are already retail businesses meeting the need, as well as selling snacks, etc. The problem is everywhere else, such as the residential areas where many deliveries take place.
My dad has been a letter carrier for over 40 years. I'm very aware that drivers very openly talk to one another about peeing in the back of their trucks into bottles. Like with Amazon, the only policy is that you'll get a good talking to (not formal reprimand) if you accidentally leave a bottle of piss in the truck for the next person who drives the truck. Nobody wants to drive a car after a bottle of piss has been baking in hot Florida temperatures for 24 hours with the windows closed.
But, all that ignores a few things:
1) Look at that original tweet. So dismissive of the POSSIBILITY that anybody would EVER do such a thing. "Amazon is such a great place to work! Who could ever believe such an absurd claim!" The people who work in corporate clearly are so disconnected from the lives of their drivers that they have no idea how this is a weekly occurrence for a large percentage of drivers. Imagine what being so disconnected means in terms of setting policy for those drivers! Now apply that to a million other policies. People who do office work have no idea what it's like to do the job.
2) There were level of managers out in the field that were very aware of this. The official policy, if you read the emails, was (a) stop pooping in the Amazon bags, they'll trace you if you do, and (b) don't leave your piss bottles behind for other drivers to find. This is related to the first point, but what does it say about communication that something so commonplace didn't spread up the chain of command as a problem?
3) Amazon is saying they don't know the solution, but they'll try to come up with one. This scares me. The most likely scenario is a crackdown on drivers, as opposed to giving paid time for this purpose. Keep in mind, it could be that a driver is half an hour from a public restroom. This is expensive to solve. But what's not expensive is a crackdown on drivers. Look out for "zero tolerance" policies for those who get caught. It won't have an effect on occurrences of it happening, but could at least stop people from leaving their piss bottles behind as frequently.
It's a technology company. My assumption is that they're going to look for a way to "disrupt" peeing in bottles. Perhaps some kind of easy to install Amazon branded micro bathroom for the delivery trucks.
Amazon didn't start this spat though, so I'm gonna give them more leeway than you apparently want to.
It's pretty ridiculous that all the journos/politicians are only focusing on Amazon "doing this" when it's literally (by your own admission) done by anyone who drives all day long.
That it's so widespread in the industry should make this a BIGGER problem deserving of MORE attention. It shouldn't be used to dismiss this as a non-issue.
I don't know why you're focused on whether Amazon should be given "leeway." Even if you only care about corporate Amazon, then maybe it's not in their best interest to have no idea how their company actually functions in the real world? There were stories before, just like there had been about UPS, Uber, etc (helpfully linked in this "apology") -- but this only super blew up when they issued their snarky denial to a member of Congress that anybody would ever pee into a bottle, and implying that the Congressman was a fool for believing such a tall tale.
I think we have to put the tweet in the context of Amazon having already spent years defending itself from claims that people in its warehouses aren't allowed to go to the bathroom.
Also, the fact that the tweet was snarky is irrelevant. Twitter is a place for snark.
If a delivery driver wants to use a restroom they ought to have the liberty/permission/time to do so. But if a delivery driver prefers to take a leak in a bottle and use some hand sanitizer afterwards, that doesn't strike me as a problem. Call me crazy.
It is also probable that the drivers are unable to find public restrooms to use, even if they had time to have bathroom breaks.
For example, I live in a very big city, at the city center but there are not any public restrooms nearby. People with emergencies are have to do their business in the public.
I live in London and the lack of public toilets is just beyond belief. Most of them were shut years ago by councils trying to save money.
And the results is rather abysmal: the public now have to rely on the businesses to provide such facilities,which isn't the end of the world in central parts of the city,where there are cafés after cafes,but what about further out to suburbs? If it's bad to the general public, it's 10 times worse for the drivers of delivery vans, lorries,or even bus drivers. Literally nobody in the country is thinking about such infrastructure, nobody wants to initiate it, because,well,you know, it's not as popular and vote winning as 'more pressing issues'. This is also one of the reasons why there are so few women in the logistics sector, because you can't just pull it out behind a bush.
Even in central London when I've worked for many years I've had situations where me and my 2 year old son were asked to leave an establishment right after I stated we have a bathroom emergency and I just need 3 minutes to deal with it.
TBH I don't blame private businesses. It's not like they are obligated to share their facilities with non-paying customers. It's just a shame London became like that.
There is a scheme where a private business can open their bathroom to the public, put a sign in the window saying "Our toilets are open to all", and get paid a bit by government to contribute to maintanance.
Seems like a good deal all round, considering many businesses need to have toilets for staff and customers already. The sign makes them look like good citizens, the additional maintenance is probably very small, and some of the people who come in to use the toilet will buy something, so it acts like advertising too.
They don’t do it for the usual reasons: people with terrible and unhygienic habits, vandalism, drug consumption, smelly homeless, etc etc. I remember public toilets in the ‘80s, when heroin and smoking were more of a thing: everything was half-burnt, constantly. It’s the usual tragedy of the commons, or “why we can’t have nice things”.
If you want more and more people to checkout of consumerism, removing public restrooms is a great start. It doesn't directly effect me so much (I'm apparently part camel) but indirectly, some loved ones I've traveled with need to use the restroom frequently and as the logistics person usually having to find solutions for everyone, I can tell you it drives me insane how difficult it is to find restrooms sometimes. There are areas I flat I refuse to go with others just because I'm not going to spend half my day running around in search for a restroom, nor do I want to feel inclined to buy a cup of coffee or whatever every single time someone needs to urinate. If I'm going to one specific place and I know there's restrooms that's fine but we tend to roam around. That's good for your business. The less inclined I am to roam, the less likely you'll ever see any money from me.
I'd rather just say "hey, let's do a family and friends get together and screw going out anywhere... come to my house, all the restrooms you can use here and no taxes or other non-sense!" There's probably $500-1k+ of revenue that local businesses didn't get that evening, but hey, it's better for my friends and family, we can save and invest that and be more comfortable.
For governments it doesn't matter, they can just shift taxes to where it needs to be. For businesses, it can seriously hurt your bottom line. I can't imagine operating a restroom is so costly to offset the lost customers that it's worth cutting off so many potential patrons, but maybe I'm wrong or maybe people will continue throwing their money in areas that aren't consumer friendly. It won't be me though. Also I'm not that old, the more elderly who tend to have more disposable income from wealth accumulation are also people who often have less ability to wait to use restrooms. They seem like another market to consider.
People throw all kinds of garbage into toilets and fixing them becomes a weekly chore.
Anyway, if people can start a successful business around overpriced coffee, then I'm curious if it's possible to start a profitable chain of public restrooms.
I remember visiting newly fitted library in Pimlico,London. There was a huge sign on the toilet door saying you need to ask for toilet paper at the admin desk. So I go to the desk and ask for it, obviously curious to know why such policy exist to start with. They did tell they couldn't keep up with the thefts of toilet paper and couldn't buy it fast enough. This is one of the reasons a lot of nice and useful things can't existing for public, because a few idiots ruin it all for others.
I almost 100% sure it's not those in the greatest need who keep stealing it. It's just a category of people,who treat anything that isn't theirs as crap. It's the same people who steal all the towels,soap bars and what not from the hotel room, because,you know, they paid a lot for it. Or like in my own town,where the shoplifters are often teachers and medics- hardly the first category that come to your mind.
Mostly governments resolve it without needing to subsidise toilet use by requiring licensed premises or anywhere serving food and drink to have toilets
In the US many businesses are required to have bathrooms but they can and do make them for customers only. That combined with a lack of public bathrooms (not just a lack - they effectively do not exist here) leaves many workers with no other option.
More than Starbucks alone can or should be forced to provide. Where that number lies I'm not entirely sure, but I imagine interstate commerce and population densities would be a pretty good starting point.
of course the vast majority of the US is open land, still, far from any Starbucks or humans, so the distribution of Starbucks places them close to humans for some huge percentile of humans at any given point in time in the US, by design of course.
"In 1969, California Assemblywoman March Fong Eu smashed a porcelain toilet with an axe in front of the California state capitol, protesting the misogyny of restrooms that charged entrance fees for stalls but not urinals. She was not alone in her frustration. The grassroots organization CEPTIA—the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America—mobilized against pay toilets, putting out a quarterly newsletter (the Free Toilet Paper) and exchanging warring pamphlets with Nik-O-Lok, the leading pay-toilet manufacturer. The group won a citywide ordinance banning pay toilets in Chicago in 1973, followed by bans in Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Wyoming."
-- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/why-the-u...
If the government makes it illegal to profit from providing a good or service, fewer people will provide that good or service.
I had to visit my country's consulate in Manchester couple months ago in the middle of lockdown, and in city centre there was NOWHERE to pee. Zero. I went literally from business to business begging to use their facilities and nope, due to covid customers are not allowed in. Nope nope and nope. Went through several places and ended up going in some back alley. Absolutely ridiculous and I have no idea how people manage day to day.
A (nice) hotel I stayed at recently marked their lobby restrooms as closed, even to customers. It get odd as the hotel wasn’t somewhere you’d walk to, so it would be paying customers anyways
Could be taxi or ride share drivers or food delivery drivers. I know of one taxi driver that was reported to police for the mess he left the hotels’ bathrooms.
You can start by example, I might join after laws are changed, especially the one that if you are unfortunate, you can end up being labeled a sex offender for taking a leak.
What does this have to do with peeing? Peeing outside isn't a crime. Intentional nudity meant to surprise someone can still be sexual assault, these two are not mutually exclusive.
>>My wife has it happen like once a month at least
I'm in Asia, in a place with no laws. I won't beat a native person to death for this kind of thing, but if you're "peeing" in front of children, which I have seen multiple times from foreigners here, then get ready. If you're in a city, keep your fucking dick in your pants, just in case your around somebody like me that is shell shocked by too many experiences witnessing pathetic attempts at sexual assault, both "visual" and physical.
You misunderstood - I couldn't use the toilets even if I bought something. Due to covid customers are not allowed to use the bathrooms, full stop. I was perfectly happy to buy a coffee from Starbucks to use their toilet but was told no, their toilets are only for staff due to the pandemic.
OpenStreetMap contains data on businesses and which of them have a toilet. You can see this detail on apps like OSMAnd. If you really need to pee, petrol stations are among the businesses least likely to challenge someone for using the toilet without buying anything.
That isn’t the Amazon driver problem. Their issue is that the drivers get a nearly inhuman work quota with automated enforcement and no recourse. UPS drivers work their butts off, but don’t get fired for taking a dump.
End of the day, it’s bad management on Amazon’s part. They’ve built out a distribution network very quickly, but being dependent on desperation on the part of a miserable workforce has pretty obvious drawbacks.
Yes, and it really hit home with me. As a cloud engineer and someone who really likes AWS, that article made me take a step back and think. I'm not saying I'm ditching AWS tomorrow, but it's really the first time I've really considered other solutions. And it's over something as simple as lying. Not features or even bugs, simple dishonesty.
the funny thing to me about this whole episode is how Bezos wanted "his" people to start fighting back. these accounts were not known for these kinds of messages, so it is no loss to me that they strike out at their first at bat. however, they swung at a pitch that was obviously so far over their heads. i'm guessing it would have taken all of about 30 seconds to "research" to find out this is not the hill they should be dying. i love it when people self own in such a spectacular manner.
Every week, I see a report on how company 'X' cannot meet need 'Y' and how we need more of infrastructure 'Z'. The investigation always stops at this exact point.
Peek a little deeper and the reasons are clear. The American philosophy of urban design is broken at its core.
Public infrastructure enables low cost amenities by distributing costs over the number of intended users, ie. residents of said geographic plot. 'Density' is a non negotiable prerequisite for quality infrastructure that won't spiral a nation into debt.
A public restroom can only be maintained if the users/restroom is high. The exact same logic applies to literally everything. There is an inflection point (Mumbai, my home town, being an excellent example of excess density), but no American city comes anywhere close to it.
________
I am usually cautious about boiling down complex problems to single causes. But, this one I feel confident about.
Over the long run, nothing has (and will continue to) hurt the US more than the galaxy brained American dream of an R1 zoned car centric town.
my point was more general to the unsustainability of public infrastructure in sprawl prone towns.
Outside of the NE corridor of Boston-NYC-Philly-DC, I don't think any other major US city has the density for a high coverage public toilet network.
qualifier City of Boston and SF are fake cities. The real cities of Boston and SF extend far beyond their city boundaries which capture a tiny group of neighborhoods. The real city of Boston would also fail my criterion. Small cities like Portland, Maine do well-ish, but my focus is major cities.
People are asking Amazon to change the driver’s schedule to include time for bathroom breaks between deliveries. Presumably drivers only decide to pee into bottles because Amazon gives them tight deadlines to meet, not because they prefer bottles to bathrooms.
The scheduled bathroom break time would have to include time to drive to a usable restroom. Others in this thread are discussing challenges related to that.
There just don't seem to be many restrooms around. And even if the schedule allows for it, maybe the bottle saves time and drivers could opt for it simply to get home sooner.
US cities have a lot of trash cans in public places, but a panic inducing-ly low number of public restrooms. This appears* to be the opposite of a city like Tokyo, Japan; fewer trash cans, but more reassuring number of public toilets.
* personal opinion based on living in these 2 cities
I think this article is trying to change the narrative focus of public access to restrooms, instead of the real issues around time to attend to personal needs that I gather Amazon's driver work conditions help to create. I would be good to keep the focus on that.
> "We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed."
"We are sorry that everything except our impossible scheduling algo enforced by AI-backed driver surveillance causes employees to pee in bottles."
There is an obvious fix for this, which is to allow drivers the time to find and use a bathroom, even if it is far from their route.
There is an obvious reason driver-employing companies don’t do this, which is that it would raise costs and increase delivery times, two things that all customers (both shippers and receivers) absolutely hate. The shipper that implements this unilaterally will instantly become uncompetitive vs shippers that maintain the status quo.
Honestly this is a classic case for top-down regulation. Because it forces all companies to solve the problem simultaneously, it should have little effect on the competitive balance. And companies with unhappy customers could blame the government. That also makes it hard to get regulation done. Voters essentially would have to support raising their own prices in order to help truck drivers.
I’m curious, has anyone actually tried urinating in a bottle here while on the road?
I tried it once, and found it so convenient I’ve done it multiple times now. These Amazon workers may be onto something. All those times I had to urinate so badly while stuck in traffic, I never realized a bottle could be so easy to use. I imagine if you’re in a delivery truck where you could stand up walk into the back it would be even easier, almost trivial. So what’s the big deal?
To discard the urine, I will typically pull over to the side of the road and open the door slightly to empty the bottle discretely. I’m trying to think what the best bottle to keep in the car for this purpose could be. Something made of glass and with a long neck is ideal, to avoid spills. A wide mouth is also helpful. Maybe something like a yellow hydroflask.
From now on, when I do a long road trip, urination will no longer be a reason for me to have to stop and pull over. If this saves me time, I imagine it would save an Amazon driver time AND money.
Yeah, spot on. I was slightly surprised by the almost universal sentiment that peeing in bottles was bad.
The tricky thing is that in this context, the fact that drivers are peeing in bottles is likely a symptom of a broken system that is exploiting workers and forcing them to spend all the time they can on the road. Definitely have no interest in defending profit optimisation at the expense of people.
I already commented on the underlying issue but I’ll also add, separately, that this is a great example of the dangers of a “hit ‘em back” PR strategy.
Often it is senior execs who are advocating for this approach (saw rumors it was Bezos himself pushing for it at Amazon), and at some point it becomes impossible for the PR team to say “no” to their boss. Someone has to do the dumb thing anyway and see what happens, or resign.
I bet this case study gets pulled out by the PR team within Amazon for years and years whenever someone asks them to “be more aggressive” or whatever.
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[ 427 ms ] story [ 2313 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
> First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers.
Nowhere in the tweet did it mention fulfillment centers:
> 1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
And WOW. At the end of the blog post, there are tweets of people saying it's not just Amazon. So, "we're sorry, but it's not just me, so it's not that bad."
[0]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/our-recen...
How about they pay staff to go through security screenings?
How about they pay staff for time transiting to and from the break rooms?
That's the floor. The bare ** minimum Amazon should be doing. Their staff are not slaves, or servants. They are human beings and deserve far more than the spiteful pittance Amazon provides them.
Say using the bottle shaves off 15-30mins compared to the bathroom. I’m sure many would still prefer to get home 15-30min early.
Because if enough people start going home 15-30min early, management gets excited and raises the bar by adding work, so now you do the extra 15-30min of work (by peeing in the bottle) or risk not keeping up. I'm sure many would prefer peeing in the bottle to risking not keeping up, but that isn't the kind of choice where we say 'great, let them do it, it makes them happy.'
I, for one, having been in similar situations, would rather get home fifteen minutes later, or an hour, than shit in a bag. Or piss in a bottle.
I didn't even know Amazon emoloyed delivery drivers.
(This is of course separate from people who drive actual Prime delivery vans, who seem to be everywhere)
I live in Downtown Brooklyn and between here my last place in Midtown and my work's offices in Kips Bay I've never seen an individual deliver with a private vehicle in
Doesn't really make sense unless the building itself just isn't getting that many orders
Except for the Amazon Flex program where random people can run small routes in their own cars, those people are indeed not-really-independent contractors. But they account for a very small fraction of packages delivered.
That does not mean that people who are correctly informed about this thinking that it would also include delivery drivers are wrong.
Note: I would not want to be forced to do that by my employer.
It is true that a lot of public toilets have been closed for the past year but these complaints go back to long before that happened.
I don't know where you live, but where is there a bathroom to stop at? The US isn't filled with public restrooms everywhere along driver's routes with convenient parking right outside.
To use a public restroom could easily mean a 10 minute drive, 5 minutes to find parking and walk to the bathroom, a 10 minute wait in line when it's separate bathrooms like a Starbucks, and another 10 minute drive back to resume your route, like 35 minutes total. Yikes.
I mean sometimes you might get lucky where there's a gas station right along your route and you can pop in, but most delivery routes snake through residential neighborhoods. There aren't any public bathrooms to be found anywhere.
Where I've lived in several smallish cities in the Midwest it is generally not hard to find bathrooms. I've had jobs that involved driving a van between customers' houses and never had trouble finding one. They're not in the residential neighborhoods but the routes would always go reasonably close to at least a few gas stations a day.
But even here where we do have bathrooms fairly readily available the drivers still pee in their vans. I know because I used to work in one of the local Amazon warehouses and we would find bags the drivers had returned with pee in them.
I'm not defending Amazon's general financial screw-turning, but I think the "peeing in bottles" has only become a meme because the idea seems gross to everyone who hasn't spent a long time alone in vehicles.
You can find bottles filled with yellow liquid all along major highways.
oh dear
(Obviously these drivers are being put under time crunches, hence the bottles, and that is a separate issue)
Frankly, it's insane to me that we don't consider public bathrooms to be an important component of public infrastructure.
But that doesn't take away Amazon's role in the process either.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/opinion/sunday/public-toi...
The way we've built out our cities means that literally anyone who drives around all day is gonna have a bad time when it comes to relieving themselves.
This has nothing to do with how Amazon operates their business and everything to do with a dearth of public restrooms.
A humanely run business takes these things into account. And given that we as a society allow corporations like Amazon to exist through the granting of special-rights charters for limited liability etc., we should be expecting that they operate humanely.
But, they’re a massive company with the resources such that they could address this problem. They could also reduce the schedule pressure on driver’s and allow them to take breaks long enough to use a restroom. And they tweeted dishonestly saying it wasn’t a problem. So, I’m not really ready to just let them off the hook. Amazon has agency, and could fix or seriously mitigate this problem if they wanted to. Instead, they chose to ignore it and equivocate about it until it turned into a PR black eye.
When I was in high school, I did bread deliveries for a bakery. There weren’t really restrooms I could use when I was on my route in the mornings, but I was told if I ever needed to use the restroom and had no other options I could always return to the bakery and use our restrooms. I never peed in a bottle doing that job. I also never got in trouble for being 20 minutes late for having had to use the restroom.
It seems pretty obvious to me that some Amazon drivers, like other drivers, are going to pee in bottles from time to time. This doesn't seem like a fate worse than death, IMO, at least not for male drivers. But I do think it's a reason why Amazon shouldn't put cameras in its delivery vehicles.
Still, you would think that Amazon could maintain a bathroom depot in its major delivery areas. Maybe even their own gas stations.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse...
So the first malcontent that spreads feces all over the walls and blocks up the toilet with a syringe gets the whole thing shut down.
http://psmag.com/economics/dont-pay-toilets-america-bathroom...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/closure-of-pub...
The 'downtown development authority' provides public bathrooms in the (run down) commercial district.
Highways in the state have relatively evenly spaced public rest stops.
(in my region the nearest facility would pretty much always be a gas station, with people not getting worked up about it if you walk in just to use the toilet)
Our portable bathrooms don’t self clean well enough. We need to think about how to design a better one. I don’t know if that involves building in air vacuums that force pull in everything to avoid clogs, or if we need more high pressure water, or literal acid that floods the floor after someone leaves (self cleans the whole box, and automatically sprays disinfectant, vacuums down all the shit in 2 minutes, then unlocks the door). Maybe have one time plastic bags that seal up and then get flushed down (all automated). Some kind of hosing down of the whole thing with acid is still high on my list.
There’s got to be some tech we can make that would make rolling these out the most hygienic thing to do as a society.
It would let you keep great public access, keep toilets simple, and only pass the "costs" of bad-behaviour to those that deserve it.
Having ID to take a piss is a bit weird however.
Anyway, how would you identify who spoiled the bathroom?
[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/realid_costs_...
In reality, you've got an endless supply of people who will make a mess once with your unpopular system and not care, good faith accidents unable to make amends, people that refuse to show IDs and piss on the reader on general principle, people unjustly blamed by your system for someone else's mess with no appeal, fake IDs, and inevitable tie in to other delusional top-down systems that multiply these problems.
We just clean it up.
Just ask the proprietor for some paper towels and some spray and get to work and nobody will care. Frankly, one remarked that we would always be welcome even after the disaster because we left it better than we found it.
In this case, quite literally.
>borderline sociopath teenagers
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make.
Not only that, our subway stations and trains reek of urine more often than not. It's unpleasant, but I can't blame homeless people for it too much when there are zero restrooms nearby.
Anti-homeless policies like this are shortsighted; homeless people aren't going away just because you remove public facilities. They still need to eat, sleep, and do their business like anyone else. Better to both help homeless people improve their situations and provide facilities for basic human needs for everyone.
This isn't "shortsighted" at all for the individual restroom operator.
Merchants understandably don't want to provide free bathrooms to the general public even where homelessness is not the driving concern. It costs them money while not making any money, so they limit bathroom access to paying customers if they provide bathroom facilities at all.
Then the currently homeless can have an indoor toilet where they live.
I'm all for more housing, but solving homelessness doesn't actually put a full stop to a need for public bathrooms.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-hospitals-hou...
The rest of them will either get thrown out for drugs/mental illness or ruin the place they move into. And I need my neighbors to be quiet at night so that I can keep my job. That is hard when you need to have the TV on at max volume because you need it to drown out the voices in your head.
That said, if you close your restroom, they only go away from your area if there are other restrooms nearby. If there aren't, you're just making it that more likely that you'll find urine and feces outside somewhere near your business, and that older people and people with medical conditions avoid the area (and thus don't spend money at your businesses, by the way). Classic coordination problem: while it may be in your selfish interest to close down your restroom and push people to your neighbors, if everyone does that you're all worse off.
...and that's the situation we're in right now.
Legalize housing in cities, and this problem mostly goes away, along with many others.
...and I also mentioned the lack of bathrooms being an issue for people with certain medical conditions. I mean sure, I have easy access to a bathroom while I'm at home, but a big appeal of living in the city is being able to walk or take public transit to get places. That also means you're potentially 30-45 minutes away from home, though, not to mention the 30-45 minutes that it took to get there; if you're like me and you don't know for sure that there will be a bathroom you can use somewhere along the route, it's a huge disincentive to go there.
But I also agree that I'm sidetracking the discussion :)
So... I would be willing to bet it would not be too hard to find workers at warehouses/fulfillment centers who have peed in bottles too. They seem to be setting themselves up again to me...
I mean, this is just me googling, finding this story from 2018..
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-hav...
Aha, and this story has a reddit post of a picture from a driver claiming he found a pee bottle accidentally left in a tote put on his truck "I've found piss bottles from other drivers, but now from the warehouse too" https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7amyn/amazon-denies-workers...
But having met drivers (taxi, truck, etc) from around in world and in different countries. This is quite common.
Again, not great.
But a fairly "standard" thing in the transportation industry.
I remember seeing bottles in New York City yellow cabs and wondered why they always had empty bottles beside their seats -- until one day a friend told me.
I was grossed out. But then I noticed it more and more and more.
One day I was driving from Portland, Maine to New York City and I had to go, but the next rest stop was miles away, and this was a place in Connecticut that literally had no place to even pull over. It was that, or...
I looked around and there was a bottle, and I did it. Hehe.
"peeing". On live TV.
In Sweden, the equivalent of the US presidential debate takes 3 hours, including pre-greating and post-interview. As a man, supposedly gifted with a larger bladder, I would need a lot of planning to be 100% sure not to need a toilet break for 3 hours.
I can't help wonder: Is Sweden selecting the prime minister based on leadership skills or bladder size?
[1] https://www.tena.nu/vardpersonal/produkter/slip-allt-i-ett-i...
This seems more like social hangups making our lives more difficult.
If you spend a bit of time travelling/living in a van, or maybe camping in sub zero temperatures, you'll quickly come to appreciate the humble pee-bottle.
Having a job / working environment that pressures you into not taking breaks is obviously wrong though.
It's shameful that our society tolerates such an anti-human behavior from an organization.
The people making decisions about this policy should have to adhere to it themselves.
There's a huge difference between using a pee bottle as a choice/convenience vs. to avoid some kind of workplace consequence.
It's practical for half the population.
> This seems more like social hangups making our lives more difficult.
I wouldn't consider "sanitary conditions" a "social hangup" or taking an appropriate bathroom break "making life difficult."
> or maybe camping in sub zero temperatures, you'll quickly come to appreciate the humble pee-bottle.
I have never urinated in a bottle while camping, even in extreme weather.
> Having a job / working environment that pressures you into not taking breaks is obviously wrong though.
Hiring people and then failing to plan an appropriate amount of time for them to take a break is wrong, and should be illegal.
> Hiring people and then failing to plan an appropriate amount of time for them to take a break is wrong, and should be illegal.
Totally agree.
EDIT: Oh, I guess is it illegal in the USA to install a paid bathroom facility. I think that's dumb.
Ignoring the startup cost, if you have a paid bathroom in a relatively public area, and it costs say, 1 dollar for a usage, conservatively with 2 minute usage time that's about 30 bucks an hour.
Surely 30 bucks an hour revenue minus expenses to have someone refill water/pump out waste/occasional clean would make this a decent business similar to like a vending machine biz?
(put a TV and vending machine in the front room and you are charging for the facility and not the toilet)
Make it a membership instead of pay per use and you are even further away from a 'public pay toilet'.
[1] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/gud/de/index/gesundheitsschutz/...
[2] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/stzh/gud/Deutsch/UG...
But, all that ignores a few things:
1) Look at that original tweet. So dismissive of the POSSIBILITY that anybody would EVER do such a thing. "Amazon is such a great place to work! Who could ever believe such an absurd claim!" The people who work in corporate clearly are so disconnected from the lives of their drivers that they have no idea how this is a weekly occurrence for a large percentage of drivers. Imagine what being so disconnected means in terms of setting policy for those drivers! Now apply that to a million other policies. People who do office work have no idea what it's like to do the job.
2) There were level of managers out in the field that were very aware of this. The official policy, if you read the emails, was (a) stop pooping in the Amazon bags, they'll trace you if you do, and (b) don't leave your piss bottles behind for other drivers to find. This is related to the first point, but what does it say about communication that something so commonplace didn't spread up the chain of command as a problem?
3) Amazon is saying they don't know the solution, but they'll try to come up with one. This scares me. The most likely scenario is a crackdown on drivers, as opposed to giving paid time for this purpose. Keep in mind, it could be that a driver is half an hour from a public restroom. This is expensive to solve. But what's not expensive is a crackdown on drivers. Look out for "zero tolerance" policies for those who get caught. It won't have an effect on occurrences of it happening, but could at least stop people from leaving their piss bottles behind as frequently.
It's pretty ridiculous that all the journos/politicians are only focusing on Amazon "doing this" when it's literally (by your own admission) done by anyone who drives all day long.
I don't know why you're focused on whether Amazon should be given "leeway." Even if you only care about corporate Amazon, then maybe it's not in their best interest to have no idea how their company actually functions in the real world? There were stories before, just like there had been about UPS, Uber, etc (helpfully linked in this "apology") -- but this only super blew up when they issued their snarky denial to a member of Congress that anybody would ever pee into a bottle, and implying that the Congressman was a fool for believing such a tall tale.
Also, the fact that the tweet was snarky is irrelevant. Twitter is a place for snark.
If a delivery driver wants to use a restroom they ought to have the liberty/permission/time to do so. But if a delivery driver prefers to take a leak in a bottle and use some hand sanitizer afterwards, that doesn't strike me as a problem. Call me crazy.
I noted that when you snark and get the facts wrong, that it'll get more attention.
For example, I live in a very big city, at the city center but there are not any public restrooms nearby. People with emergencies are have to do their business in the public.
TBH I don't blame private businesses. It's not like they are obligated to share their facilities with non-paying customers. It's just a shame London became like that.
Seems like a good deal all round, considering many businesses need to have toilets for staff and customers already. The sign makes them look like good citizens, the additional maintenance is probably very small, and some of the people who come in to use the toilet will buy something, so it acts like advertising too.
I don't know why everywhere doesn't do it.
The cost of dealing with the kinds of messes that happen in public toilets is exorbitant.
I'd rather just say "hey, let's do a family and friends get together and screw going out anywhere... come to my house, all the restrooms you can use here and no taxes or other non-sense!" There's probably $500-1k+ of revenue that local businesses didn't get that evening, but hey, it's better for my friends and family, we can save and invest that and be more comfortable.
For governments it doesn't matter, they can just shift taxes to where it needs to be. For businesses, it can seriously hurt your bottom line. I can't imagine operating a restroom is so costly to offset the lost customers that it's worth cutting off so many potential patrons, but maybe I'm wrong or maybe people will continue throwing their money in areas that aren't consumer friendly. It won't be me though. Also I'm not that old, the more elderly who tend to have more disposable income from wealth accumulation are also people who often have less ability to wait to use restrooms. They seem like another market to consider.
Anyway, if people can start a successful business around overpriced coffee, then I'm curious if it's possible to start a profitable chain of public restrooms.
I don't really want to make it like Chinas social credit score, more like you do these bad things and we take your good person card.
Starbucks doesn't anymore after the PR incident couple of years ago. There are 15k Starbucks in USA.
If the government makes it illegal to profit from providing a good or service, fewer people will provide that good or service.
My wife has it happen like once a month at least... Keep your dick in your pants around me or I'll hack it off.
>>My wife has it happen like once a month at least
Where the hell do you live??
Just wanted to point out that you _are_ able to pee anywhere, you might not be allowed to, though.
End of the day, it’s bad management on Amazon’s part. They’ve built out a distribution network very quickly, but being dependent on desperation on the part of a miserable workforce has pretty obvious drawbacks.
Now in London, and whenever I see men urinating on trees I cannot help but think "put the fricking urinals on the streets"
[0] https://www.travelblog.org/Photos/642355
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/you-cant-trust-amazon-whe...
Peek a little deeper and the reasons are clear. The American philosophy of urban design is broken at its core.
Public infrastructure enables low cost amenities by distributing costs over the number of intended users, ie. residents of said geographic plot. 'Density' is a non negotiable prerequisite for quality infrastructure that won't spiral a nation into debt.
A public restroom can only be maintained if the users/restroom is high. The exact same logic applies to literally everything. There is an inflection point (Mumbai, my home town, being an excellent example of excess density), but no American city comes anywhere close to it.
________
I am usually cautious about boiling down complex problems to single causes. But, this one I feel confident about.
Over the long run, nothing has (and will continue to) hurt the US more than the galaxy brained American dream of an R1 zoned car centric town.
I am curious what others think of the veracity of that statement, it leaves me scratching my head a bit. Agreed on the last sentence though.
Outside of the NE corridor of Boston-NYC-Philly-DC, I don't think any other major US city has the density for a high coverage public toilet network.
qualifier City of Boston and SF are fake cities. The real cities of Boston and SF extend far beyond their city boundaries which capture a tiny group of neighborhoods. The real city of Boston would also fail my criterion. Small cities like Portland, Maine do well-ish, but my focus is major cities.
Furthermore, even in American, geographically spread out, “driving cities”, there could still be public toilets people drive to.
The scheduled bathroom break time would have to include time to drive to a usable restroom. Others in this thread are discussing challenges related to that.
* personal opinion based on living in these 2 cities
Invent "a better piss bottle" for drivers. Extra points for accommodating female drivers.
"We are sorry that everything except our impossible scheduling algo enforced by AI-backed driver surveillance causes employees to pee in bottles."
There is an obvious reason driver-employing companies don’t do this, which is that it would raise costs and increase delivery times, two things that all customers (both shippers and receivers) absolutely hate. The shipper that implements this unilaterally will instantly become uncompetitive vs shippers that maintain the status quo.
Honestly this is a classic case for top-down regulation. Because it forces all companies to solve the problem simultaneously, it should have little effect on the competitive balance. And companies with unhappy customers could blame the government. That also makes it hard to get regulation done. Voters essentially would have to support raising their own prices in order to help truck drivers.
I tried it once, and found it so convenient I’ve done it multiple times now. These Amazon workers may be onto something. All those times I had to urinate so badly while stuck in traffic, I never realized a bottle could be so easy to use. I imagine if you’re in a delivery truck where you could stand up walk into the back it would be even easier, almost trivial. So what’s the big deal?
To discard the urine, I will typically pull over to the side of the road and open the door slightly to empty the bottle discretely. I’m trying to think what the best bottle to keep in the car for this purpose could be. Something made of glass and with a long neck is ideal, to avoid spills. A wide mouth is also helpful. Maybe something like a yellow hydroflask.
From now on, when I do a long road trip, urination will no longer be a reason for me to have to stop and pull over. If this saves me time, I imagine it would save an Amazon driver time AND money.
SoBe bottles are available at many gas stations. Not the biggest mouth, but having fresh bottles makes up for it.
The tricky thing is that in this context, the fact that drivers are peeing in bottles is likely a symptom of a broken system that is exploiting workers and forcing them to spend all the time they can on the road. Definitely have no interest in defending profit optimisation at the expense of people.
Often it is senior execs who are advocating for this approach (saw rumors it was Bezos himself pushing for it at Amazon), and at some point it becomes impossible for the PR team to say “no” to their boss. Someone has to do the dumb thing anyway and see what happens, or resign.
I bet this case study gets pulled out by the PR team within Amazon for years and years whenever someone asks them to “be more aggressive” or whatever.