It goes a little deeper than that. I'd assume Amazon meant no harm (business, personal, or otherwise), but Americans have a vested interest in the FAA doing its job; this sort of mistake can down an airplane. If the cleaning agent had leaked in-flight instead of in-handling and found its way to something that'll react nicely with sulfuric acid (read: lots of things), you now have a scenario where an airplane is coming out of the sky in a less-than-controlled fashion, possibly over a populated area.

I'm pretty comfortable with the FAA using strict methods to avoid that scenario.

Based on the decline of Amazon UPS deliveries over the past couple years, UPS is becoming less and less important to them. For a while, Ontrac was doing most of my Amazon deliveries, but more recently, Amazon's own delivery service has been delivering most of my orders (not sure if they are really Amazon drivers or if they are contractors). UPS is still doing some deliveries (seems to be only products that aren't available in nearby warehouses), but not nearly as many as they used to. When Amazon first started using Ontrac, Ontrac's delivery service was so horrible that I think Amazon did it only so they could squeeze more money from UPS and Fedex, though Ontrac has improved a lot since then.

Recently Amazon has starting using the USPS to deliver more packages (or at least the last-mile delivery), and that service has been disappointing, I can usually count on a USPS package being delivered at least a day late, and more than once, it hasn't shown up at all, despite being marked as "delivered at front door".

In any case, while I would think that any unhappiness between UPS and Amazon would be resolved through their contracts, I doubt that UPS wants to rock the boat with Amazon, because even a small piece of the Amazon delivery pie is a lot of deliveries. So in this case, where workers health and safety is in question, it's good that the government stepped in to prevent UPS's desire to keep a customer happy from getting in the way of their worker's welfare.

> nd more than once, it hasn't shown up at all, despite being marked as "delivered at front door". <

It very well might have been delivered, but stolen before you got to it. Super likely in the Bay Area and especially San Francisco.

This is interesting because I've had similar problems with Amazon orders that come thru Canada post. One incident I was already in the middle of the dispute process when they finally delivered it. A week after the Canada post website showed Delivered.

I originally blammed Canada post but perhaps this is an AWS shipping issue after all.

Oh, I'm sure my problems are related to the USPS and not Amazon -- one of the lost packages turned up a week later from a neighbor to whom it was misdelivered.

Amazon has always been quick to ship out replacements when I reported the missing packages (even when the USPS said they were "delivered"), and even for the one that was re-delivered by my neighbor, when I reported to amazon that I received it, they said I could keep the $10 item, no need to return it.

I'm going to say that regulating the transport of highly-caustic toxic materials is a proper function of government.

(Edit: Not caustic, but evidently highly acidic. Even better!)

Amazon is working on their own delivery infrastructure (buying aircraft, etc) specifically to cut UPS out after UPS screwed them one christmas.

http://www.wired.com/2013/12/amazon_ups/