I've had good success with this last year, after Amazon's own in-house fulfillment service caused me a series of issues due to erroneously failed deliveries; since I made that request, I haven't had a single shipment fulfilled via AMZL_US save those for which I requested same-day delivery of items present in the Canton warehouse. Other sorts of orders which AMZL_US would previously fulfill are instead now handled by UPS or FedEx.
If you have trouble with LaserShip, as I gather many do, you could probably do worse than to request Amazon deprioritize that carrier. If my experience is any guide, you may have to bounce from rep to rep a couple of times before you find someone who knows what you're talking about, but it's worth persisting, because the results are, at least in my experience, much worth the effort. Hope this helps!
I wonder how bad a carrier has to be for Amazon to abandon them entirely.
From what I've gathered from anecdotal evidence, things vary a lot by region. Where I am, USPS is incompetent (repeated Sunday deliveries to my apartment building fail because "no access" despite USPS employees having a key to the building during the week) but the other carriers all make an effort and are willing to redeliver later the same day if they mess up.
Plus when I want to ship things around the country or (especially) internationally, USPS is nearly always the worst option unless you want slow and cheap.
I've noticed USPS deliveries at my office have been very unusual lately. They often just throw the stuff on the floor near the door (there's a table for mail, etc), and when people exit the door it mashes the letters and such. Very odd. Also, it appears that the people delivering do not speak any English. I've tried to talk with them and either they are pretending to be ignorant of English or they don't understand it.
The only way to protect yourself is to ship non-USPS and insure.
I had UPS leave things outside my garage where they could easily get run over. Thankfully they've finally learned to put stuff at the side of the door rather than the middle.
Throwing mail on the floor is completely bizarre, though. I don't know if it would do any good, but have you complained to your local post office about that?
USPS marks stuff delivered before it arrives here at work. They seem to just run through all the packages and flag them when they put them on the truck. Had it happen with one from Amazon just yesterday. At least I've always received them. I have more trouble with Amazon not putting everything in the box they're supposed to.
With Amazon, around here they like to use a craptastic local shipper called LaserShip. Now those folks are the epitome of incompetency. Tracking is useless, they like to mark packages as delivered well before they actually arrive, and sometimes they just plain give the stuff to the wrong address. Once they gave my package to a random house thirty miles away!
I don't mean to say that you and the others are wrong, of course! I wonder what the difference is. Maybe I'm just lucky in this respect due to where I live or something.