On a societal level it's a shame that jobs that could actually support a person or family are being replaced by hustle economy types. My own parents never went to college and have worked service jobs their whole life, but could still own a house and eat dinner with us every night. They even bought a computer when I was a teenager in the 90s. I think in today's world they'd be driving for Lyft all night and I'd have grown up in a different town with a worse school system.

"Your margin is my opportunity." -Jeff Bezos

It was a single family home in a neighborhood of ~100 homes on 2 intersecting roads, so not really hard to find.

UPS, USPS, and Amazon had no problems finding my house. Even had a couple freight companies make deliveries on Amazon's behalf without issues.

I use to standby FedEx as my preferred shipper but they've really gone down hill since the early 2000s IMO.

Amazon will let you do that with every other carrier EXCEPT Amazon Logistics. The only way to get them blocked is prove your home is a prison, military base, or have experiences so horrible they have pity on you.

It's incredible really. The Amazon logistics folks weren't able to accurately put packages into the parcel locker system at my apartment, and would constantly just leave them on the counter in the public area. This happened so much so that my apartment revoked their courier number to use the parcel system. The apartment management's idea: instead have them deliver directly to the door of each resident. As you can imagine, this has tanked successful Amazon deliveries to anyone in my apartment complex. I'm probably sitting at about a 66% success rate for getting my packages delivered AT ALL.

On the bright side, their customer service folks have added tons of $5 and $15 credits to my account because of how absolutely terrible their own courier service is at delivering.

- Was it left at my apartment door?

- Was it left in the 2nd floor mail room/lobby?

- Was it left in the 1st floor main entry/lobby?

- Was it left outside?

- Was it left in some side door?

- Was it left halfway between the 2nd and 3rd floor on a random stairway?

- Was it left in the office?

- Will I have to wait 3 more days so I can report it lost/stolen and try again?

So fun.

Not to get into the "Prime 1-day", which when I order three 1-day things at the same time means one shows up tomorrow, one the next day, and one the day after.

I don't often finish work before this, so pick-up of these "One Day Delivery" packages are pretty much relegated to weekends.

They added instructions to my account indicating which door the packages should be left at. So far, about 50% of the deliveries have been at a different door, but at least they've made it to the house.

For example those nice looking cursive addresses instead of simple to read numerals are annoying.

Then there's missing numbers, or bad choices in color, or it's black and they don't have a light for it at night.

People are way too quick on pointing their fingers at automation and globalization. There is some evidence against those being the main cause of the current lack of low qualification jobs (that is worldwide, by the way).

I don’t even agree that much with those clichés (they had their sets of challenges, plus I’m Gen X) but it’s extremely important to remain aware of the various trends of the new generations.

Example with a popular symbol: https://www.bitchute.com/video/_16B2euF128/

Sometimes, you have to know when to get out to end on a high note. American television is notorious for this. Game of Thrones and House of Cards are recent examples. The American television industry is the one that gave rise to the proto-meme of "Jumping the Shark." (On the other hand, the Japanese anime industry is notorious for often leaving people wanting more.)

On the other end, Apple's biggest successes involved knowing when to wait, and when to move, so that they didn't release something which wasn't ready. Apple didn't release the first MP3 player. They didn't release the first smartphone or the first tablet.

So I doubt that Amazon is "done" at 2 day delivery. However, given my experience with new Amazon services, I'd say that they've created an incentive structure for internal groups to be first, even when they're not ready to the point where they somewhat damage the brand.

Product differentiation for the sake of differentiation is always a dangerous game. Someone posted here the other day about "peak products" where the product reaches an ideal state which is an interesting concept!

The problem is an obsession with constant newness misses stuff like privacy, customer support, longevity, etc. But they care more about having a new flashy SKU for next season which looks different.

Edit: the Wikipedia for "Jumping the shark" is excellent, apparently from when Fonzie jumped over a shark in water skiis as part of a promotional gimmick on Happy Days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark

if they had ended in season 5 with the material already written, none of the storylines would have been resolved. therefore, some amount of additional story had to be developed, so if you're doomed to disappoint fans, why not write 3 more seasons and make a bunch of money in the process? in a deadline-driven environment, no army of writers was going to produce a satisfyingly detailed and consistent ending to match martin's prior work (it seems even martin himself is having trouble with regard to the book series).

No one was locked in. You know what the Japanese anime industry does in this case? Sometimes, they draw out the story, so that entire episodes are taken up with just powering up. (Dragonball Z) More commonly, they just wait for the author!

Of course, the anime industry has the advantage, that the "way someone is drawn" can remain the same after a gap of 5 or 10 years, while human actors age. However, in 5 or 10 years, I don't think that's going to be prohibitively expensive anymore.

Was there something before the Newton?

I started getting things delivered to a Locker near my office because delivery to my apartment consistently sucked regardless of carrier (drivers never tried to buzz in; stuff always ended up at the post office or back at the delivery depot.)

Now that I've tried it I'm not going back. Just the fact that I can guarantee where the thing will be (no misdeliveries; no chance of theft from my front door), and pick it up immediately (no waiting in line) at any time of day (since the lockers tend to be street-accessible), makes so much difference.

And that's leaving aside the fact that I've never found anything delivered to a locker to be late (on the last-mile logistics side of things, at least.) In fact, as long as such a shipment enters the country on time, I've found it to arrive faster than its projected delivery time more-often-than-not.

Amazon has a solid experience with Logistics+Locker, but they haven't really marketed it very hard. Kind of surprising, really; the improved delivery experiences might do wonders for their customer retention at a time when fake Marketplace sellers are scaring customers away.

I have no way of giving feedback that the delivery drivers here are lazy and marking packages as delivered to keep up their metrics and then actually delivering them the next day. It is very annoying.

Now they’re usually fulfilled by UPS, and I don’t recall any issues since having the flag added.

IIRC, Amazon.com customer support can only request the flag, but it can be denied. That's what happened to me, and I still get stuff delivered by Amazon Logistics.

At least their service has improved somewhat since then.

My $2 item that shipped by itself? Photo. $1300 worth of PC build? No photo, no doorbell, nothing...

Very rarely ever have any issues with FedEx, UPS, or USPS. OnTrac is pretty garbage, but still better than Amazon Logistics.

Don't worry though, they have high-viz vests so they're clearly safety conscious.

If they were employees and shared liability with FedEx these issues might not exist. But they do exist, and if Amazon can do no worse it'll be a wash for pedestrians and cyclists. At least in this part of Floriduh.

tl;dw: people think they're going to be "Amazon Business Partners" more like you're another cost center being squeezed as much as possible

Cool, thanks, but I really didn't need or expect it that fast, and I kinda feel bad for whoever may have had to work extra to get me my Friday order on Sunday...

In the UK Second Class post is just held back a bit. It isn't like it gets sent by pack horse instead of by truck.

Now you are a good sort, but your neighbour might be on the phone to them on Sunday evening saying 'I ordered this Friday, moan, moan, moan...' if it was not delivered so promptly. This would incur 20 to 30 minutes of customer service time and could possibly lose them as a customer, for them to write negative reviews and bad mouth the company.

It is less work to do deliveries really promptly and have no queue to manage. Don't feel bad for the people that work to achieve this, imagine how much more miserable they would be if they had a backlog, a veritable mountain of stuff to deliver on Monday, for them to not get it all done and to be going home fretting about it.

I am no fan of Amazon but I can see what they are doing.

I wonder if Amazon is preemptively competing with AliExpress, Alibaba, etc. Once people realize you can get stuff _even_cheaper_ from the Chinese version of Amazon it's going to be really tempting to go there instead. Pretty much the only advantage Amazon has is that they're state-side and can compete on ridiculous speed (which is gonna be really tough for people on other continents to do)

For me it was when they had to solder in the ram. As soon as you can't fix or change your own device, it's a device i don't want to own.

I got a call once from a Amazon guys saying he had my package, I went down to the lobby to see he was basically unloading a pallet of packages in our fancy lobby. Needless to say our logistics team has tried to work with Amazon to get stuff delivered right, but we still seem to have issues.

I asked them about never sending me something with Amazon logistics again and they indicated that they flipped a flag to remove it as a shipping method.

Is this accurate?

I was reading reviews of the Game Boy Micro a few years ago (written when the Game Boy Micro was released in the early 2000s). Many described the product as "as small as a cell phone". I found this funny—it's significantly smaller than smartphones today—including the original iPhone, by the way, which wasn't small when it came out.

I'd say the trend has been towards larger phones as we've begun to use them more and more. If you use something most of your day, you don't mind so much if takes up more pocket space.

You may be right in terms of thickness, although I think it's too early to call that a trend.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f7/35/1d/f7351d374bbbb01da339...

Blackberries were never that small, and weren't trending downwards in a significant way.

Probably in the early 2000's when small equaled good.

My wife had an LG phone that was so small it fit in the palm of my hand with my fingers closed. Sony sold a phone so small that it had a boom mic that swung down a couple of inches to pick up your voice.

I had a SonyEricsson t68i that was 4" x 1¾" x ¾": https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_t68i-325.php

I currently own a phone so small that it doesn't even have a keyboard[0]. When they get the thing to fit in my ear, then I'll start to worry that they're getting too small.

I'm being just a bit facetious, but in seriousness if voice-controlled AI can improve a bit, size might cease to be an issue.

[0] Apple Watch, and the only thing keeping from just ditching the phone is a. battery life b. Apple's use case they designed for is not "ditch the phone".

I think they are optimizing for cost/customer satisfaction, not speed.

Ha! I'm pretty sure they're optimizing for cost and precisely as much customer dissatisfaction that customers can take before they leave for competitors. My experiences with Amazon Logistics have not been good. Their processes and staff are inferior to USPS and UPS at least.