You can only squeeze people so far until they finally step away. The only reason it's being sustained is that people don't have alternative options in many cases and are esentially forced to do it. At some point people will find other options and leave you on your feet but as long as there's a steady stream of desperate people ready to be subjugated to ridiculous working conditions, this will continue.

What about customers? They seem to be happy to ignore how the sausage is made, to have stuff delivered to their doorsteps cheap and fast.

It's made me deprioritize Amazon when it comes to my online shopping.

"We don't like being a customer of the company that clubs baby seals but our customers would leave us if we didn't use the company that clubs baby seals so I guess we should pay up for some more clubs."

It's a pretty glaring example that "free markets" usually aren't, and often unrelated to government intervention. You have information, you have agency, and you have the thing that the other party wants (money), yet you don't feel free to move away from a supplier who you clearly view as unsuitable[0] because that supplier has gained a market position so dominant through exploiting others.

0 - If I am reading too much into your comment, I apologize and don't mean to put words into your mouth.

Well, you can buy it from one of those 'green energy' companies... I dislike the marketing a lot (as though it isn't fungible and you are somehow getting different, greener electricity piped to you than your neighbour) but it does work in the sense that you can shift the needle by buying your (essentially just as not-green as if you paid (less to) anyone else) electricity from someone who has whatever commitment to fund green projects or buy the 'green wholesale' stuff or however it works.

(Not that I do that.)

The budget for one company I worked at's infra -- 4 full racks in two datacenters with power, network, and a dedicated site-to-site between them was $200k over five years plus $3k/mo ongoing costs. The upfront cost was tiny tiny -- they started with a router, two switches and 4 used supermicro blades. That lasted them the first 4 years of their startup. It took two FTEs to manage the full infra and provide a PaaS style thing to the developers.

Curious if you or someone else can expound further on this?

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581797

I called Amazon and they of course speak of them like they are some completely separate affiliate that has nothing to do with them. This is despite the fact they say Amazon and deliver only Amazon packages.

That's entirely the point: create a policy to cover your ass, put some schmuck under so much pressure that he's forced to violate it, then blame the schmuck when there's pushback (and try to present yourself as the good guy in the process).

This by design:

Amazon has repeatedly said in court that it is not responsible for the actions of its contractors, citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify and hold harmless Amazon.” Just last week, an operations manager for Amazon testified in Chicago that it signs such agreements with all its “delivery service partners,” who assume the liability and the responsibility for legal costs. The agreements cover “all loss or damage to personal property or bodily harm including death.”

Amazon vigilantly enforces the terms of those agreements. In New Jersey, when a contractor’s insurer failed to pay Amazon’s legal bills in a suit brought by a physician injured in a crash, Amazon sued to force the insurer to pick up the tab. In California, the company sued contractors, telling courts that any damages arising from crashes there should be billed to the delivery companies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/amazon-delivery-driver...

The whole article was pretty shocking to read. I rarely, if ever buy stuff on Amazon now that I know how they've attempted to wall themselves off from responsibility of what happens with these companies.

The issue here is that Amazon is very strictly controlling the drivers, without (directly) employing them. By gig-economy voodoo they try to have it both ways.

Why? Is this just an assertion that there is no difference between big and small things, and that a single mistake is the same as building your business model on mistakes?

So please take up any complaints with your service with them and not our restaurant.

If you think that Amazon should be liable for the actions of their contracted drivers, you would likewise be liable for burning down and destroying your neighbor's houses.

I don't tell the contractor working on my house what tools to use, and the contractor working on my house has other customers besides me.

The Amazon delivery "contractors", though, do do all of the above.

40 packages per hour or 90s per package. No wonder the drivers pee in bottles and work unpaid overtime to keep their jobs.

Even if you lack empathy about the situation of the drivers, the choices Amazon makes can impact you or someone you love and care about very quickly.

It fits with the larger trend of corporations privitizing more profits at the expense of society as a whole.

I mean, sure, people are more likely to die in car accidents, but on the bright side Amazon can run more of their competitors out of business by driving down delivery costs! Great...

There’s a probability of an accident happening. And a probability of it causing a lawsuit and a probability of Amazon having to pay a settlement and a calculation of what that cost is compared to the savings of overtaxing drivers.

Bezos’ background at a hedge fund seems highly relevant to all this.

There's a difference between destroying someone's stuff because you hate your job and just not caring about someone's stuff because you want your job.

Because you need your job, even. It's not just a want.

Yes, obviously both the boss and the enforcer are bad for doing harmful things with an evil mind. That's just not the same as apathy.

What is the difference, when you said you destroyed the packages in each case?

Tossing a cardboard box just doesn't do much the majority of the time.

I've seen so many packages where the box is two sizes too big, and then a smattering of air pillows is added, leaving most of the space empty.

In cities, an Amazon delivery driver might be delivering 5, 10, or 20 packages to the same building.

And in those areas where Amazon is using its own delivery network, UPS packages (non-Amazon) will be far fewer -- often just 1 or a couple or none per day.

So it's not crazy. The Amazon driver might be elivering far more packages but making fewer stops. Also, a lot of those packages are the little white-and-blue padded envelopes, almost more like large letters than packages.

But 200-300% efficiency gains over businesses that have been profitably providing this service for years? Its exceptional enough to warrant being called crazy at first glance.

From the article,

"The two Portland delivery companies are demanding a cap at 250 packages and 150 stops per 8.5 hour route"

Which seems to indicate that they realize that some bundling will occur and accept it as long as there is an upper bounds on both metrics.

In the end a great deal of it comes down to volume per delivery location. If UPS is delivering 1 package per day per location, there's nothing they can do to optimize (except skip locations certain days, which nobody wants). It sucks for them.

Then Amazon comes along with 5 packages per day per location, and it changes the economics completely. By 200-300% is not unreasonable at all.

There's a fact that blew my mind when I first learned it -- that apparently UPS actually loses money delivering packages for Amazon, but makes more profit in the end because the added scale makes it even cheaper to deliver packages for other people. E.g., if it's already dropping off an Amazon package at a location, then it's suddenly much cheaper to drop off the non-Amazon package at the same time.

Then again my monkey brain sucks at statistics and considering the last year or so of my own home usage it is probably close to 1-to-1. And we try to avoid Amazon. So probably a lot closer to those numbers above than I'm comfortable to admit.

Probably not higher than 85% though. And of the rest, the next biggest category is packages from clothing stores like J. Crew, Nike, Madewell, etc.

(Also this isn't including groceries or DoorDash, just talking about traditional packages.)

As with most things like this, the numbers seem scary until you peel back the layers. Not a pass to Amazon as the rest of the article is damning in its own right, but a little less crazy than my initial thoughts.

Do you have any source for this? It seems like a really weird assumption to make, especially given that Amazon will already bundle multiple orders into the same package.

The 400 package number from the article is also specifically cited from this company and we have no idea whether that is a nationwide figure while the UPS comment implies that it is.

But you're still just making an assumption with 0 evidence. I would love to see a distribution of how common multi-package deliveries are, but we don't have that information, and I highly suspect that it's overwhelmingly one package per delivery.

It seems like an exceptionally bad assumption that Amazon is regularly shipping 3-4 items individually rather than bundling them up. After all, they are basically a logistics company at this point.

If we're just making assumptions here, you may as well assume that most Amazon deliveries are to apartment buildings, where the driver just leaves everything at the front desk, there are 200 packagers per delivery, and the driver is only making 2 stops per day.

Also, Amazon has a large number of different warehouses that products are shipped from, and it's quite common for different items/orders to not ship together either for that reason or because some items' availability would slow down the others.

That’s not always been my experience. Just last week, I had three separate orders, all made on the same day, arrive in three separate packages.

Amazon can pick and choose where they have contractors make deliveries (e.g. non rural areas with higher population densities). UPS serves almost everywhere. Additionally, we don't know what hours UPS drivers work in comparison to Amazon drivers.

Anyway, that's what cheap labour does, it leads to stagnation. Why invest in to improve the state of the art when you can throw more bodies at the problem?

There's also the other problem: Jeff Bezos strip-mines the workforce and takes the gains to Washington. Meanwhile his underpaid employees can't invest in their own communities.

Heck, I’ll do one better. Why not pick 1890?

“Workers should be paid less today than in 1969” is a sort of crazy thing to say out loud, but here we are.

That seems like tortured analysis. If you take 1989 which was 20 years after your date, the minimum wage adjusted for today would be $6.78.

And there is no reason whatsoever that pay has ever been or should be tied to productivity. Humans haven't evolved to become better or faster or more adept in a workplace. We have technology. I don't see why I should pay employees more than before because simply because I also invested in some technology that makes allows them to get more work done with less effort. I see no logic in that at all.

"Humans haven't evolved to become better", and neither have CEOs, even though their pay has soared.

As far as "should," yeah, I think pay ought to be on that level. I think it would probably lead to faster growth.

The only tortured analysis is the idea that workers, who are trained for and use more advanced technology, should not get paid according to the productivity they bring in, but their bosses (who didn't invent that technology) should. There's no logic there, either. It's just bargaining power. And if you (as a--hypothetical?--employer) see no reason whatsoever that workers should be paid more when their productivity is higher is exactly why we need a minimum wage to require it.