Same here, just last week. He politely told me that he could hand it to me, but then I'd need to sign for it. If he put it on the front step, he could just take a picture.

I opted to just let him continue his normal routine. Undoubtedly faster than doing a one-off signature because I happened to be standing out in front of my house.

I think the requirement is basically only in areas that have high rates of people complaining about things not turning up, and even then, Amazon doesn't really seem to care.

For a while, my home had very poor labeling of its address on the building, and getting anything delivered was always a crapshoot of drivers giving up and just picking a random location to leave it instead. They would happily take photos of them having left it at a home that was not mine, not remotely mistakable for mine, and Amazon didn't treat that any differently from the cases where there were no photos at all.

It's very driver dependent. Sometimes I'll get the super professional, uniformed delivery driver driving a marked van who seems to actually care about doing a good job at his job. Other times it'll be the guy in jeans and a t-shirt who throws the package on to the porch from 8 feet away before going back to their nearly broken down white rental van. Both get the picture before leaving though.

My guess is one of two things, either Amazon contracts out overflow work, or some of the contracting companies have high employment standards and some don't.

This comment and sibling comments read like bizarro world for me. I've never seen anything close to this level of attention to detail.

I've had my packaged signed for by "mailbox". This is practically the default message for me.

I've been on vacation and seen "Handed directly to a resident". Which would be more disturbing if I didn't already know the whole system was broken. In this case, the package was sitting on the front steps.

(Edit: These are all Amazon branded van deliveries, fwiw).