
How Amazon Hooked America on Fast Delivery, Avoiding Responsibility for Crashes - hhs
https://features.propublica.org/amazon-delivery-crashes/how-amazon-hooked-america-on-fast-delivery-while-avoiding-responsibility-for-crashes/
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flaviu1
I'm not really impressed by this article. The two main points:

> An investigation by ProPublica identified more than 60 accidents since June
> 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious
> injuries, including 10 deaths

A better investigation would count the number of miles traveled and compare
the rate to the general population. Driving is the most dangerous thing most
people do: 37k people died on the road in 2017.

I'd like to see actual numbers here--driving is an inherently dangerous
activity, and therefore needs to be looked at through statistics, not
character pieces (like this article does).

> citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify
> and hold harmless Amazon.”

This sounds pretty standard. However, if this is the case, then

> often Amazon directs, through an app, the order of the deliveries and the
> route to each destination

seems like it may be a problem. Either the contractors have the autonomy to do
things like they need to to stay safe, or Amazon should take that liability
themselves.

~~~
smt88
> _A better investigation would count the number of miles traveled and compare
> the rate to the general population. Driving is the most dangerous thing most
> people do: 37k people died on the road in 2017._

The alternative to Amazon's delivery contractors is not civilian drivers, so
that comparison wouldn't be interesting.

The comparison should be against small-to-medium delivery trucks, as used by
UPS, FedEx, and USPS.

~~~
jessaustin
Lots of stuff that I get from Amazon I otherwise would have gotten by driving
to the store.

~~~
twothamendment
Yes - this.

I live an hour from Costco and Wal-Mart. I've gotten over the "guilt" of
having Jermey, the UPS guy, bring packages to my door. In the weeks where I
don't have something delivered he is driving right past my house - and I'm
kinda in the middle of nowhere. It isn't uncommon for him to hit at least 2
houses out of the dozen or so that are past me.

If I (and everyone in the area) decided to drive an hour to get to a "real"
city with stores, there would be so many more cars on the road. Why not let
the big brown truck bring them to our area?

~~~
smt88
> _Why not let the big brown truck bring them to our area?_

The article and controversy are explicitly about how Amazon has been replacing
the big brown truck with dozens of private vehicles, most of them the size of
cargo vans or smaller.

People were not accusing Amazon of causing congestion before, when they were
exclusively using UPS, USPS, and FedEx.

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egdod
> An investigation by ProPublica identified more than 60 accidents since June
> 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious
> injuries, including 10 deaths.

Is that supposed to sound like a lot? Amazon delivers a staggering number of
packages.

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lutorm
This "contractor" thing has to be shut down. If someone gets all their work
from amazon and is told by amazon when, how, and where to deliver packages,
they're not contractors. It's just a completely transparent attempt to
externalize costs and liabilities.

~~~
ballark
Are you going to legislate away all contractor work? Because every medium to
large company and even government agencies utilize contractors.

You can't build and develop subject matter expertise on everything. And
besides that, contractors are often used to scale when you have demand that
you can't necessarily meet with your current capabilities.

I guess I don't understand how your "solution" to this problem scales to the
regulatory world outside of Amazon.

~~~
lutorm
That's not even nearly what I said. I said that if someone is consistently
told how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear, then they're an
employee.

If, on the other hand, they're asked to do something and have the freedom to
set the price for the task, to accept or reject the task as they see fit, and
perform it at a time, place, and manner of their choosing, and they perform
this task for several different clients, then it's perfectly reasonable to
consider them a contractor. Which pretty much is what the IRS says, as well,
as linked by jcranmer above.

~~~
tracer4201
I contracted for 8 years in the energy industry. How, when, where, and what
were standard requirements defined by the company I worked at. The main
difference day to day was I didn’t attend some company town halls or have
access to the wellness facilities.

Are you proposing a massive overhaul to the legal framework around contractors
or just wanting to target Amazon?

~~~
lutorm
No, but I think you and the other commenter would not have been allowed to be
contractors if the IRS rules were actually enforced. Have you read them?

------
issa
Pretty sure this same argument was made against 30 minute pizza delivery in
the past. And I think most pizza companies made changes due to accidents (or
risk thereof). Something tells me a 16 year old pizza delivery person was much
more dangerous than an amazon delivery driver. Purely based on how my friends
and I drove when we were 16.

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astura
>Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, is famously secretive about details of
its operations, including the scale of its delivery network.

Amazon is really the world’s largest retailer? I thought that was Walmart.

Turns out they surpassed Walmart a couple months ago.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2019/05/15/worlds-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2019/05/15/worlds-
largest-retailers-2019-amazon-walmart-alibaba/)

~~~
hnburnsy
No Walmart had three time the retail sales of Amazon in 2018.

[https://stores.org/stores-top-retailers-2019/](https://stores.org/stores-top-
retailers-2019/)

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SamReidHughes
This article is mixing together car accidents and wage disputes to create the
impression people aren’t getting compensated for accidents, by, e.g., car
insurance companies.

~~~
smt88
> _people aren’t getting compensated for accidents, by, e.g., car insurance
> companies_

Car insurance doesn't cover 100% of costs. There's the deductible and, for
many low-income drivers, the cost of lawsuits. A fully-loaded insurance plan
is pretty expensive, and the unit economics likely doesn't work for a lot of
these people unless they're insured with the bare minimum.

That idea does fit into the low-wage argument, because you're creating a race-
to-the-bottom market among your delivery drivers such that the ones who want
proper insurance aren't able to compete on price with the ones who are willing
to take risks.

------
esotericn
Anecdotally when I lived in London Amazon delivery drivers always seemed super
stressed. Like they had way too many deliveries to make in too little time.

It confuses me because it doesn't feel like deliveries would be that much more
expensive if they were given say 20-30% more buffer.

Delivery drivers don't get paid much, and last mile doesn't make up all of the
delivery cost anyway.

It almost feels as if a piecework pay model would work better because it would
give the individuals the ability to decide that making $N an hour and taking
their time is better than $N*1.2 and playing race car driver, running up
stairs, getting signatures in 0.1 seconds etc.

Whilst a target based model is basically 'rush fast or get sacked'.

~~~
greeneggs
It isn't so simple. As a manager, it is easy to incentivize "deliver as many
packages as you can" (e.g., pay per package). It is not so easy to incentivize
"deliver 83%[=1/1.2] as many packages as you can."

Furthermore, people always optimize what can be measured, and measuring safe
driving, on a day-to-day basis, is harder than measuring number of deliveries
(not impossible, maybe, but much harder---also less transparent, easier to
game, more intrusive).

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elandrum
I’m not hooked. In fact, I think it’s kind of obnoxious how much effort they
put into getting me stuff so fast. If there was a “slow ship” button for
Prime, I’d do it almost every time. I also don’t need notifications of it
being “almost here! Watch it on a map!” Completely useless information for
most of my orders.

~~~
skellera
As mentioned, there is a button to ship it slower where they usually give you
$1 or so for a digital purchase.

I think they slow it down by packing it up with other orders along the way
which is more efficient yet slower to deliver.

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aknoob
A bit off track but here in India I see, all sorts of negligence shown by
delivery guys of almost all delivery companies - Swiggy, Zomato, Uber Eats,
etc. Even cab drivers of Ola, Uber are reckless. It is high time these
companies start taking accountability.

~~~
distant_hat
I worked with routing in a logistics company in India. The whole last mile
delivery had so many special cases that we stopped trying to model them all.
Drivers would take routes to avoid cops, or go toward a cop they knew (they
had paid off in the past). Drivers would not go into each others' territories
(so 2 drivers working for the same company would not deliver if their areas
overlapped). For delivery people on 2-wheelers, all road rules were optional.
They would go down wrong way on one-way roads etc. (we could track them, we
called them 'dirty routes'). Drivers would prefer their own routes even when
we gave better routes. Sometimes better was vaguely defined, since we might
think this route save 10% time so is better, and he might think my favorite
paan shop is on that route, so the other route is better.

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jumpman_miya
I fail to see why Amazon should be held liable in the cited accidents. A truck
driver plowing into the back of a jeep killing a 9 month old in a car seat?
That's 100% on the driver. Article refers to the truck driver with "he was
running late and failed to spot the Jeep in time to avoid the crash".

I can see liability with things like Domino's back in the day, guaranteeing
delivery in 30 min or less or something. They had to stop because their
drivers were getting into wrecks left and right. But those drivers were
employed by Domino's sent out for delivery from a Domino's store. These are
third-party logistics companies. Why wouldn't they be held liable?

~~~
jurassic
These "contractor" drivers are misclassified employees who are not trained to
the safety standard of logistics providers like FedEx and UPS.

~~~
djsumdog
and FedEx/UPS have insurance that can deal with these situations. Here Amazon
is pushing the liability down to smaller companies who could easily fold if
their insurance premiums starts to go up. Amazon will then just move on to the
next contracting company that tries to push it's way in on tight margins.

