edit: so #girl of me to post this right before I had to go AFK for like 3 hours
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Yes I've already done a pee bottle
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It's not technically Amazon, it's a DSP (delivery service provider) that owns a fleet (tho in my case part of the fleet is also rented) and employs the drivers. I don't actually know if Amazon directly hires any drivers themselves; all of them seem to work for various 3rd party DSPs
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Overall it Sux but not as much as I thought it might but also I'm a worm and will tolerate a lot of things + I'm still new
Yes I’ve already done a pee bottle
Is this like normalized, is the deadline really that demanding?
In my case it wasn't really about the deadline so much as I'm delivering in the center of a residential block and having to leave it, find a 7-Eleven or something, park a bigass van without windows, use the restroom, then get back to my route. It takes a lot of time and breaks my flow and it's a lot easier to just pee in one of the many empty bottles I have because I drink a lot
Edit: and yes it's completely normalized the boss even told us not to leave pee bottles in our vans after our shift in a "come on man" kinda way rather than a "this is unacceptable and you're gonna be fired" way
Then the truck will end up smelling like piss and shit.
Also bathroom breaks should be built-in, and there should be a way to hit (find me a place to bathroom/urgency) to find a place that has a restroom/parking as close to the route as possible, so like if you need a bathroom in 20-30 vs NOW. Or also simply having indexes of good starbucks/711/spots to use.
There is also the fact that this is a consequence of the LONG routes a lot of these places use.
Landscaping was similar for me.
Actually, going out on a tree crew to drag brush (to the chipper) was good, because tons of guys took shits in the back of the chip trucks lol, so it was a porta-shitter as long as there was room for you to stand in the back
But only tree crews had that luxury, everything else was “hold it or find somewhere to slink off to”
It’s not technically Amazon, it’s a DSP (delivery service provider) that owns a fleet (tho in my case part of the fleet is also rented) and employs the drivers. I don’t actually know if Amazon directly hires any drivers themselves; all of them seem to work for various 3rd party DSPs
I worked at an Amazon warehouse years ago and it was the same thing, you didn't work at Amazon until they wanted you, instead you worked via 3rd party
Is this an anti-union thing? Decentralize out the labor so it's harder to organize? And I'm guessing reduce their overhead /liability but yeah
They hire directly at the one I work at but idk nationally. Straight to blue badge too.
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I mean they hired me so clearly they're desperate for employees :p
jokes aside, IDK. This facility only opened a year or two ago, so I think everyone who works there started after COVID and the whole thing kicked off...
Do you have a quota on how many packages you gotta deliver per shift? If so what happens if you don't? Do they give you a device that times you? Has anything interesting/fun happened to you so far? What's a question you'd want to answer no one is probably will guess to ask?
Do they give you a device that times you?
So besides the delivery van itself, like 90% of my job involves interacting with "the rabbit" (no, not that kind, though I did make that joke several times during training). It's just a smartphone (Moto G Powers in our case, lower end phones with large screens and battery capacity) in a rugged case.
It's used for a few apps, mainly Flex. This is the same app used by Amazon Flex drivers (literally just delivering packages from your personal automobile like doordash), but since I guess our accounts are registered as DSPs, we have additional functionality. The daily workflow goes like this:
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sign in
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a pre-shift vehicle inspection checklist that we're told to just skip through because they have their own mechanic taking care of stuff off the books
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drive from the fleet parking lot to the delivery warehouse, where the app will tell you where the cart already loaded with your packages will be (the Staging Area)
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load your van; most stuff comes in large square "totes" full of envelopes/small boxes. The totes have numbers on the side, and the app will tell you the order you'll be delivering in (so you can place the earliest ones on your route closer to the bulkhead, etc) as you scan the QR code on each tote with the rabbit. There's also "overflow", large/heavy loose boxes that you kinda just tetris in the best you can. There are big yellow stickers with a code on them that correspond to codes on the totes, so you can learn to put them roughly in order like you do with the totes, but I haven't had time to figure that all out yet.
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drive to your delivery locations; the Flex app has its own GPS navigation, but it uses a non-google map provider and often times sucks, doing things like counting 2 houses that are a fair distance from one another as a single stop, but then telling you the next stop is the house next to the very first one that you don't need to drive to. Also fun when it says there are multiple "stops" inside the same building, meaning you have to manually check so you don't do some deliveries, return to your van, and be told your next stop is the building you just came from again...
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anyway the app tells you what tote the packages for this stop are in (or which overflow packages you need), and you scan each package with your rabbit before leaving the van (helpful to have an IKEA bag if you have a bunch of small envelopes, or a dolly if you have large/heavy overflow).
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drop the packages off at the doorstep, including apartment doorsteps in buildings. Also, we're not allowed to use US Mail mailboxes, and really aren't supposed to throw them over locked gates or leave them in lobby mailrooms unless we've tried to contact the customer several times and there's no other way, so
CONSUMER PRO TIP: if you order shit from Amazon, and you live in anything except a single family home with a publically accessible front door/porch, PLEASE GIVE US CLEAR, SPECIFIC DELIVERY INSTRUCTIONS! "OK to place item inside gate if it's locked" would save us a few minutes trying to call you, for example. If you're at one end of a hall in an apartment building, tell us which way to go as we get off the elevator, cause a lot of places don't have signs telling us which direction the suite # we need is.
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return to the van, check our next location, and go there. repeat until
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after you're done with your route, you contact dispatch and see if they need you to help someone else out or other special instructions, then fuel up with the DSP's fleet card, and head back to the warehouse for debriefing, sign out, drop the van at the lot, put the keys in a lockbox, and clock out.
There's also the Mentor app in the background; it tracks and grades your driving habits (hard acceleration/braking, speeding, etc) and is the most annoying fucking thing on the planet.
The rabbit is also used for texting/calling dispatchers, fellow drivers, etc, and there's a workplace app (Sling) where we get our schedules, and have chat channels where we get our van assignments for the day and leave each other hints about access codes to problematic buildings, public porta potty locations, etc). However, we mostly use Sling on our personal phones, since we need to sign out of the rabbit at the end of each shift and are assigned a possibly different one next time.
Do you have a quota on how many packages you gotta deliver per shift?
Yes; our route is assigned to us based on Da Algorithm; all our packages are pre-sorted and prepared to be loaded, and the app will guide you to each stop in a predetermined order. In a perfect world, it would do things like "account for businesses that might close before your ETA based on the route calculations", or "incorporate traffic signals and traffic itself into the estimates for drive times", but it still generally assigns you about as many packages as it thinks you can deliver in your shift.
If so what happens if you don’t?
If Da Algorith tells the dispatchers you're falling behind, and they have another driver available (either as a dedicated Rescuer or someone else who finished their route early), they'll send them to "rescue" you by taking some of your packages and delivering them themselves. I assume if you need large rescues often, they'll start prodding you to pick up the pace, but rescues of 15% or less are totally fine and basically ignored.
Da Algorithm's supposed to account for this too, and give shorter routes to slower drivers, so you're more or less incentivized not to rush. However, the DSP offers "efficiency bonuses" for drivers who do full routes quickly; I was told top drivers end up making $24+ an hour (for reference, the base wage is 16.25), but I'm not sure if that means "being paid for 8 hours even if you finish in 5, meaning you effectively worked 5 hours @ $24/h, instead of 8 @ 16.25", or if it's "we'll pay you $24/h AND count the shift as lasting 8 hours even tho you left after 5"
Has anything interesting/fun happened to you so far?
I've seen some cool cars delivering to both the richer parts of town and auto body shops. Also a few kitties!! One of em let me come right up to it and pet it. Also I got a dimly lit, maze-like apartment building, empty halls lined with broken drywall and exposed pipes, and it was like I was delivering in Silent Hill or some shit.
What’s a question you’d want to answer no one is probably will guess to ask?
No, my boss is not a MILF, tho some of my coworkers are cute
(serious answer, "what're the driver demos"; I'm in Los Angeles, and 80% of the drivers seem to be latinx, and like 15% southeast Asian people, including my boss. I'm one of like maybe 4 whiteys there. Also 90% of the workers (drivers + dispatchers) appear to be under 30, but the bosses are both at least 40)
The multi-house = one stop thing is intentional to make getting the good grades harder. No way it isn't.
I also am mad that they are expecting you to deliver to Apartment units in buildings. Here it's "Try getting it into the lobby and buzz the unit." as NO ONE INVOLVED wants people wandering around looking for the right unit, simply being in a place where it can't be stolen with no effort is enough for apartment living.
The stop problems are avoidable with foresight and experience but yeah there's no way to manually mark mistakes/corrections in the map software
And you'd be surprised. Intra-building porch pirates are apparently a thing, since even people in gated communities and secured buildings complain about them. not sure what they expect us to do about it though since there's nowhere to really hide a package near the door in an unfurnished hallway
That is what security cameras are for. Porch pirates in my complex are much easier to deal with than strangers. As most of the problem is “who the fuck was that?” If you could track them through the complex to home, it’s a lot easier to deal with.
our route is assigned to us based on Da Algorithm
is that an Amazon algorithm or is it whatever company you work for's?
Amazon's; the DSP tells us they can't control who gets assigned what route, or how many routes get assigned each week
they exist only to cash their middleman check, they have no operational independence
That's not completely fair. They also exist to shield the megacorporations using them from liability in the event of an oopsie.
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Do they track how much time you take on a delivery? And do you get warned if you take more?
Absolutely yes at the first part, they track everything. It's sinister and paranoia-inducing but also is kinda cool to see my deliveries on a line graph vs the "expected" deliveries/hour. I don't think they care if one specific delivery takes a while if that's what you're asking though; stopping for a house without a gate obviously takes much less time than the 4th floor of a gated apartment building .
For the second part, IDK, I'm still on "nursery routes" (basically shorter, though certainly not easier cause they sent me to the fucking mountains on my first day driving) so they account for the fact that I'll be slower than an experienced driver. For my DSP, they have "rescue routes" where they send dedicated drivers, or those who finished their own routes early, to pick up packages from people who are falling behind for whatever reason. Helpful, but also kinda annoying/humiliating when I got some packages taken from me that I know I would've delivered just fine by myself [and I'm still paid for the hour rather than the shift, so fewer deliveries also means fewer billable hours lol].
be aware they intentionally “gameify” things so you feel motivated to be more productive for that dopamine hit speed runners/gamers get when they do well/pb
As a devoted gamer I see right through it, and my shitty weak body couldn't push itself much even if I wanted to anyway
What's the turnover like?
Have you gotten any readout on the class consciousness of your coworkers?
