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This sort of thing happens all the time at the apartment complex I live in (in the South Bay Area, California). We have an outdoor "mail room" with an automated package locker. I'm not sure if the package locker is usually full or simply hard for drivers to use, but often the delivery drivers will just leave a pile of like 30-50 packages next to it. Honestly, I don't blame the drivers in the slightest. If I were treated the way they were treated and paid what they were paid, I wouldn't care about doing my job the right way either. Hell, they're so monitored by algorithms and surveillance devices that they probably don't have time to do it the right way even if they wanted to. Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job. This is Amazon/Bezos' fault, not the driver's. |
What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing?
I know Amazon already don't bother to process their own returns, instead selling those off in bulk lots for potentially far below the market value of the items (sort of like creditors selling off bad debts rather than trying to collect on them themselves.)
Both situations suggest a paradigm where human labor is by far the most expensive part of any logistics process, such that margin can always be increased simply by replacing workflows that involve even a little bit of human labor with fully-mechanized/externalized workflows, even when that brings service quality down.