[lozenge]

> 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?

It's not. Delivery works with a hub and spoke model. Simply get it back to the nearest local distribution point and it will be dealt with.

However, the loss just isn't tracked by Amazon. "Unable to recover packages due to atrocious processes" will be indistinguishable in their reporting to "van flooded/burnt, packages lost". So they don't see the problem and can't see any reason to fix it.

How I can tell - the customer service couldn't even figure out how much the packages were worth. No cost benefit calculation was performed.

[kube-system]

Cost isn’t necessarily linear with complexity. And customer service wouldn’t be the ones tasked with those calculations. Amazon knows how many packages they lose in delivery once the intended recipient notifies them as such.