I only have praise for UPS and FedEx, their employees are great and I happily use both of them as applicable.
USPS employees are clearly more cheerful in the countryside, the guys working in the cities have "dead fish" eyes with no light.
Something I would suggest to everyone: Get friendly with your drivers. Greet them with a smile and thank them for their work; simple signs of appreciation might seem small but they go a long way. Exchange some jokes and make small talk if they are the social type. If they look tired, see if they want a can of coca-cola or something; ask if they want to borrow the restroom if you have one available for guest use. Make sure any pet(s) don't get in the way of your drivers.
To those who ship stuff out frequently: Ask your drivers if there's anything you can do beforehand to make their work easier; things like attaching/inserting shipping documents a certain way, writing the tracking number on the box somewhere, etc.
To those who ship/receive high volumes: Help your drivers with loading and unloading if they're okay with it. Being a deliveryman is back breaking work, so most drivers really appreciate having extra sets of hands.
We're all human, so for better or worse we're all going to treat friends better than strangers. Becoming friends with your drivers is important for everyone involved with your packages.
I lived in a neighborhood where we could keep our garage open without fear of theft for a while, and we ended up keeping a mini fridge plugged in with water and red bulls and stuff for the delivery folks.
it took a little while before they trusted it (understandably), but it caught on after a bit and really made for some great moments. We became pretty close with some of the folks on our route. The red bull was far and away the most popular but buying in bulk made it affordable.
Fast forward, I've made a series of purchases on Ali Express and they've all started getting returned; turns out whatever system they were using screwed up our address on like six packages. I mentioned the trouble to my USPS person who we'd become familiar with due to the fridge - she asks me for the tracking numbers and said she'll see what she can do.
She saved something like $350 Worth of packages that would have just been lost to the aether.
> I mentioned the trouble to my USPS person who we'd become familiar with due to the fridge - she asks me for the tracking numbers and said she'll see what she can do.
Unrelated to providing snacks/drinks - I find USPS support to be absolutely stellar. The amount of effort they've gone through for us to track down packages in the past is amazing.
The other day I had a visit from a USPS worker who noted that one of their delivery drivers' scanner had died while performing their duties and a package meant for us had not been scanned. They were simply following up to make sure the package had actually been delivered.
I often pray for anyone working on my behalf, and that certainly includes delivery drivers, food processors and subcontractors. I want their work to be safe, light and joyful.
Obviously there are some HN readers that will detest this suggestion, but for those who believe, please save a word or two for them.
My zip code is one of the worst in the country for USPS, neighbors go without mail for weeks or even months at a time, constantly losing packages too. Eventually I was fed up so decided to try building a relationship with the carrier, just the occasional smile and acknowledgment at first, mail service improved so much that I now throw them $20 for christmas every year. Really unfortunate that I need to bribe my mail carrier to get reasonable service, but it's absolutely worth it to me, and it definitely makes their day a bit better too which can't be bad.
UPS has not kept up with the modern concept of B2C shipping (I'm in Canada, maybe it's different elsewhere). If I understand correctly, legacy shippers like them and fedex have global networks and are well positioned to ship spoke to spoke if you can call it that. But they're getting their grass cut by the amazon centric couriers (ours is called intelecom) that focus on hub to home delivery.
I've had nothing but problems with UPS actually delivering stuff to my house, and the idea of driving to an industrial park to pick up a package at a shipping center is a joke. I've had no problems with the amazon couriers.
I assume this is on the back of the employees. And I support a model where I pay the true cost of delivering stuff, meaning appropriate pay for delivery workers.
But I think the writing is on the wall for UPS and other legacy carriers, and a strike is only going to accelerate that. They've already lost the goodwill of the public. Most won't even notice if the rest of their business goes to the Amazon focused couriers.
The problem is what it will do to the broader shipping networks. Presumably without ups, shipping will get even more expensive and have worse service for smaller businesses
To me Amazon delivery people are a menace. I have seen them take out garbage cans and mailboxes in feats of horrible driving. They will park on dangerous blind curves. They will block small but important local roads. They hop out of their driver’s side of their vans right into traffic.
I live in a small rural town and the Amazon delivery model endangers residents and our roads. Every town in my State (NJ) is on high alert that an Amazon warehouse is going to sneak into our neighborhood.
I hope government wakes up to how screwed up and dangerous Amazon’s model really is.
> I hope government wakes up to how screwed up and dangerous Amazon’s model really is.
The amazon model isn't to drive horribly and park badly. They just pay too little and try to insulate themselves from accountability by hiring contractors while overworking their drivers to the extent that they have to piss in bottles to get through a shift without being punished.
Have you complained to anyone about the problem you've seen with drivers? Called the police? UPS, Fedex, and USPS can have the same problems when it comes to bad/overworked/inconsiderate drivers. Governments just have to do better at holding companies accountable for the behavior of the drivers working on their behalf.
> The amazon model isn't to drive horribly and park badly. They just pay too little and try to insulate themselves from accountability by hiring contractors while overworking their drivers
These are not mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary, I would say they're precisely equivalent.
If you cannot give people an appropriate workload to do a good job, and they'd end up homeless if they quit, then the result is that they will do a bad job.
And the reason it's the most profitable model, is that they've insulated themselves from accountability, and everyone else pays for the negative externalities of crashes and such.
We are a town of around 6,900 people over 30 square miles. There is an army of Amazon vans invading our town. Our local officials and police have no capacity to deal with this.
UPS, USPS and FedEx drivers do not show this level of dysfunction. There are issues, but they are isolated. With Amazon, I fully expect nearly every driver to be a menace.
They have the capacity, they just don't have the laws to do the job. If Amazon is effectively forcing their drivers to disobey the law, the solution is simple: have escalating fines for violating the law. The fines for most petty violations are based on the idea that the violation was most likely a mistake or an exceptional circumstance. If the violation is deemed to be just a cost of doing business, make the cost of doing business higher. If Amazon needs to routinely violate the law in order to operate, let them negotiate with the city to come up with a safe and reasonable plan. Otherwise, the city should make it unaffordable to routinely violate the law.
Amazon doesn't employ the drivers though, they're all contractors for a third party firm. Start investigating the driver company and they just shut down and reopen with a new name.
You probably don't even need escalating fines. Just having police stop to warn/ticket the drivers would be enough to throw drivers way behind schedule. The costs of constantly having to hire/train replacements for all the drivers not meeting their crazy metrics would be costly enough for amazon that they'd probably start looking for better options, but I'll admit that would have a much larger cost on the employees when its the employer we want to punish.
> Our local officials and police have no capacity to deal with this.
Why not? Even if there’s one sherif have then spend a few hours each week ticketing these vans.
Since there’s an army it should be easy to find them breaking laws and ticket them. If they are fined then they will change their behavior. And the upside is if they don’t change their behavior, then they can just hire a new officer who tickets full time.
This is a solvable problem if communities want to solve it.
I talked to a few folks who do this extensively, particularly for fedex ground. My understanding is they actually pay is a decent amount at the end of the day minus expenses, it’s just long hours, but nothing like whet Amazon does with their contractors
Yup, my brother did this for a couple years and after seeing how the contractors handled (or threw, or kicked, etc) the packages, I avoid FedEx like the plague. Unfortunately their content employees are amazing.
It's downright chaotic how they operate in denser cities. They make the city feel like its the 1800s again with random commercial activity taking place in the middle of the manure laden road and everyone having to deal with it.
> They make the city feel like its the 1800s again with random commercial activity taking place in the middle of the manure laden road and everyone having to deal with it.
Urban people both love and resent chaos. I personally find it best to embrace it as default and try to adapt around it, rather than ostensibly rejecting it while pretending it won't still exist via supply & demand. But that rarely flies in municipal politics or online rant-driven forums.
I haven't been impressed by Amazon drivers, but I haven't been impressed by any other delivery drivers either. My house has a new garage door thanks to Purolator (a package delivery subsidiary of Canada Post).
This is largely because some of the packages they give Flex drivers are downright nasty smelling, and as a result they have to use Febreze or the likes to deal with it.
Could’ve gotten wet in transit, in a station, their contents (I had a package that was wet cat food that was on top of everything else at the station, it leaked..). A ton of reasons. I did preload at UPS two years ago during peak season, station sorting can do crazy things to packages heh.
UPS is much better in my area of the US. The Amazon drivers are terrible and on par with laser ship. I would say about 20% or more of my Amazon packages come from UPS and about 40% or more from USPS. I’m not sure if I’ve had any laser ship packages from Amazon lately.
I have never had UPS want me to pick up a package from a hub. The only times it happened is when I requested it.
“Pick up from the far side of town because you weren’t home during working hours” is a story super familiar to those in the UK. I stopped ordering things because of it.
for me it was worse pre pandemic. UPS will randomly pick an item as requires signature becaues it was e-ordered. So I've got to go to a pickup because they missed delivery. It's a lot faster than the delivery driver being missed. Post pandemic no one seems to care and the drivers sign for everything so I've had to go to the FC less often.
UPS is the only one that does a decent job delivering to my house. The tracking is always accurate, and they leave it on the porch. If it's raining they cover it. They're the best.
FedEx always drives on my neighbors lawn(we don't have curbs) and leaves stuff on the lawn uncovered
Amazon will say the package is delivered before it is, and they ignore my requests to leave it on the porch more than half of the time.
USPS has broken 3 trashcan lids in the last 4 years, and insists on giving me junk mail.
> Amazon will say the package is delivered before it is, and they ignore my requests to leave it on the porch more than half of the time.
As far as I can tell, this is an outright fraud they are committing against their own delivery metrics. It's such a ubiquitous problem with Amazon specifically and no other carrier that it can't be just an accidental oopsie. I wouldn't be surprised if they get sued for it in 2023.
That or it's individual actors within the shipment centers doing it to prevent getting fired, in which case I have a lot more sympathy for them even if it makes it hard to know where your package actually is.
It is completely accepted, to. Amazon won't deal with support tickets about missing items at all until a day or two has passed because they know the driver has probably just marked it early. It's crazy that they don't seem to care.
Exactly. It's so embedded in the design of their system that it can't just be a known numbers-gaming scenario perpetrated by drivers and delivery center managers to try to avoid dropping below some performance target. Hence my belief that the first scenario is more probable, that it's an outright fraud perpetrated by upper management.
I once bought something to be delivered by fedex in about 10 days. Two days later they sent me an email that Good News Everyone, your package will be there tomorrow! It then sat in the next state over for 7 days, and showed up at the original estimate.
They went out of their way to lie to my face about delivery time.
Yep, this. I live downtown, and I don't have a car. The UPS location I would have to pick things up is a 15 minute drive away, outside of downtown, or like an hour+ with transit. It's just not viable for me. I have the same problem with Purolator, their physical location is way too inaccessible for me.
Thankfully though I have a Canada Post location literally next door to my apartment, so when I need to do returns, it's usually pretty easy as long as it's done via Canada Post.
Intelcom (gig-economy delivery used by Amazon from their fulfillment centers) was pretty bad when they first got started a few years ago, but it's smoothed out significantly since. The only problems I've seen is when they deliver to rural areas and the drivers aren't familiar with the dirt roads, they tend to give up trying to deliver pretty quickly. But their support via email has been okay.
I have distinct memories of being a student in Ottawa and having to take the bus out to some industrial area by the airport to pick up a package once. It was the complete antithesis of customer service and convenience.
Yep. From Carleton to the Purolator near Hawthorne/Hunt Club. Nightmare. The bus decided to drive right past me and I had to sit on the ground in the hot sun for 45 minutes waiting for the next one, with my phone battery dead. I told myself never again.
> I live downtown, and I don't have a car. The UPS location I would have to pick things up is a 15 minute drive away [...]
Here in Norway, UPS and FedEx have deals with local corner shops and similar. If I'm not at home they'll bring it there. I live on the outskirts, but I've not had to walk more than 15 minutes.
For a friendly (to UPS) payment of $5.99, UPS America will happily deliver your package to a nearby location.
The worst part is that if you just want the package held at the hub in advance then it’s still $5.99 now, even though they didn’t have to actually deliver anything! It’s crazy.
So just wait. I’m sure UPS Norway will soon be coming for your money too.
I just had this entire argument in my head today before seeing this post. But swap ups for FedEx. Amazon has the de facto service and for some reason others haven’t even tried to replicate it. If anyone wants to reverse engineer the data matrix tracking code (think Amazon packages) side of things hit me up.
I used to work at Amazon on transportation long time ago.. but that data matrix is not too complicated. From the last package I got, I see that the parcel got routed from BOI2 -> WA5 from the first QR code and from WA5 -> RNT9. I would guess the parcel originated from a warehouse in Boise, Idaho and moved to sort center WA5 (somewhere in washington.. I would guess Federal Way). Then it went from there to last mile delivery station RNT9 - I would guess Renton here and from there got delivered at my house.
The QR codes are not the magic. The real magic are the systems that select routes (Why was WA5 was selected from BOI2) and how Amazon fills it truck for optimal utilization. There are so many processes you need to plan and execute flawlessly with a very temporary workforce. Replicating this needs a lot of cash, a lot of talent in system and process design, good local leadership, and insane focus on operational efficiency.
I agree this isn’t a differentiator and or complex but could be used for common courtesy / digital tracking… why can’t FedEx/ups notify me when something was delivered…or give me a better delivery window than “tomorrow between 9am and 7pm”. I’m in an industrial complex with 8 other retail businesses and today a package which I didn’t know had shipped to me (or delivered) was left outside a door of mine next to public parking. This behavior is the norm at my location.
Intelcom is totally undercutting them for sure. If I get an Intelcom email, I know it's showing up on time as stated. Meanwhile, if it's UPS, well I'm still waiting on a package at I ordered 2 months ago coming from the US a 2.5 hour drive away. It has been chilling in Pennsylvania for the majority of that period which was supposed to arrive today after contacting support yet has been pushed out another week two hours after the described delivery window today.
In my area at least, a lot of DHL and Fedex packages get delivered via USPS. It's pretty smart for them, let USPS handle the last mile. I wonder if UPS does this anywhere...
Yeah, and my post office BOX is not in the same town as my residence. So, UPS transfers to USPS, which has no way of notifying me. And, it only happens sometimes - it’s unpredictable. Very annoying, especially since the UPS truck goes past my door every day.
That's by design - SurePost is a last mile USPS delivery service. You get slightly cheaper/ faster service than the traditional USPS methods (because UPS essentially consolidates and forwards the packages to the delivering post office / hub, skipping many of the sort steps a traditional USPS package would take.
If you want a brown UPS truck to deliver your package you have to choose one of their "regular" service, like Ground or one of the air services.
Take "fulfilled by Amazon". Most of the time they ship by USS brown truck and the package arrives at my door. But, sometimes they use SurePost. My point is that I don't know which ahead of time. It's unpredictable.
Or, take some coffee roasters. I suspect they are going to use SurePost, so I give my address as my PO Box. Their system rejects PO Boxes. So, I use my street address. The package gets transferred to USPS and ends up at a post office in the wrong town, since I don't have a mailbox at my residence.
The USPS won't let me create a mail forwarding address in my residence town, since "I don't have a mail delivery address there", Catch-22. In addition, SurePost claims to accept PO Box addresses, but the vendor's software doesn't know that.
And, I don't have a way to tell the SurePost system what my postal address is. Same deal with the Fedex equivalent.
A lot of our stuff gets shipped that way and it's terrible. The post office sits on packages forever and the tracking rarely updates once the real courier gives it to the post office. It's a super-econ way to ship so I think they just intentionally delay packages so they don't beat any of the other methods. I'm half-serious about that last part.
Oh yeah. My stuff likes to sit in Grand Prairie, TX, for days on end. Had never even heard of the city, but I already don't like it :).
I have a feeling it's a super cheap service, and USPS just sits on it til it has a light load or something. Still, I'd put the blame on the original shipper, they know what they're signing up for.
> the amazon centric couriers (ours is called intelecom) that focus on hub to home delivery.
This is complex and a slightly unfair comparison.
Amazon packages all come from a few central locations- the fulfillment centers. That network has spokes- Sort Centers and Air Hubs. But Amazon has optimized that in most cities, the item you're ordering is typically in a warehouse near you. The bigger the city, the more likely. From those few locations they can do rapid sorting and send packages to the last mile delivery stations.
UPS and FedEx have to pick up from everywhere. That gives them a "first mile" problem that Amazon doesn't have.
Amazon built its own last mile delivery network, and the air freight middle mile in the US (also I wasn't even remotely involved in that), for one simple reason: growth. Up until a few years ago, Amazon happily relied on existing carriers. And then Amazon's growth, together with eCommerce growth in general, required massive investment by said carriers. Amazon did some matgs (over simplifying), and came to the conclusion, that for the amount it would have to invest into increased third party carrier capacity it can built in house capacity. And the risk is negligible, since internal networks will handle only so much of the volume.
UPS, FedEx, DHL and company are perfrctly able to do last mile deliveries. Some are better in some regions than others.
Back the day, Amazon Germany was DHLs biggest global customer. So yes, existon carriers will feel if all their business goes to Amazon logistics. Which it won't, because of risk diversification, and a ton of other reasons.
I deal with logistics at the small company I work for, and deal with UPS all the time and am actually thrilled with them. Good rates certainly help, but the customer service (at least for business customers) has been far better than Fedex, for example. We get the same driver every day as well, which helps a lot too.
We don't really deal with Amazon couriers in a business sense, but I find them a nightmare to deal with personally. Since I don't know ahead of time how it will be shipped, I can't make intelligent choices about where to ship to. If I ship home, it shows up during the day with a legacy courier; if I ship it to my work, it ends up with one of those Amazon couriers that just toss the packages at the front of the building in the middle of the night or on weekends. Neither option is great, and it's a major factor in me using Amazon less now.
2C here: my wife has a small business selling exotic plants and the reverse path was always seamless with UPS. She did use a middleman (e-shipper), but 24h pickups at our (remote) home were mostly seamless. Most of the issues were internal to e-shipper messing up pickups.
B2C isn’t a modern concept. USPS has done it for over a hundred years. People used to order things from catalogs. Does Canada have a national postal service that delivers parcels?
UPS has a good union. It is usually the same driver on the same route and they know what they're doing. I don't know what happened with FedEx and their union but it always seems to be a different driver who is not confident. For residential service anyway. Amazon pits multiple local 3rd party carriers against each other in a race to the bottom in both quality of service and labor quality of life. Really shameful behavior by Bezos IMHO.
As I understand, FedEx Express are FedEx employees and paid properly. FedEx ground is “independent contractors” who are poorly paid.
I do not understand the logic behind devaluing the FedEx brand like that, especially since a FedEx express driver will not pickup a FedEx ground package and vice versa. They expect customers to keep track of this?
I wouldn't go as far to even say Amazon delivery people are in competition with UPS and Fedex delivery. Amazon's couriers (as you call them, and it seems like a good designation), practically work the last mile for Amazon, from the Hub, to a given customer's address. I imagine UPS, USPS (here in the states) and Fedex are still handling much of the deliveries and shipments to Amazon's hubs in the first place?
Is there something that could be particular to your situation with UPS?
I've not had to go pick up a package in basically ever, in a low population county in the US. I remember 20+ years ago my brother and I went and drove to get something, but I think it was Fedex.
As far as online shipping, vendors seem to split between UPS and USPS for me. There's a Fedex distribution center like 6 miles away, so not sure why they don't seem to be in the mix.
> I've not had to go pick up a package in basically ever,
Back In The Day, couriers treated every parcel as if it contained a high-end laptop worth several weeks' wages - it either gets signed for by someone in the right building or it goes back to the depot. And if you want to collect from the depot, you'd better have government-issued photo ID matching the name on the package.
Leaving such a valuable item just sitting on someone's porch? Without a signature? Unthinkable!
And as the deliveries were conducted 9-5 Monday-Friday, if you were in work those hours every parcel would end up at the depot, no matter how many redelivery attempts they made.
Of course in the modern age, where a courier knows they might be delivering a $2 tube of toothpaste instead of a $2000 laptop, things are different.
I think it’s even more granular than that. I’m in Los Angeles and we have pretty good UPS delivery where I am. Not perfect, but not too bad. But a few weeks ago, Staples sent us the wrong item, and instead sent us like 25 pounds of industrial soap that was clearly intended for an office to our home, and didn’t send us something they were supposed to.
So we contacted them, they sent us a UPS label, I printed it out, went to the UPS website and told them to pick it up. It was pre-paid, and they agreed to pick it up between 9:30AM and 5:00PM that day. But they never did. So I figured they’d come the next day. Nope. So I called and they said it had been picked up. I had to explain that, no, I was looking at it right now. It’s definitely still in my home. So they set up pickup for the next day and said, “But we’re going to have to charge you for it.” I said, “Well, I’m not the one paying for it, Staples is, so go nuts.” They never showed up. In the end, I drove to the local Staples (not the one it was supposed to be sent to), which also does UPS shipping and just had them take it for UPS.
So where I am delivery is pretty good, but pickup is complete trash. I think it’s just the luck of the draw and the number of packages they have to deliver on a given day vs. the number of drivers available.
> And I support a model where I pay the true cost of delivering stuff, meaning appropriate pay for delivery workers.
So do I. Unfortunately, this is a cost not everyone can shoulder, so we won’t see anything like this happen.
I heard a good quote about capitalism adjusting for endless efficiency, recently. Maybe someone knows the saying. It essentially means we’ll never go backward on cost.
That was a really good piece. I'd encourage everyone to read it in its entirety before getting the urge to comment here based on just the title (as is usually the case).
While the article is expectedly one-sided, it does touch upon the changed environment in the delivery sector and labor in America in general. This is no longer a David vs Goliath contest like the last UPS strike in the 90s went. Amazon is now the Goliath. The gig economy is the Goliath. UPS itself is helpless in the face of these developments. A striking UPS driver with stable hours, a 6-figure salary, benefits and a pension/retirement fund is going to get far less sympathy from the public today than 20 years ago. But then is there any alternative other than to sit by and let their job become another Amazon or DoorDash?
If the market doesn’t sustain the kind of jobs they want, how will striking help?
Striking can definitely backfire. How many UPS customers will ship with other companies during the strike? How many of them will stick with their new choice and never come back to UPS?
When a market gets disrupted like this, the worst thing the incumbents can do is refuse to accept change and double down on their old model. They need to innovate and change. I know that’s not easy, but it’s the only thing that works.
they are trying to destroy competition by the service equivalent of illegal dumping, using their AWS profits to eliminate competition by taking a loss on every single other part of their business.
This is generally false. Amazon has lost money in North America every quarter this year as part of a pandemic hangover (they over invested in warehouses). Prior to Q4 2021, their North American segment was profitable.
If I Google "how much does amazon make on shipping", of the results on the first page that contain the statistic we're looking for, all of them indicate Amazon is losing money on shipping.
> they are trying to destroy competition by the service equivalent of illegal dumping, using their AWS profits to eliminate competition by taking a loss on every single other part of their business.
> But Firm A now has a tough problem. If it sells for anything more than $5, another competitor might enter. There is no reason to think that another competitor couldn’t match the $5 average cost. And there is some reason to think that its cost could be lower than $5. Why? The new competitor could buy Firm B’s assets at fire-sale prices, thus reducing average cost.
Ah yes, the mythical world where the assets of an enormous but deteriorating corporation are just sitting around on a shelf for purchase by any plucky entrepreneur with enough vision, bootstraps, and good old American sack, who will of course be able to restart the whole enterprise immediately, and, having purchased the whole thing on the cheap, will have so greatly reduced average cost that they can immediately call the predator's bluff and restart the same price war, this time with the upper hand and victory in sight.
Of course this argument makes no sense except in a world of spherical cows and perfectly rational actors.
The more plausible argument against Amazon operating their logistics business at a loss is the obvious fact that they have invested enormous resources into squeezing efficiency out of their logistics business, to the point of being now-infamously abusive of their delivery drivers and warehouse staff. Keeping marginal cost as low as possible clearly matters a lot to Amazon management. What's more likely is that they have invested in keeping marginal cost down specifically in order to run their logistics business at a very small but positive margin and still compete on price in order to establish and maintain dominance and high volume. Don't forget that they are also skimming value off of several points in the e-commerce lifecycle, basically at every point except actually charging customers for shipping, but that's probably more than offset by all the Prime accounts that people renew every year but never get their money's worth out of.
Then again, this is just speculation. I haven't actually looked at their financial statements, and maybe someone with more finance expertise can weigh in on whether there's anything more to be learned there.
> The more plausible argument against Amazon operating their logistics business at a loss is the obvious fact that they have invested enormous resources into squeezing efficiency out of their logistics business, [...]
Seems like a good thing!
> Ah yes, the mythical world where the assets of an enormous but deteriorating corporation are just sitting around on a shelf for purchase by any plucky entrepreneur [...]
Well, blame all the laws and regulation that make 'hostile' takeovers so hard.
I think it is. However they're engaged in plenty of other sketchy and unethical practices, so let's maybe hold off on the ticker tape parade hailing our great Job Creator Bezos as a national hero and success story for laissez-faire "free" market economics.
Amazon retail makes all their money selling ads. So sure, you can say they don't make money shipping products, but it's because they're using "free" shipping to build a platform that sells extremely profitable ads.
Amazon isn’t disrupting UPS. They’ve sunk billions to try and smooth out the slowdown in an e-commerce business that is a boat anchor on the real money machine - AWS.
The conditions and wages that the market can bear aren't some physical universal constant that exist in a vacuum - they are a product of labor market laws and regulations.
> It's good for people to be able to enjoy cheap shipping.
Yes, that's why sectoral bargaining laws are so important - they force firms to compete on genuine innovation and efficiency, rather than undercutting pay and working conditions.
No amount of laws and regulations will make it possible to sustain jobs that the market participants are not willing to pay for -- not unless the government starts paying the wages of employees at uncompetitive firms to keep them from losing their jobs.
Package delivery still exists in countries with sectoral collective bargaining. No government payments are involved - all that's different is industrial bargaining laws. The companies are competitive - they just compete on actual efficiency rather than undercutting worker pay and conditions.
> The conditions and wages that the market can bear aren't some physical universal constant that exist in a vacuum - they are a product of labor market laws and regulations.
It's wrong.
The conditions the market can bear are based on market demand. If the demand isn't there, businesses will have nothing to offer, so it wouldn't much matter what kind of regulations are in place.
Regulations don't produce demand, unless they require people to buy things they would not otherwise buy.
Regulations can only work with the demand that exists in the market. For example, if the market demand for delivery services would only be enough to support a wage of $5/hour for workers, but the law said the minimum wage must be $10/hour, the result would be that all delivery companies would fail and there would be no jobs for delivery workers -- unless the government stepped in with subsidies as I mentioned before.
What do you mean by 'actual efficiency'? Whatever companies in an economy with sectoral collective bargaining can do to cut costs and increase revenue is also available to companies in economies without sectoral bargaining.
It might be "available" but the focus and outcome will be different.
Suppose there are two delivery firms:
- Firm A develops innovative delivery routing software that cuts delivery costs by 20%.
-Firm B is rubbish at software, but really good at underpaying workers and getting away with it, such that they reduce costs by 30%.
Without sectoral collective bargaining and stronger labour rights more generally, Firm B will win. But the better outcome for workers and efficiency is for A to win.
Firm B would be pretty easy to compete with, because it would end up with the worst human capital out of all of the firms, and a firm with better people would find a way to add value that Firm B could not.
Amazon is definitely not Firm B, although I suspect that is what you were driving toward. Amazon has invested more in being competitive than any other company it competes with in almost every area, and despite the nonsense you read in the media, it offers above-average pay and benefits in the industries it is involved in. Despite that, all warehouse and delivery jobs suck and are dangerous, but that says a lot more about those jobs than it does about the company.
You seem oddly defensive of Amazon. Do you work for them?
In any case, you've missed the point. If Amazon is competitive and better than others on pay and conditions as you say, sectoral bargaining would be good for them, because it would stop them getting undercut by worse employers.
> Firm B would be pretty easy to compete with, because it would end up with the worst human capital out of all of the firms, and a firm with better people would find a way to add value that Firm B could not.
This is obviously not true. Plenty of companies pay terribly and get away with it, and plenty of companies thrive because treating employees badly is their primary innovation. Uber, for instance, has found success through paying "employees" effectively below minimum wage.
> Uber, for instance, has found success through paying "employees" effectively below minimum wage.
Yeah, but think about why.
Specifically, why doesn't Uber have any competitors that pay better? The only other major player in the US market is Lyft, which is such a clone of Uber that a lot of drivers work for both of them.
This happened because the market won't bear the kind of prices Uber, Lyft, and any other entrant in the market would need to charge in order to pay the drivers more.
This is a perfect example of my previous point about how regulations can constrain the market but don't create demand in themselves: if the government said all Uber and Lyft drivers needed to be full-time employees with benefits and a higher wage, even though the market won't bear the prices needed to make that happen, Uber and Lyft would go out of business. Instead of having low-paying jobs those workers would end up with no jobs.
You keep aggressively missing the point. Uber drivers' wages are nothing to do with "what the market will bear" and everything to do with bargaining power.
In countries with sectoral bargaining, where bargaining power is higher, workers get much higher wages and conditions for those same jobs. And yet, those jobs do not cease to exist. You must be very puzzled at how this is possible.
Firm C that combines the advantages of firms A and B will eat their lunch.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by underpaying? If people are willing to work for a company, and everything is as promised, what's wrong with that? (If things are not as promised, the legal system can help.)
> Firm C that combines the advantages of firms A and B will eat their lunch.
Read what I wrote again. The point of sectoral bargaining is to remove downward competition on wages as a possible competitive advantage.
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by underpaying? If people are willing to work for a company, and everything is as promised, what's wrong with that? (If things are not as promised, the legal system can help.)
What’s wrong with that is: low wages are bad. Your conceptual mistake here is thinking that jobs are “voluntary”. Most people are forced to do jobs in order to pay for food and shelter.
Humans are not ideal gas particles bouncing around in a frictionless canister. Aggregate unemployment rate says very little about the difficulty of finding stable work that pays enough to support a small family, or of the high switching costs involved generally with changing jobs.
I think their argument is that the market will sustain those jobs. UPS's earnings are up around 8.5% year over year and UPS has been doing consistently better than FedEx with the same revenue and employee headcount.
There is danger with a strike, but it might be more limited than you've suggested. Yes, companies will try and keep shipping things with alternatives during a strike. Yes, some might want to stay with that alternative. However, there are two complications with that. First, I don't think people will decide to boycott UPS because they had a strike. I think shippers want to minimize their costs, not punish a shipper because they had a strike. Companies aren't going to pay FedEx more just because UPS had a once in a generation strike (and it looks like that last one was in 1997, 26 years ago). Second, do competitors have the capacity to pick up the slack? Yes, companies can expand over time, but they probably can't for the duration of a strike. Amazon started shipping its own packages years ago and is still UPS's largest customer. Amazon can't just scale up operations overnight and they're Amazon. I'm sure that FedEx, Amazon, and LaserShip/OnTrac will make a play for marketshare, but if they're able to get a reasonable contract, I don't think others will be able to move fast enough to really take marketshare in the short term.
Now, if the contract puts UPS at a big disadvantage over the long-run, their marketshare will simply dwindle. However, as it stands, FedEx and UPS are making similar amounts of revenue (UPS is around 7% higher), but UPS is often making 2-3x the profit. Trailing 12 months: $10.2B vs 3.5B. 2021: $9.4B vs 5.6B. 2020: $5.1B vs 1.6B. 2019: $5.6B vs 0.8B.
2.9x more, 1.7x more, 3.2x more, 7x more. That's a nice run of much higher profits while having only marginally more revenue.
It kinda looks like UPS has a good business model and that the union wages haven't been a hinderance to that model. UPS is valued at 3.2x more than FedEx despite having the same revenue and UPS's P/E ratio is actually a tiny bit lower - 14.24 vs 14.86. People are paying over 3x more for UPS stock because they're making great profits that justify being worth $157B to FedEx's $48B. Wall Street isn't the kind of place where they're going to love your stock because you're a union shop - probably the opposite. However, they do like the profits that UPS is bringing in compared to FedEx.
Yep, my instinct was that UPS's fundamentals would be bad compared to newer and non-union shops. Turns out that they're making money way better than their main rival with better margins. It's surprising, but I'd say there's money for the union to go after. I'm not saying they can have unlimited demands, but if UPS is earning 2-3x what FedEx is on the same revenue, there's room for improvement in salaries. Even if the workers take only half the difference between UPS and FedEx and we look at the worst delta between the two since 2019 ($3.5B in 2020), we're talking $1.75B. Divide that by the 250,000 union workers and that's $7,000/year in more money. Even if we're talking about the 500,000 global workers, that's still $3,500/year. If UPS is looking at more expansion in the next few years (which seems likely), maybe the union can go for a bit more. Note: this isn't talking about bringing UPS down to zero profit. This is about bringing UPS down to 1.5-2x FedEx's profitability rather than 2-3x. With increases in package volume, maybe UPS could be back to 3x FedEx toward the end of the contract.
UPS's business just looks strong. They have a similar employee headcount as FedEx and similar revenue, while having way better profits.
I absolutely believe that unions are essential with the current predatory situation of exploiting peoples.
But when I read : "Sean M. O’Brien, the Teamsters’ general president, has said, “We’re going to take that contract, and we’re going to show the Amazon workers what you get when you join the greatest organization in the world.”"
It reeks of hubris and I wonder how it will end up ...
Did the current employee-owners get the big windfall they anticipated in that pre-IPO article?
> Mr. Kelly said that U.P.S. needed to issue stock to the public to maintain its competitiveness against rivals like the FDX Corporation, which owns Fedex; DHL and several increasingly aggressive foreign postal services that are also planning to issue stock soon.
Well... that's one story.
I wonder how working conditions and salaries changed after they went from employee-ownership to public ownership... I have a guess of course.
Thanks for posting that, that's very interesting. I'm curious as to how the 1997 strike mentioned in the article worked then. I would think that strikes in employee- owned companies would have very different dynamics than in public or closely-held private companies.
I enjoyed reading the article as a former supervisor of UPS. It's funny how apt some of the descriptions were from my own experience while working there. I've come to the belief that most low/tight margin jobs come with the peril that you just have to eat "you know what". I think part of my frustration when working there was the performance numbers that you have to run were unrealistic. The performance is broken down into (packages per hour) / total hours. Meaning that you need to have people loading at a rate of essentially ~450 packages per hour per person. The pressure is always on for you to get your work force moving to hit an almost physically impossible production rate. Your tactics are really one of two things which is to try to 'cut' down the work force to reduce hours or to yell that they're going too slow. In some ways this always made me feel pretty lousy because I like to treat humans with respect. Now the question is what happens when supervisors don't meet their production quotas? You get written up or in my case you write yourself up, then you get dressed down by your boss, and if you're really taking a lot of aggro, your boss's boss. It is incredibly easy to get written up, everyone I knew would constantly be written up for small things.
The methods which is mentioned in the article is literal instructions on how to safely do your job if you could physically adhere to them while maintaining production would actually be really great because they're pretty thoughtful, however, it's easy to cut corners and do things that speed you up slightly at the cost of increasing injury.
One thing that would be really great for my production is small packages because smaller packages = more pph which means less boss aggro. One thought that I've had is that Amazon gives all UPS the junk packages which we would call large cube or irregulars which were either exceptionally large boxes or super heavy boxes > 70lbs. (Btw they say you won't have to pick up more than 70lbs, that's a straight lie).
Anyway wanted to give some additional perspectives.
Maybe it's just me, but UPS in the US is much more reliable and high-quality than FedEx. For one, FedEx Delivery Manager seems to have a super old map of addresses, so a house built in 2021 couldn't be verified by their system, and in general I've had many more packages delivered to the wrong addresses (one time my parcel was delivered to Neighbor A's door, A's package to B's door, B's package to my door") or super beaten up with FedEx. It might just be class division, with the higher rates leading to lower overall volume, but that's just a hunch.
UPS is staffed with union employees, FedEx Ground/Home Delivery (which is different from FedEx Express) is staffed with contractors, not even real FedEx employees.
> FedEx Delivery Manager seems to have a super old map of addresses
I've always been curious how Uber has lasted this long with such an awful mapping platform. But I assume it has to do with Google Maps/Waze (I've never used Bing or Apple Maps) having such an advantage over Uber that they are just years behind.
Every time I've had an Uber driver that forwards locations to Google Maps I know I won't be circling the block twice, after going down two extra side roads.
Up-to-date address DBs seems to be an easier problem than taxi routing though.
It depends entirely on your location, or more specifically, what driver is delivering your packages, and how absurd their "quota" is.
I've experienced positive and negative experiences from all three (including USPS, though Amazon makes 4 now), but have definitely had more negative experiences from FedEx.
Same. FedEx constantly struggles to deliver packages on-time to my place, but UPS is reliable. It’s become an ongoing joke in our household and we make efforts to avoid FedEx when other options are available. DHL tends to impress me with very fast international shipments, but I use them infrequently.
UPS in the UK is absolutely atrocious. The drivers are not motivated to deliver at all and there must be some externality that means no downside to failed attempts. I'd say 50% of my packages go to a crappy convenient store a mile away from home which is a huge hassle to get to and has surly staff who are very displeased to see you and make the absolute least effort. Makes UPS in the US look absolutely gold plated. I assume they must send their flunkies from Atlanta to the overseas regions if they're too incompetent to work in the US system but it's really appalling. My childhood rural UPS drivers were absolutely lovely but the UK makes me despise this carrier nearly as much as Hermes/Evri
It's the same in Finland. There was a big blow up about it a few months ago when someone's Twitter thread[1] about it blew up online and, eventually, in the local media[2].
The drivers are given utterly unrealistic quotas and there's appears to be little incentive for packages to actually get delivered. There's also no way for a consumer to escalate delivery issues to anyone who'd actually be empowered to fix mistakes.
My UPS drivers is great. I give him a nice Christmas tip. He knows my neighbors so can have them sign for things on my behalf etc. I look forward to seeing him and his big smile.
Amazon drivers do an adequate job but often look stressed and burnt out. They never look me in the eye. I feel really bad for them.
Anecdotally, I run a consumer goods business and UPS has set me up with a business account for volume discounts and tries to get me to use them for shipping. The irony is that I do use them for shipping, but get cheaper rates from a variety of other label providers. My UPS rep says they can't match them.
Giant corporations never have your best interests top of mind.
That's because your "business account" is just a sales channel. You get discounts versus going to ups.com, but you won't get the discounts you get via label resellers because your business really doesn't matter; but if they lost a volume shipper like ShipStation or Pirateship, they'd lose overall volume to Fedex USPS etc.
I'd like to see package delivery people get good working conditions
That said, I'd also like to see law enforcement enforce double parking violations of delivery trucks, even if that means it costs more for delivery.
The amazon trucks in particular in SF, really don't give a fuck who they're blocking. They'll block a main artery in the city during rush hour and they'll even block it right next to 3 open spaces meaning they could have pulled up to the curb and not blocked traffic with 15 to 40 cars piled behind them if all they'd done is pull over. I have multiple videos of this happening.
I certainly have sympathy if they're getting rushed by management but I want the law enforced and management to get the message that double parking is not acceptable. Certainly not on main arteries.
UPS routinely delivers my packages after 9PM. Fedex had a phase of leaving my packages next to the road. The dodgy people in passenger vehicles tend to hang out in my driveway for a while and never seem prepared. Half the carriers stack the packages in front of my door such that it can't be opened. All the services are bad in their own ways, which seem to depend on the "ingenuity" of the individual drivers. I'm sure they're all getting the screws turned on them as much as technically possible.
I will say Fedex Express seems to have retained some of its character, in the way that UPS Air has not (some of those >9PM packages have been Next Day Air 10:30AM service). The worst is being unable to reach an actual human. If I'm calling, it's not because I want to listen to a computer voice read out the tracking information. (Although one of their tracking websites has been straight up "unavailable" for months, so maybe it's not a stretch).
The reward for worst offense probably goes to UPS, for delivering a crushed box that started off containing 4 gallons of oil paint, very obviously leaking everywhere. That was also at 9PM, so nobody to even try to get ahold of until the next day well after I had been forced to deal with it. I donned disposable gloves and carefully poured them into a 5 gallon bucket and got 3 free gallons of paint and 20% discount on the reship from Home Depot. I guess dealing with the fallout is the real price we pay for goods getting delivered? The sheer wastefulness continues to be obscene to me. We have such abundance that we don't even bother handling goods properly to avoid squandering them.
What I really don't get is why none of these companies have tried batching deliveries onto fewer days per week. I get that they they're not in the business of storing packages, but instead of having drivers race around to do one package at each of many houses, they could make fewer stops. If the buffering would take too much room, do ingress policing that requires shippers to only ship to specific destinations on specific days. If we're going for cheapest possible rates, that seems like a straightforward optimization.
> The worst is being unable to reach an actual human. If I'm calling, it's not because I want to listen to a computer voice read out the tracking information.
I’ve had their automated system hang up on me! I semi-regularly have to send a pre-paid box back to Apple to recycle an old device. I go to FedEx’s website to get a pick-up, and it always says that the tracking number isn’t valid. (Apple must send literally millions of these boxes a year - why would the tracking number be invalid?) I then call and the person on the phone fixes it and the package gets picked up as expected. But one day they changed their phone tree and the old options didn’t work. If you asked for a representative or agent, it would just hang up on you! I eventually figured out that you have to follow the prompts that say, “Problem with the web site” and then “something else” after that and then you get a human who can fix the problem or escalate it. But they’re clearly trying to get you to hang up and go away.
These days, the only time Amazon ever does that to me is if I order something with same-day delivery. Otherwise, all regular orders come via the big gray & blue Amazon trucks, just like any other delivery company.
While I've had mid-day Amazon Flex drivers show up with a regular 2-day package, this only happened once during the Christmas season. Otherwise, Flex drivers seem to be dedicated to same-day grocery/Amazon/Whole Foods delivery.
I live in a rural area and before amazon had their own trucks I got almost all my packages from UPS. I got to know the driver, nice man, and my guardian dog got used to him. Well that was many years ago because now Amazon delivers their own packages now and it’s usually a different person every time. There delivery process is so rigid with regard how they consider the package delivered , meaning if they don’t physically occupy a certain location it won’t be considered delivered and that can’t be altered. I had to contact support and tell them to move the drop point at the gate and life was better. Unfortunately when I do get the occasional UPS package it is a woman who is always talking on the speakerphone the entire time.
Did it seem to anyone else that during the holidays, UPS prices skyrocketed? I felt like a box that would have run me $25 to ship 3 day ground a year or so ago was almost $60 this year. If this is how others felt, UPS might struggle next holiday season while USPS and Amazon thrive.
Maybe it’s just been years since I sent an overnight envelope without my secretary’s help, but a couple months or two ago, I went to a UPS store to send a letter overnight and it was $75. Crazy.
I feel like not that long ago, overnighting a letter was a $15-20 expense (as long as you weren’t opting for one of the “very first thing” delivery slots).
Sign up for a shipping account. It's often an immediate ~50% discount off retail, and that improves (slowly) as you ship more. At least that's how it works for FedEx.
I don't know if that's just because they like keeping out the "retail riff-raff", they like having your credit card on file, that juicy "data", or what, but it works.
If I go to a FedEx store I routinely get prices of $30 - $50 to send an overnight envelope, if I go to my corporate mailroom it’s $10-15 for the same shipment… my point being there are is a broad range of pricing regimes based on volume etc.
It can get really broad, too. A former coworker who used to work for a brand you've probably heard of (if you're American) whose core business model involved/involves a ton of mostly-overnight shipping told me once that he could send a heavy package literally from one corner of the country to another for $LOTS on his own dime, $90 for 5-day ground on the company's dime, or... $8 for early overnight. Eight bucks! I don't think that even paid for the jet fuel.
They certainly have the right to strike and argue for better compensation packages, but that will be reflected in the price of UPS shipping in a world where Amazon is currently demolishing them. Hell, even the USPS undercuts them as they run it as a jobs program for vets instead of a real business. Fedex has virtually no unions and will get a competitive advantage here.
I wonder if the end results will be a temporary boost for current employees, but at the expense of new ones as UPS loses more and more market share.
Working class does not mean low income. Working class is the most of the people.
Blue collar workers can make more money than middle class, because definition of class is not just money.
working class: the social group consisting primarily of people who are employed in unskilled or semi-skilled manual or industrial work.
These days with over half of households paying zero income tax, if you have a job at all and aren’t on welfare or disability, you are at least “middle class.” And working class at the same time
No, in the U.S., the middle class can include much of the working class. The middle class has typically included the entirety of the manufacturing sector prior to the year 2000. When people vote for politicians who say they're going to bring back manufacturing jobs, those voters aren't clamoring for lower-class wages, obviously.
That’s because, after WWII, you could do basically any job in the US and afford things we typically associate with the middle class, e.g. a modest home in a decent neighborhood. So everyone really was middle class.
People who work factory jobs aren’t “working class”? Who is working class then? To be honest, it sounds like your definition of working class is the definition that’s being stretched.
Upper / middle / lower class is about wealth. In a society with little income inequality, the middle class can become quite large. “Working class” is a class related to a type of work. In most places, the jobs that make up the working class are low paying, so the working class is also lower class. But this didn’t use to be the case in the US.
> The modern usage of the term "middle-class", however, dates to the 1913 UK Registrar-General's report, in which the statistician T.H.C. Stevenson identified the middle class as those falling between the upper-class and the working-class.
"Middle" literally stands for "between" working-class and upper-class. What do you think it's in the middle of?
You can also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_middle_class#Academic... for a comparison of different contemporary models of the American middle-class specifically (all of which place the middle class in the middle of working-class and some other class, obviously).
Not in the United States. Generally middle-class stretched to something along the lines of having enough income you own a home, at least one car, etc. and a level of financial stability (you can take a vacation, plan to retire, etc. even if not lavishly) and access to healthcare. This did not require a professional job – a skilled carpenter or plumber, union factory worker, career postal worker, etc. probably qualified - but that started changing around the time Reagan was elected. When politicians talk about bringing good jobs back, that’s the image they’re trying to conjure up.
Middle-class literally stands for "in the middle" of working-class and upper class. You can disagree on who's in there, how many are in there, etc but disagreeing about what it means is futile. The middle class is not the working class, by definition.
Again, your mistake is in assuming that there’s a single unambiguous definition. As other people have attempted to help you learn that is not true in popular usage. Rather than unsuccessfully being pedantic it would be better to more precisely state which particular attributes you care about in the context of the larger conversation.
Less inaccurately, you cherry-picked a single quote on Wikipedia from a century old source and ignored the rest of the page saying that definitions vary.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to belabor this point but would suggest reading the entire page or at least the first paragraph:
> Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation's income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%
You accuse me of not reading the entire article but you don't read it or even my comment?
> > Common definitions for the middle class range from the middle fifth of individuals on a nation's income ladder, to everyone but the poorest and wealthiest 20%
Your quote says that the size of the "middle-class" group varies, not that it overlaps the "working class" group.
I don't understand where you are stuck. In case you lost track, here is the comment that you are seemingly supporting:
> Working class and middle class are not mutually exclusive
Yes, they are mutually exclusive. There are two different meanings of "middle class" being used in this kind of discussion:
1. The class of people who live of their work but owns their own means of production (e.g. independent professionals like dentists, lawyers, or independent tradesmen like plumbers, electricians). This definition sits in the middle between the working class (who has to work for an employer) and the ruling class (who employs others to work for them).
2. The class of people with the middle earnings, regardless of how they earn their money. This definition sits in the middle between the poor and the rich.
So, if you are comparing middle class and working class you are clearly using meaning #1, in which case they are mutually exclusive by definition.
To be clear, not everyone who works is working class, the working class is just those who have to sell their labor to a middleman because they don't own the means to work directly to a customer.
It's like trying to emulate "normal old school" The New Yorker prose, which is usually pretty... wordy I guess (but not in a bad way!). But it ends up failling pretty hard at doing that, so it just makes the whole thing sound weird.
Agreed. For example: "As Mehrotra puts it, “UPS has been the one oasis in the middle of a vast desert that is declining union membership in our country.” (Meanwhile, Amazon is in the midst of laying off more than eighteen thousand workers.)"
Hu? What's the connection between these two things? Is the author not aware that the Amazon layoffs are corporate layoffs, not delivery layoffs?
USPS employees are clearly more cheerful in the countryside, the guys working in the cities have "dead fish" eyes with no light.
Something I would suggest to everyone: Get friendly with your drivers. Greet them with a smile and thank them for their work; simple signs of appreciation might seem small but they go a long way. Exchange some jokes and make small talk if they are the social type. If they look tired, see if they want a can of coca-cola or something; ask if they want to borrow the restroom if you have one available for guest use. Make sure any pet(s) don't get in the way of your drivers.
To those who ship stuff out frequently: Ask your drivers if there's anything you can do beforehand to make their work easier; things like attaching/inserting shipping documents a certain way, writing the tracking number on the box somewhere, etc.
To those who ship/receive high volumes: Help your drivers with loading and unloading if they're okay with it. Being a deliveryman is back breaking work, so most drivers really appreciate having extra sets of hands.
We're all human, so for better or worse we're all going to treat friends better than strangers. Becoming friends with your drivers is important for everyone involved with your packages.