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[flagged] Amazon Let Its Drivers' Urine Be Sold as an Energy Drink (wired.com)
97 points by fortran77 on Oct 19, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 85 comments



They jest, but I see a business opportunity here if someone were so bold. The new Amazon EV trucks could be modified to have an electric urine collection system and collect the urine in a large tank under the vehicle whilst it is in motion. While collecting the suction motors pulsate to the song wagie cagie [1]. Upon return to the warehouse the vehicle could couple with a set of connectors that charges up the batteries and drains the urine collection tank. That urine could be processed to separate out the Urea and sold to the companies that produce Diesel Exhaust Fluid. The separation machine is powered by employees on their break time stepping on peddles to get exercise. The remaining chloride, sodium, potassium, creatinine could be processed and sold on Amazon as "Completely natural supplements" branded as "Amazon Heart Healthy" with the drivers ID number on the ingredients ~Edit out: giving them a portion of the profits~. The bilirubin could be sold as antioxidants to prevent endothelial cell injury. The marketing options are limitless.

I jest but when evil corps give you lemons...

[Edit] - I forgot to add the link to the song. It's 30 minutes but the pumps will just keep extracting.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRzxpIa6U8o [video][30 mins][metal]


I was with you until the whole "giving them a portion of the profits" part. New processes need to capture the full value of the employees, not give them pieces of it. This is part of AMZN Management 101, looks like someone didn't pay attention in the employee onboarding.


I don't know when you attended, but now you are supposed to charge the driver for each relief event.


Fair enough, I will return for remedial re-education after I complete my social media training.


You jest because it is too soon. Take the driver's urine and separate it for urea. As the van moves through heavy stop and go traffic in Europe, spray out the urea. So the EV is not only a zero emission delivery van but also a NOx scrubber. Drip the remaining urine components out as you drive along. It is Europe, after all. :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPM40ey1OHQ



Another good business opportunity: some truck drivers use stimulants. Some of those stimulants will end up in the urine, where they can be extracted and re-sold.

During WWII, there was a limited supply of penicillin (discovered in 1928 but not used on humans until 1941/1942). Since ~99% is excreted in the urine, it was collected, cleaned up, and re-used.


> I jest but when evil corps give you lemons...

Or maybe Urinade is the idea whose time has come. Finally a powerful energy drink that peak performers deserve.


Like POCARI SWEAT...


Their tagline could be 'it's not lemonade'


It's got electrolytes.


I get the joke, but.. Chinese Cultural Revolution already prosecuted people who did not produce enough poop to fertilize fields. This already happened!

And 70% of males in US very violently attacked while they were infants to have big parts of their genitals removed! Those genitals were used as a skin care product for rich!

This joke is just too real to be funny!


> Those genitals were used as a skin care product for rich!

This is true. All those fancy ladies getting collagen injection into their lips don’t realize where the collagen came from. Allergan’s strain was cultured from the discarded foreskin from a single boy about 27 years ago.


> US very violently attacked while they were infants to have big parts of their genitals removed! Those genitals were used as a skin care product for rich!

Wait what?


I would like to know more about the CCP fertilizer business, with sources. I keep running up against an astonishing ignorance from the younger generations about some of the excesses of these sorts of groups just as they bemoan "late stage capitalism."


Just to be clear, when people bemoan late stage capitalism it doesn't mean that they also all like and appreciate CCP/Mao/Stalin etc.

One can be anti-capitalist without being pro-authoritarian communism.


At some point there's an implicit obligation to suggest something better, rather than just complain.


You think anti-(fascist-)capitalists have no better suggestions than dictators from 40+ years ago?


You think anti-(fascist-)capitalists have no better suggestions than dictators from 40+ years ago?

It would seem that they don't. Their suggestions, when they exist, are based on a childlike naïveté that can be justified only with near-complete ignorance of both history and human nature.

Conflating opposition to capitalism and opposition to fascism is a good example. The sad thing is that you don't have to go very far to the right before you encounter stupidity of comparable magnitude.


> he separation machine is powered by employees on their break time

Did they finally allow warehouse workers actual break time? Weren't they were peeing in bottles or something for a while because they didn't have time for breaks while still making quotas?


I don't know but I did buy a powerful black light to check my packages.


to those who don't know the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBVggGXGxxc


Good point. Here is the Extended Version [1] used in ℌ𝔢𝔩𝔩 𝔚𝔬𝔯𝔩𝔡 4 that YT censored

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRzxpIa6U8o [video][30 mins][metal]


Thanks I had no idea what they were referencing. Is the image used for the wagie cage from a real patent application?



Incredible.


They will just use it to deny compensation based on the substances they found.


Instead of penalising employees for too many bathroom breaks you’ll be punished for too few.

But no free water for you; you’ll have to buy water. Perhaps you’ll be able to take it off your taxes, at least.


Diesel exhaust fluid is just urea + water. I see a business opportunity for truckers looking to save a few bucks.


Replenish the DEF for trucks that supply the Amazon warehouses. Synergy.


The story here is that a guy collected urine bottles discharged along the road by Amazon drivers. Managed to register as a seller and sell them on Amazon as Energy drink. It is a prank but good enough to prove there is nothing Amazon wont sell, even if just temporarily... :-)

"...even attained number one bestseller status in the “Bitter Lemon” category..."


That's not the story.

The story is Amazon let him list urine in their food section AND fulfilled shipments of supposed urine for him to his friends.

The documentary this was done for is all about how Amazon is negligent in it's duties to the public. We wouldn't tolerate a grocery store putting rat poison in the food isle or selling knives to toddlers, so why are we tolerant of Amazon doing that? He had his kids order though an echo knives and rat poison. Those were delivered to his house without the mandatory in the uk age check.


> a guy collected urine bottles discharged along the road by Amazon drivers

He didn't do this. He said he did this.


Speaking as someone who has worked cleaning up the area adjacent to an interstate, there's no way to identify the urine bottles specific to a trucking company. Unless Amazon issues their drivers with branded urine bottles? (I think the urine bottles begin as pop bottles and are reused).


after learning that drivers were being penalized for returning with urine filled bottles he searched the road near the warehouses, so it's urine very likely to come from an amazon driver.


Why couldn't they be from trucks from other shipping companies going to the Amazon warehouse, or from other distribution centers presumably located in the same general area?

I think people may be under the misapprehension that only Amazon trucks leave bottles of urine on the side of the highway. This has been a practice for many, many decades. And not just commercial drivers, either. The word to look up is 'trucker bombs'.


Maybe they are (or were) an Amazon driver and were retrieving their own bottles.


Why are they allowed to "discharge urine bottles along the road"?


probably not allowed to have them in their truck, so choice between maybe(fired) vs maybe(ticketed for littering)


I mean, ultimately they might be required to drink it


Lots of comments in here that obviously didn't RTFA.

The point of the article and documentary is that Amazon listed and fulfilled delivery of products described as urine. They even sold said products in their food section.

The article further goes on to describe how the guy had his toddlers order knives and rat poison with the dot and got said items delivered without the mandatory (in the uk) age verification.

It's an article about an upcoming documentary of Amazon's public negligence.


Obviously not all of this is true. I chatted to Amazon driver for my apartment about some local Chicago sports and he talked to me forever. Ironically I had to end the conversation by saying I needed to use the bathroom. He’s definitely not timed.

Can’t wait for Season 2 where he chronicles how to game the ratings system.

I feel 99% of the people on HN understand it but on the other hand there’s people like my 70 yr old mom who look at that and think, oh what a fantastic product. She is very susceptible to dark patterns, has no concept of sold by Amazon vs 3rd party sellers, etc.


> Obviously not all of this is true. I chatted to Amazon driver for my apartment about some local Chicago sports and he talked to me forever. Ironically I had to end the conversation by saying I needed to use the bathroom. He’s definitely not timed.

In the US and the UK (where the interviews were conducted) Amazon deliveries are mostly contracted out to Delivery Service Partners who are small businesses that work exclusively for Amazon, drive Amazon vans, and wear Amazon uniforms. Amazon puts a lot of pressure on DSPs while giving DSPs the digital tools to apply pressure to their drivers, but there isn't a fully direct link and you can expect variation DSP-to-DSP and day-to-day.

Also, trying to calculate something as complicated as delivery routes to the maximum a human can do is bound to have outliers on either side. Eventually Amazon will figure it out and fix it, or they won't because the driver is smart enough to intentionally slow-roll it and feed them route data that validates their prediction.

https://www.protocol.com/workplace/amazon-delivery-program-t...


I might have miscommunicated my idea. I certainly think everything that documentary shows happens and agree with everything you say. No dispute there. I just don’t know what percentage it represents.

Maybe my driver is a corporate driver, not a DSP, and has different metrics etc. I don't know.

BTW I really like the term “partner” in delivery service partner. It’s a weasel word that covers up what’s really going on. They are not partnering in the common sense of the word like “my wife is my partner.” (Although on a long road trip she wouldn’t hesitated to make me pee in a bottle rather than stop for my baby bladder. Haha.)


nice little liability shroud there. Looks like a full-time-employee, walks like a FTE, but has no access to the same rights or protections as someone whose paycheck says Amazon on it.


It's pretty true. Here's a screen recording some guy took while working in the dispatch role. They're tracking every driver in real time and measuring against the expected progress

https://youtu.be/8SJYPf73iJI


funnily enough I had never seen for myself the whole "Amazon truck just stops in the middle of a 1 lane street to start delivering packages" until yesterday evening while driving.

That driver may not have felt rushed, but certainly other drivers do.


Did that driver you chatted with ever deliver a package to your house again?


Yes. He comes all the time. I haven’t been in this apartment for very long but he’s had this route for at least a year. I first met him on New Years Eve when ordering a board game to play that night. I came back from picking up last minute groceries and he was delivering packages. In the spring we talked NBA playoffs (he was very proud that he predicted the Nuggets to sweep the Lakers). During the summer when we talked about the Cubs. It’s coincidence we bump into each other but I see him driving the truck around.


Jeez, ask him out already.


No matter whether this is true or not, nothing amazes me no longer with this company.


I am wondering what happened with the major techs.

Amazon actually used to be the world's most customer-centric company, and Google used to try to not be evil.

Building long-term trust is good business, and I did a lot of business with both because I trusted them due to a good track record. They could charge more, and I'd still do business.

Now, they feel sleazy and evil. I've been burned enough times in the past five years that I would pick a random vendor I know nothing about over either. They need to significantly undercut on price or win on performance for me to even consider doing business.

Trust takes a long time to earn, and can be lost very quickly.


Cory Doctorow explains it. First you provide good value to customers to build your business and destroy competition (even losing money if necessary). Then, you provide good value to partners (e.g. vendors) at your customers' expense to get them locked in. Then in the final stage, you start extracting the value from those partners so that value flows to neither them, nor the end customers.


> Amazon actually used to be the world's most customer-centric company

What's contradictory here? They focus on their customers at the expense of their employees.


'Focusing on customers' = selling them piss?


>Amazon actually used to be the world's most customer-centric company, and Google used to try to not be evil.

Well, power corrupts people, and corporations are people.


they were sleazy before, too. AMZN and ebay both got big at first because for the first 10-ish years they escaped paying sales tax in the jurisdictions in which they did business. No wonder they had the lowest prices!



On a slightly different note, there is an "alternative medicine" stream popular among the right- in India called urine therapy. Some advocates of it suggest cow urine and some for drinking their own urine. The most famous and vocal advocate for drinking your own urine was the former Prime Minister of India, Morarji Desai.

- Miracles of Urine Therapy - https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Urine-Therapy-Desai-Morarji/...

- “60 Minutes” Interview (June 4, 1978) With Former Prime Minister of India Morarji Desai - https://infiniteunknown.net/2016/12/29/60-minutes-interview-...


Cow urine and cow dung cakes are in high demand in certain demographics. I'm certain Whole Foods will offer organic variants.

I'm conservative, so I can't see a huge demand for human urine. I suppose its possible, homeopathic urine drops of billionaires (Bezos, Buffet, Munger) and influencers (Kim Kardashian). NFTs exist, hard to comprehend, so, I guess this is entirely possible, with the right people at the top, like SBF, Adam Neumann. Adam Neumann would brand it MyFlow and Marc Andreessen will fund it, it fits with web3.

https://a16z.com/podcast/disrupting-the-worlds-largest-asset...


"Alexa, add wolf urine to shopping cart" is a fun thing to say at somebody else's house.


My children have put coyote urine in a cup they left in my cupholder. It's used as a deer deterrent, but aren't we the apex predator?


Yes, my mom would have us boys go out and piss outside by the garden for the same reason. My wife's azalea bush was getting eaten by deer too, so I told her the trick and got my son to water the bush. The tradition lives on.

Follow me for more life hacks.


There was a clip on Swedish public service television a few months ago about an old man that sprinkled his own pee (mixed with water) around his garden every day to keep the wild boars away. All his neighbors' gardens were devastated by the pigs, but they stayed away from his.


As long as it's not too concentrated (like diluted ~1:10), then for the plants it is an energy drink.


Yeah, but we don't want to actually kill them, just get them to not eat our garden.


Selling literal piss for supposed health benefits sounds right up Gwyneth Paltrow's alley.


Another idea comes to me is those fresh frothy steins of human urine to be served only to the winners of late stage capitalism. They deserve something real good after a hard day of funding Blockchain based AI / AI based Blockchain startups.


We really should rename the link. It is grossly misleading.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.


Which part is misleading?

Amazon (check) let (check) its drivers' urine (check) be sold (check) as energy drinks (check).


The implication is that Amazon was fully aware that this was happening and didn't care. That's what most people would think "let" meant here.

Yes, equivocating over the meaning of "let", the headline is technically true. Like so, so many other technically true but misleading headlines.


I'm with you on that. If they removed the product once they learned what it was, I'm not sure how an you could say they "let" someone sell it, rather than that they were tricked into selling it for a while. The name of the show is The Great Amazon Heist, which maybe tells you a little bit about what is going on. I agree with the article, and perhaps with the prankster, that Amazon didn't do enough due diligence on the products they sell, but "let" implies they would continue selling it even after knowing what it was.


Amazon is fully capable of doing due dilligence on new and changed listings. They could even charge a small listing fee to cover the costs of having some minimum wage peon look at it for 30 seconds and hitting the "yep, this is OK" button.

They choose not to implement sufficient checks. They bear some responsibility for what's being sold under their name on their website.


> rather than that they were tricked into selling it for a while

Can you think of any other retailer where this is or could be happening? Could you imagine Walmart selling cocaine? Yet somehow it's ok if Amazon does it because "we stopped after we discovered what we were doing was illegal"?


Amazon's cavalier approach to verifying new sellers and their listings lets things like this get into their store.


the implication would be that amazon is not responsible for the sale of bombs unless someone complains that they explode


It's their responsibility to know what is happening and to care what is happening on their store - just because they have completely vacated their responsibilities doesn't mean we should give them a break.


They didn't care, but clearly their checks and verifications failed, so they were probably not fully aware.


Why is this post flagged? In which way is it against the guidelines?


His work he did gaming Tripadvisor to make his shed the best restaurant in London was hilarious.


Man Wired is the _worst_. What a BS article


Paywall, but it feels too crazy to be true. There's a host of legal issues here for one.


For sure, and Amazon keeps getting away with it because nobody is bothered enough to sue, or Amazon makes changes fast enough for a judge to go "Honest mistake, carry on", or Amazon has an army of lawyers that can keep going until the person or organizating suing runs out of steam and / or money.


i've met people who like to drink piss, but they usually want it from someone attractive. (no offense to any amazon drivers reading this)


Please don't slander previous President's on this platform until the facts are released. Thanks.




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