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Amazon Wants You To Start a Business To Deliver Its Packages (cnn.com)
If you have $10,000 and want to be your own boss, Amazon has a deal for you. From a report: Starting Thursday, you can apply to start your very own small business, delivering Amazon Prime packages in Amazon branded vans and uniforms. The company wants to help launch small businesses in the United States dedicated to taking its packages on the last step of their journey: from local Amazon sorting centers to the customers who ordered them. It announced the new program on Wednesday at a press event in Seattle.
It's the latest attempt by Amazon to gain greater control of the delivery network at the core of its Prime business, which ships 5 billion packages a year globally. [...] Amazon's new "Delivery Service Partners" and their staff members won't be employed by the tech company. The initial $10,000 costs will go to helping them start an independent business that has to begin with at least five delivery vans and ramp up to 20 vans over an undisclosed period of time.
It's the latest attempt by Amazon to gain greater control of the delivery network at the core of its Prime business, which ships 5 billion packages a year globally. [...] Amazon's new "Delivery Service Partners" and their staff members won't be employed by the tech company. The initial $10,000 costs will go to helping them start an independent business that has to begin with at least five delivery vans and ramp up to 20 vans over an undisclosed period of time.
Personally I want Slashdot to stop writing stupid headlines like some cheap tabloid rag. Especially since we now have two "Amazon wants" stories in a row.
It is also a way for them to erode their dependence on big carriers (UPS, Fedex, USPS, etc.). The bigger you are, the harder it is to be pushed around. These small independent carriers will be at the mercy of Amazon feeding them a stream of business. Oh, and they will also squeeze the hell out of them, like they do their warehouse workers.
I pay Amazon for the privilege of delivering their packages, under their rules, and I can only use their branded vans (which, no doubt, I have to pay for), and what a great deal, huh? And I'm not even an Amazon employee?
Okay, here's a slight problem with that.... FedEx Ground already lost that legal battle. They had "contractors" who had to wear FedEx branded uniforms, drive FedEx branded vans (which they had to pay for and were on the hook for all but the simplest maintenance), and could only deliver non-FedEx packages after they finished their deliveries for that day, but (and this is important), according to FedEx, they weren't employees.
The contractors sued, and won. The judge basically ruled that FedEx was treating them like employees when it benefited FedEx to do so, but for things like health care and 401(k), oh no, they're not employees.
The judge was not amused.
So, I don't see this going the way Amazon thinks it will.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
No thanks. Not interested. FedEx, UPS, USPS have earned my respect for the quality of their delivery. I have little confidence in Amazon digging up someone who wants to deliver packages. I once had a package delivered by a gig-based delivery service, and it did not result in a good experience. http://nymag.com/selectall/201...
Because these are designed to replace their use of UPS and the post office. I live in the suburbs, close enough to a major city that over the years Amazon deliveries have moved from UPS/USPS to primarily Amazon's delivery people (which are currently Uber-style "contractors") over the last few years. Amazon's delivery people are both obviously cheaper for them and fairly terrible at their job.
Amazon will dole packages out to the lowest bidder, and the only ones who will make money are those who consider their time to be worthless, thus becoming ex-parte slaves like Uber drivers already are.
"Slaves"? Really? Slave sort of implies you cannot quit and go do something else. Uber drivers aren't slaves either. Just because they are willing to working for crap wages doesn't mean they are obligated to continue to do so.
In reality Amazon will not be taking bids. They will set a flat rate (which will be aggressively cheap) and conditions to ensure service quality and it's up to the delivery company to make a profit. Honestly I have trouble seeing this working out well with high quality service but maybe they'll figure it out.
I'm really beginning to seriously think that this whole culture of 'everything delivered to your door' just isn't sustainable -- and perhaps not healthy, either. People are lazy and fat enough as-is without there being more conveniences to give them more excuses to not get off the couch and move around, and also more excuses to not interact with their fellow human beings. I think many of the social problems we're having these days are exacerbated by people being more and more socially-avoidant, and their fellow human beings becoming more and more an abstraction instead of fully 'three-dimensional' beings.
I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare