Slashdot Mirror
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.
Amazon wants you to take all the risk to get into a race to the bottom with other hopefuls in a competition to see who can deliver packages for Amazon for the least possible cost.
Make no mistake about it, 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.
This really just comes off as an effort to avoid dealing with employment standards for delivery people...
If you answer to a corporation and not your customers, it's a franchise.
It's basically Amazon Avon.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
I've ordered several things with promised same day delivery in downtown Seattle for work, and none of made it even next day. The worst was a microwave that took seven days. I talked to the Uber driver that delivered it, and he said it had been in the back of his Jeep since the day we ordered it. My boss was so pissed off about people getting angry with him since we didn't have a microwave that we stopped buying from Amazon completely.
Now, we pay employees mileage to drive to local stores if you can buy locally. We're spending a lot more time and money because of Amazon's terrible local delivery.
Since Amazon already uses UPS and the post office today to deliver packages, how is this Amazon "avoiding" anything, other than having a more focused delivery service in some locations that is dedicated to providing good service to Amazon?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First they want to turn my fire tablet into an echo, and now they want me to change careers and become an echo for them? This is outrageous, I will not stand for this, oooh, 2 day shipping.
Do you Gentoo!?
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.
thus becoming ex-parte slaves like Uber drivers already are.
Yeah but at least the income drip is steadier and more reliable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Would it be better for Amazon to try and increase their costs, by dealing with these employment standards?
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.
They can afford to employ its own workers and vans.
If you're driving around with their branding and they set your hours, they're your boss. The pretence that the drivers are independent contractors is just an end run around labour regulations.
"The business owners will be able to make as much as $300,000 a year in profit running a full-sized fleet of 40 vans and managing 100 employees, according to Amazon. They'll be plugged into Amazon's software, which will determine where the drivers go."
Manage and maintain 40 vans, employ 100 people and the over head that goes with it and all you get is $300k a year?
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...
Well, what did you expect? You're the one who ordered a sack of bricks from Amazon!
#DeleteFacebook
If you only have one customer, you have no leverage. You're an employee with none of the benefits of being an employee. Ideally no customer should be more than a 3rd of your business, to reduce the risk of them taking that business away.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
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.
They can use automated T-shirt cannons that automatically load and fire. The driver just does a slow drive-by, and fires the packages at the front door.
Just run a parallel pot delivery service with the vans. Don't tell Amazon.
It's insane on its face. Nobody that signs up will be 'strictly complying' with the contract terms. Especially once Amazon sets up many of these services in all metro areas and starts making them bid on the deliveries.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
if you live in the blasted out ruins of the rust belt. You take whatever work you can to get enough money for food and rent (well, food _or_ rent). Folks don't realize how bad it is in large swaths of American. We're just shy of a second world country. Maybe 1.5?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
This is just a creative attempt to avoid providing health benefits or paying the $2-3K per employee for not doing so. In the end, it moves the cost of the health of most of these employees to other tax payers - in effect, providing a huge government subsidy to Amazon in the form of health care for the employees they require.
As long as the (essentially) franchises keep their employee count under 50, none of them will have to provide insurance. At the same time, Amazon will probably brag at how they are promoting small business development.
Employers should be required to pay the cost of living for the employees they require to do business and health is a critical part of that. If they don't, their profits are coming from the fact that the government is partially paying for the employees necessary to make those profits.
That works out to a profit margin (net income) of just $3000/yr per employee.
Most businesses have a net income per employee of tens of thousands of dollars ($28k/yr average for the fortune 500), with the best ones pulling in well over $100,000/yr per employee. Most of the companies with a net income per employee below $10,000/yr are huge corporations who gain economic stability from having 100,000+ employees (erratic performance by a single employee does not affect their bottom line much), and are able to leverage economies of scale to turn those meager profit margins into something worth doing.
If you take up Amazon's offer, you're basically dead meat. Especially since you're in the precarious position of only having a single customer, and have no leverage to negotiate prices - you either accept what Amazon says they'll pay you or they'll bankrupt you overnight. This is basically Amazon outsourcing the delivery business, where they take the lion's share of the profit for themselves, while offloading all the risk (fewer deliveries due to an economic downturn) onto the poor schmucks who took out loans to buy all those delivery vans and have to pay payroll and unemployment regardless of how poorly business goes.
At least in some states, I predict that they will run afoul of independent contractor v. employee rules. That said, there is a lot of this sort of thing in the trucking business.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
That's all that's required to start a franchise with them.
That is the same as with any other Franchise.
However if you wanted to start a local delivery business, Doing this with Amazon at least means you will have a paying customer (Amazon) .
If you are clever and you want to deliver other things, you can just get a big magnet to put over the Amazon logo, and put yours on it. And just give your workers a change of shirt, or a vest to put over the shirt.
All that being said, Having Amazon as your only customer is probably really good for a small shipping company. Being otherwise you will need to Compete against USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm not falling for it. If I had $10,000, I'd buy an eight-ball and head to Vegas. Hit up the blackjack tables, maybe see a show. Go to the Palomino Club and try to catch a venereal disease. At least I'd have some good memories when it was over. Those poor dudes who deliver Amazon parcels to my house look miserable.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why are they making 1099's use uniforms? much less buy them? That should make them employees?
Fedex got sued for doing this to drivers your own boss?? no fedex has a lot of control and you have to buy / rent all of there stuff to work for them.
I think you have liberalism confused with libertarianism.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
McDonald's has some legal issues with the level of control over the franchisees. So this seems like it will get to the same point.
So instead of relying on existing methods of delivery, UPS, USPS, FedEx, they want to get individuals involved. What that really means is that reasonably well paying jobs with delivery companies decrease in number, while poor schmucks in debt to Amazon increase.
This is happening throughout the US labor landscape. It's one of the reasons labor unions came into existence way back when. Unfortunately "union" is now treated as an expletive, and the very people that unions can help most are the ones who object to them most strongly.
But don't forget that UPS drivers are Teamsters, and won't take kindly to a bunch of amateurs taking a bite out of their livelihoods.
No, he's complaining about the shift in usage of the world itself: liberalism. From an article on the matter:
Liberalism has become one of the most widely misused and abused words in the American political lexicon. It represents, some say, politically “progressive thought,” based on the goal of “social justice” through greater “distributive justice” for all. Others declare it represents moral relativism, political paternalism, governmental license, and just another word for “socialism.” Lost in all of this is that fact that historically “liberalism” originally meant, and continues to mean for some, individual freedom, private property, free enterprise and impartial rule of law under constitutionally limited government.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
"I wonder if this is a cheap shot at Trump."
I disagree. I'd call it an expensive shot.
They state that you can use the vans for other business activity
Aren't most franchises based on areas. Like I cant start a McDonalds franchise across the street from your established store because they don't allow that. Will Amazon provide any protection to people who buy into this franchise like limiting the number of them in a given metro area?
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
If I had $10,000 lying around, I would not purchase an Amazon delivery franchise just to get a job. That would be stupid.
If I did it, Amazon would be my boss. Amazon is an extremely shitty boss that screws everyone harder the loser-down the totem pole they are.
Amazon should simply contract with existing providers. If those providers do not want to expand, then Amazon has to do something. Externalizing all of the risk of a business venture, while being shackled to Amazon Corporate's whims is a sickening proposition from a sick mind.
Yup, this is exactly it. Many employment regulations are waived for small employers. So if they just contract out to a lot of small employers, they think they can save money by avoiding those regulations. Thus, this is all about exploiting people to shave a little bit more money off the top.
Socialism is based around social ownership. Places like Norway and Iceland have strong privately-owned corporations, factor regulation, and product market deregulation. Basically, government. At the same time, they have strong government services and social insurances.
Democratic Socialism would be something like having all employees have equal voting share holding in all businesses, whereas private ownership requires you to buy shares. Credit unions are a democratic socialist type of institution, with each member owning a share in the union based on the money deposited, although that's sort of like private ownership where every member of the union is an equity partner instead of an equal partner.
Classical socialism, of course, involves the state owning everything. Single-payer healthcare with the Government owning and operating all medical practices and hospitals would be an example of a socialized healthcare system.
I favor state service covering the gap, such as by a private healthcare market, regulations around healthcare and around worker's rights (such as healthcare as a regulated benefit), and a Federal Health Insurer supplying health insurance to the uninsured. Obviously, a free market capitalism society tries to turn this socialist because employers would just try to not provide healthcare and shift the cost to the taxpayer, so you have regulation about what they need to supply and how they and the employee are taxed (e.g. payroll tax and wage tax at the same rate as the respective costs if the employee took the employer's basic healthcare) to remove the incentive.
Nationalization of a service by covering the gap from which the industry cannot profit at reasonable cost makes sense. Nationalization of an entire industry not so much. Socialization only makes sense when private industry, for technical reasons, cannot supply service efficiently (this only happens when you have a Prisoner's Dilemma issue: A and B can act independently, and the overall-optimal results are when A and B both take action X, but if A does X and B does Y then A incurs great cost and B incurs great profit, so both take action Y and achieve sub-optimal results). Usually, you can resolve that by regulation rather than socialization.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
But not door-door delivery.
After driving through the Great Plains this past year, where small towns (and I mean small towns) are scattered over vast areas, and where there are many small towns that got so small they closed up shop, and hearing about the problems of getting goods delivered out there, I thought that a good strategy for a behemoth like Amazon that wants to Sell Everything to Everyone would be to set up a system of delivery hubs across the plains.
Buy up abandoned buildings in abandoned (or nearly so) towns, and convert them into the equivalent of post office boxes for packages, with locking storage. With web enabled smart locks the locals would not need dedicated containers, but would be notified which container had their stuff, and they would be able to unlock it to retrieve it.
An additional iteration would be along the lines of the TFA, allowing other locals to sign up for delivering to their neighbors.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Hay, with Prime, it's prime entertainment watching deliverdude haul them across the yard.
Eventually you have enough to build a brick barbeque, or here in flyover, a backyard trash burner (better than a burn barrel).
Yeah, well Amazon wants a lot of things.
Anyone remember when they were just an online bookstore?
Mind you we at /. were probably too busy laughing at the Iraqi Information Minister at that time.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
If you have $10,000 and want to be your own boss, Amazon has a deal for you.
Be your own boss while you are an Amazon contractor? Who believe such a bad joke?
I can vouch for the "let's see who can do it for the cheapest cost" mentioned above... Here in Canada, at least in Quebec, their deliveries are handled by InterCom (or is it IntelCom?). Basically, the drivers are usually freshly arrived immigrants that barely speak French or English, very happy to have landed a job with a nice pay for the training... at the end of which they sign a contract they barely understand where they now deliver for Amazon with their own vehicle, pay their own gas, and are paid per-delivery at a ridiculous rate that really should be illegal. Actually, it IS well under our equally ridiculous minimum wage, but they're self-employed so InterCom can get away with it. This is why those poor drivers will leave your goddamn package by your front door, god help you if like me that front down is downtown in front of a shady boulevard, they have to deliver as many as possible as fast as possible to, somehow, make it profitable. I don't recall the exact amount per package, but it was something that didn't make any sense, in terms of making it profitable. InterCom is located right by the Montreal airport... So yeah, my most heartfelt sympathies for anyone that unfortunately ends up working for Amazon, anywhere in the chain.
You're not an employee of them so you have zero rights and whatever contract your "independent company" signs with them is undoubtedly so lopsided and inequitable that it isn't even funny. And because Amazon are basically evil, they'll probably oversaturate the market with more drivers than necessary just so they can stiff drivers on bonuses and game the system in other ways.
Democratic Socialism would be something like having all employees have equal voting share holding in all businesses, whereas private ownership requires you to buy shares.
Classical socialism, of course, involves the state owning everything.
You've jumbled things up a bit. Yes, classical socialism involves social/common - in practice, by the state - ownership of the means of production. It also however involves a "dictatorship of the proleteriat", i.e. one-party rule by a vanguard party of the ruling class which will establish first socialism, and then, via socialism, slowly transition to a classless society, thus achieving communism.
"Democratic socialism" means social i.e. state ownership of the means of production, but a political democracy - so no one-party, dictatorship of the proleteriat stuff, we have a real democracy where people meaningfully vote and get to decide what the state does with those means of production it controls. It's still a planned economy but people get to vote on the plan, basically. Note that this is different from "social democracy", which what you described in your first paragraph (Norway etc.), which means a mixed (state and private ownership) market economy that is extensively regulated and where there is a large state-funded social safety net. To play around with the words of Dubek, social democracy is "capitalism with a human face" whereas democratic socialism is "socialism with a human face".
What you have described as democratic socialism is in fact called worker's self-management and was the official ideology of communist Yugoslavia from about the late 1950s/early 1960s (with major reforms resulting in the 1970s) to its demise in the 1990s. Under this ideology, previously state-owned and controlled socialist enterprises where restructured as "Organizations of United Labour" (OUR in Serbo-Croatian) run by workers' councils and not by the state/Communist Party (though the two retained a large influence, especially in large and important companies). Even some public institutions (hospitals, universities, etc.) were reorganized into OURs. Btw, the system still wasn't democratic - political power was still monopolized by the Communist Party (officially no longer a political "party" but instead a "union" or "league"), so it definitely wasn't democratic socialism. Interestingly, OURization brought in a large degree of market competition and quasi-competition into the system, as, theoretically, these were all companies set up independently by workers and were not co-ordinated by the state/party. In practice, it was a heavily-regulated quasi-market economy with a huge dose of government intervention, and OURs essentially could not go bankrupt. In the end, both an actual capitalist market economy, as well as a classical planned socialist economy, were more efficient.
It also however involves a "dictatorship of the proleteriat", i.e. one-party rule by a vanguard party of the ruling class which will establish first socialism, and then, via socialism, slowly transition to a classless society, thus achieving communism.
Politburo will never give up power. It will only transition to new hands as people learn to cheat the system. All economics is based around economy: people seek to expend the least means and gain the most ends. We call it financial sense, efficiency, productivity, greed, whatever; it's all the same thing.
Regulation ensures control over those behaviors so they produce the outcomes we call "efficiency" and "productivity" instead of the ones we call "greed". Likewise, proper social services, collective risk sharing, and other economic programs maximize efficiency.
Centralization attempts to eliminate market inefficiency: we get all these gains by uncoordinated economic actors wadding things together and exterminating each other (while trying to cheat); by focusing on societal outcomes instead of personal gain, we use that effort to improve efficiency instead of wasting it on competition. Unfortunately, we don't have any way to measure societal outcomes before implementation. We don't even have a way to define societal outcomes before implementation: your stupid selfie stick bullshit turned out to be something a bunch of people liked and wanted, and any reasonable central planner would have done something more-interesting...to politburo.
The eventual discrediting of socialism came from the recognition that a market is a huge, self-constructed (that is: efficiently-constructed) computer processing market data. That data grows exponentially with linear resource growth, so you can't get ahead of the curve unless resource usage is also the computation of optimal resource usage (= market). The free market model doesn't produce optimal results; the regulated free market produces more-optimal results; central planning does even worse than the unregulated free market. It's not perfect; it's just the best we have.
Note that this is different from "social democracy", which what you described in your first paragraph (Norway etc.), which means a mixed (state and private ownership) market economy that is extensively regulated and where there is a large state-funded social safety net.
Essentially, yes. I'm the current President of Nordic Model USA, a Social Democracy think tank and lobbying organization that seeks to bring this type of system to the United States. I'm the President because...I'm still working on the LLC filing (this organization is my back-up plan after this week's election). Part of the official policy is opposition of privatization (government service becomes private) and socialization (government takes over an industry) and support of nationalization (government fills the gap with a government-run service, as opposed to contracting with private services). That means privatization and socialization are okay if nationalization and regulation cannot achieve acceptable ends; whereas nationalization and regulation are okay if they aren't expected to produce specifically worse outcomes.
We can actually beat Norway's effectiveness with low taxes. I don't expect any tax increases in my short-term plans--which entirely eliminate homelessness and hunger, and probably recessions--and the long-term goal is something like 8% effective tax rate on the middle class and 25% on the highest income earners (although it might fall closer to 30%). Those tax rates are secondary: services first, efficiency first, fiscal responsibility first, and achieving this should create an enormous surplus which requires tax system rebalancing.
I have, as well, designed a tax strategy which allows us to essentially pick a structural progressive tax curve and set the rate. That means raising the rate by 25% (e.g. 40% to 50%) raises it by 25% on everyone: low-in
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I'm not free so long as someone controls my access to food, shelter, health care and education. You see it as "distributive justice" but that's not correct. The goal of progressives isn't justice (funny word that, plenty loaded). The goal is to have a world where nobody's too poor to live. We're not there. By all accounts 45000 Americans die for lack of health care ever year (preventable diseases left untreated).
That goal in turn leads to real freedom. Real freedom is being able to say 'no' when you boss tries to screw you and not dying of starvation or a preventable heart attack as a result.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/