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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course it's not going to be actual profit - if Bezos could turn a 30-fold profit on this he'd be launching the delivery company himself.
Citation, please.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
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