Pee bottles, constant monitoring and ignoring stop signs: Driving for Amazon

Pee bottles, constant monitoring and ignoring stop signs: Driving for Amazon(cnbc.com)

45 points by fireball_blaze 5 years ago | 23 comments

Don't see why Amazon gets singled out for drivers peeing in bottles. UPS drivers, which are members of a very powerful union also do this. Their official forum is completely filled with posts about urinating in bottles. They're not even complaining, just casually discussing, because it's an every-day part of the job.

https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/what-do-you-do-w...

https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/urine-bottles.36...

https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/urine-bottles-le...

I guess public restrooms aren't exactly the most common thing in the world on suburban delivery routes. Don't see how this is the parcel company's fault.

chomp 5 years ago | |

A couple reasons, one is that Amazon made that weird denial tweet with "You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?", denying that their drivers ever peed in bottles. Most companies just put out a statement "We're looking for ways to improve etc etc...", so it was bizarre enough that the meme has carried forward. Amazon has a 1.75T market cap and is reporting profits in the many billions, so people are looking for them to start humanizing their jobs.

UPS drivers are, like you said, part of a union and if it was an issue, they have bargaining power and could get it addressed.

mindslight 5 years ago | |

I think it's just a thing that sounds gross to anyone who hasn't tried it, but it's actually very convenient. If I were given a 20 minute break to drive to a restroom, I'd pee in a bottle and take a 19 minute break from driving.

fireball_blaze 5 years ago | |

Amazon gets singled out because they are one of the largest, most powerful companies in the history of mankind, by almost any measure: market cap, revenue, employees, etc.

UPS is not.

Amazon wields immense power over multiple industries, and they are scrutinized as such.

sschueller 5 years ago | |

Amazon sets the standard that other copy and Amazon actually has the funds to fix it but would rather add another point to their stock price.

PedroBatista 5 years ago |

My question is: Do people REALLY care about these drivers?

Because I get the feeling that "Yeah that sucks, Amazon should do something about it.." is generally followed by "Where's my package? I ordered it yesterday, where's my f*$#ing package?!"

This IS a government problem, it takes more than a few tweets to make a behemoth like Amazon to play ball and people generally only do what's in their self-interest, again where are the politicians?

yepthatsreality 5 years ago | |

My take away is no because the same outlets that cover Amazon’s indiscretions also usually turn around and deliver Amazon Prime deal offerings that provide affiliate income. The negative reporting is balanced out by affiliate needs and the consumer’s want for a convenience they don’t really need (2-day shipping). Why do most people claim they need 2-day shopping? Because they didn’t have it before and they can have it. It has nothing to actually do with physical need.

Look at US electronics related news sites today for a plastering of these affiliate ads. Then instead of clicking the deal link, do a search for negative news about Amazon to seeing the ironic morals.

Clubber 5 years ago | |

>again where are the politicians

I suspect many of their campaigns were partially funded by Amazon.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/totals?id=D00002...

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/lobbying?id=D000...

$12M in 2020. Politicians aren't very expensive and the ROI is incredible.

I see the Amazon shills work fast. Do they make you use piss jugs in the office too?

Merem 5 years ago | |

They would benefit from what I care about at least. Though, not sure the situation here is the same as in the US. Basically, I ordered seven items off Amazon (shipped by them, non-prime) earlier this month (despite their bloated website with terrible UI which mostly keeps me away). Told them to ship them together but they split it into four separate packages which arrived one day after another. So that's one way to unnecessarily increase the workload.

(Another annoying thing is that it went to four different neighbours but that's a separate issue.)

ishiz 5 years ago |

Amazon is in an interesting situation. They create the delivery routes, dispatch the drivers, and set the KPIs the drivers need to meet, but if anything bad happens they can say "The driver isn't an Amazon employee so we're not responsible." If a crash occurs you often can't figure out what the contracting company was as the trucks are often unmarked and Amazon won't help as they have plausible deniability that the truck was even performing an Amazon delivery. If a contracting company is identified with a crash it often goes out of business the next day and those records are lost.

parksy 5 years ago |

20ish years ago I was driving ingredients to restaurants. The business owners had metrics that required drivers to break speed and traffic laws in order to hand off all of the ordered goods to the customers. They never specifically ever said to speed or break the law, but the amount of stuff they piled our vans and trucks with made it impossible to deliver in the timeframes they set.

I was grateful to get the job, as previously I was fired from a 24x7 McDonalds store - I had used my personal vehicle to transport boxes of product from the owner's other store to meet demand after a rostered shift, and being sleepy after doing a graveyard shift plus that, woke up to the owner calling me and saying "if you can't even bother to wake up for your job, don't bother coming in again."

Anyway so in the first two days of my induction, my trainer taught me about driving over median curbs, waving as if you made an accidental mistake down one way streets, doing u-turns into oncoming traffic to get to a street that took a few extra minutes to get to, demonstrating the most efficient way to park the vehicle in front of the target establishment.

So this is nothing new. Amazon can stick it if they've just managed to commercialise it better than all the small businesses, but yeah, this has been happening since warehouses, telephones, and automobiles existed together. Just "wave and pretend" like you made a mistake, or this is normal, or whatever. Some low-level shitkicker will get the fine for parking in a fire zone, or jumping a curb, or whatever to meet targets. Alternatively, they can quit or be fired if they don't like doing that. for me having the cheese cutting guy ask constantly if I was gay and if he could shave my haemorrhoids was the cherry on the cake.

My heart sincerely goes out to all drivers. It is a very unforgiving task for many.

nradov 5 years ago | |

This is a general issue in many industries way beyond just delivery services. Executives set overly aggressive targets where the only way to succeed is to break the rules. When an underling is caught the exec has plausible deniability because they never explicitly told anyone to break the law.

This was a major factor in the Wells Fargo account fraud scandal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...

swader999 5 years ago |

They are called piss jugs. Thanks TPB.

strangus 5 years ago |

Rules of the road...

markdog12 5 years ago | |

"Way of the road bubs", "piss jugs"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77zYvVTvTcU

bruce343434 5 years ago |

320 packages in 10 hours is 1.875 package per minute

PedroBatista 5 years ago | |

They deliver many at once. ( office buildings, etc ). But still, it's ridiculous.

everyone 5 years ago |

I think at this point its clearly unethical to use Amazon, for a multitude of reasons. Just dont use it.

BitwiseFool 5 years ago | |

I do what I can to avoid Amazon where possible, by either ordering directly from the company or by using a competing online retailer. But sadly my employer uses AWS and we even have to train/certify X% of our employees to use it. Even worse, I suspect just about every step in the process of getting my product depends on AWS in some way.

blowski 5 years ago | |

I'm trying, but... there are a lot of vendors who only sell through Amazon. Some of the alternative vendors are even worse. And Amazon is in so many sectors by now that saying "don't use them" is unfeasible. It's like saying "don't use oil" in the 1950s.

Wherever possible, I either shop local or use an online vendor I know to be more ethical. And I encourage others to do the same.

But to seriously sort this out requires action at an international level. Without that, even in the unlikely event we break up Amazon, they'll just be replaced by A.N.Other unethical company. They're like the mafia - we need to do more than lock up one family, we need to get rid of the whole kit and caboodle.

jnwatson 5 years ago | |

The problem with this approach is that you're biasing your purchasing decision based on what companies get the most sunlight.

We want to encourage companies to be more open, not closed. Assuming that Amazon is worse than Walmart or Baidu or UPS because you haven't heard about those other companies lately just encourages secrecy.

Clubber 5 years ago | |

Amazon is displacing Walmart which displaced all the Main St. mom and pop shops that kept the country running. Main St. shut down, out of business long ago, so the only alternative is Walmart, which is just as bad.

mikey_p 5 years ago | | |

Somewhere in there is the catalog business as well, Sears, JC Penney, etc. I imagine those were also perceived as disruptive, but it's been so long we're mostly forgotten