Amazon Launches 'Flex,' a Crowdsourced Delivery Service 145
sckirklan writes: Amazon has rolled out a new service called Amazon Flex. It lets people sign up to deliver packages using their mobile phone and their car, earning $18-25/hr while doing so. Think Uber, but for package delivery. Their goal is to fully support one-hour delivery within certain cities. The service is available in Seattle to start, and it'll soon expand to Manhattan, Baltimore, Miami, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Portland. No news on what they think of bicycle couriers, but given their focus on being green, I'd imagine something is in the works.
No News on bikes? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's on the main page:
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I've seen Amazon bikes in Seattle already, though it was a bike with a big branded box and two tires in the rear, and the person riding it didn't seem all that experienced. Might've just been a test type thing.
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In Seattle, the Jimmy John's delivery guys often ride bikes - especially in the U District. It'd be funny if I could order an Italian Night Club and a dozen batteries, then have the same guy deliver both!
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In Seattle, the Jimmy John's delivery guys often ride bikes - especially in the U District. It'd be funny if I could order an Italian Night Club and a dozen batteries, then have the same guy deliver both!
I did not know that Jimmy John's sold vibrators. But a dozen batteries? Either you like to keep busy or that thing is HUGE.
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I'm guessing Amazon hired the bicycle guys for their Prime 1-hour delivery experiment (which has been a few weeks now), and this is the next step. Not sure why they'd hire the bicycle guys and not the couriers, but perhaps they want to buy the bikes, but not the cars? Hard to say - they definitely bought (or leased) a bunch of trucks for Amazon fresh.
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We get Amazon deliveries up here in Canada by girls on Rollerblades. I ended up getting involved with one of them, long story short, very high maintenance. I had to get in a fight with all of her exes, who were all kind of dicks. One of them killed me, but luckily I had an extra life. Anyway, it somehow all seemingly worked out in the end.
The point I am trying to make is that this is a bad idea since Amazon delivery girls are bad news and attract really crazy exes. Having more of these girls around can onl
Figure out independent contractor vs employee? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I emailed them asking to see their contract.
Re:Figure out independent contractor vs employee? (Score:4, Interesting)
Uber went too-far... They dictated the acceptable models of vehicles, their condition, where and when drivers needed to position themselves, etc., etc. Amazon has far less reason to dictate such minutiae, so they're far less likely to run into trouble.
My concern would be more about security... In a gated community, instead of just the UPS/FedEx/USPS drivers needing to be allowed entry, now anyone and everyone can claim they're delivering a package... Any thief who want to case a building can conveniently sign-up as a delivery driver, and have a legitimate reason to be at the location, studying the security layout. The risk used-to be failure to check on *fake* delivery men, now the legitimate ones can be the criminals.
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When you sign up to work for this, I would doubt that you get to restrict your deliveries to a couple of gated communities. Unless you're really hard up, very patient or preternatrally stupid, there are much easier ways of casing upper class houses.
Deliver pizzas. Pretend you're from 'Mission Impossible'. Wear decent clothes and walk through the area.
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Oddly enough, gates and doors don't unlock themselves when a well-dressed gentleman walks by... You need a good reason to be granted access to a locked area.
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Gated community "security" is only effective vs opportunistic street crime, it's never helped vs a clever, determined thief. While almost all theft is the former, the latter is the guy who spends hours looting everything of value.
The cops do know about Uber, and there's been at least one Uber driver arrested after taking someone to the airport, then going back to rob their place. Anyone doing anything that obvious will get busted, regardless of the delivery service.
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A great number of breaking and entering complaints are idiot junkies looking for a fix, and the skilled cat burglar is a tiny minority of the throngs of dummies who spend half their lives free & high...and the other half with all bills paid, incarcerated & sober.
drones? (Score:2, Funny)
What happened to the drones? Oh wait? What? We're the drones?
Re:drones? (Score:5, Funny)
That's "Interchangeable Biological Units" you insensitive clod!
I was waiting for this (Score:2)
This is the uber of the owner driver truck/van model, should be interesting to see what happens!
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Hmmm. Common Carrier, Commercial Livery, competition with the USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL. Add in liability insurance costs, possible theories about CDLs for certain products, and let's see how far this one gets. Novel idea.... but they battle titans and their supply chain.
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This is the uber of the owner driver truck/van model, should be interesting to see what happens!
I would love to sign up for this. Imagine, I could _get_paid_ to intercept packages and tamper with them. Install my malware right on people's new phones, loggers in their computers and peripherals, the possibilities are endless.
I wonder if many NSA moles will be signing up as well.
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You're gonna spend your days infiltrating peoples toilet paper and associated sundries? Whatever floats your boat, I suppose.
I think the NSA workbook is just a bit farther along than this.
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You're gonna spend your days infiltrating peoples toilet paper and associated sundries?
Imagine that we infiltrate the toilet paper and install devices that report back all sorts of data pertaining to each wipe! That's gonna take targeted advertising to the next level!
Sort of how dogs sniff each other's ass to know what the other dog eats, how healthy it is, if it lives in a house or on the street, etc.
I always love hearing about city-based services (Score:5, Funny)
It's always nice to read about the high speed fiber, car services, delivery services, etc. that I know will NEVER EVER come to my small city.
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Do you have high-speed internet? (I mean higher than slow-ass DSL)
If so, then don't worry, you're doing better than everyone who's getting this. They're in Seattle. Seattle has no high-speed internet. [thestranger.com]
So while these people might enjoy getting Amazon packages delivered to them in an hour, they're going to have a miserable time just browsing the Amazon website with ~128kbps DSL to make these purchases.
I live in a rather rural area currently (a very very small town) and I have very fast cable internet, and h
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Remember when Craigs List was San Francisco only?
Let them work out the bugs.
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Actually, it often works the opposite way around... Look at the biggest cities in the US and you'll find lower penetration of fiber than the less-populated suburbs. Or take the extreme case and look at most of Western Europe, where labor prices are so high that replacing the (slow) DSL networks just isn't economic.
Plenty of sparsely populated suburbs in the US have F
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The funny part is that this used to be Time-Warner, before the big trade. Ever
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The state outlaws my city from having it's own municipal mountain. So I have to wait for a private company to bring one in, which will never happen because some company already has a monopoly and can charge us $80/month for a molehill instead.
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Hey, sometimes laws can be changed. My current small town (actually, possibly the state, but in some way where the city can overrule it or opt out) has some non-compete restrictions with services like internet, but we've got it on the ballot to let the city start providing fiber internet at 10x the going speeds. I'm pretty excited about that ballot item.
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That's why you don't live in a small city. You thought the reduced cost of living was free? It comes at the expense of reduced quality of life.
I expect your definition of "reduced quality of life" is much different than the parent poster's.
Now you're a professional jack of all trades(the inane shit people used to waste their free time on before Silicon Valley startups allowed people to outsource their domestic distractions boggles the mind). Enjoy doing your own laundry, driving to the grocery store, and fixing your own toilet.
As opposed to, what, your parents' doing it? Most adults - even in the "big city" - mostly do this stuff for themselves. You might be surprised how easy it is to repair a toilet, and it won't cost you $200 to do so.
And it might surprise you to know that plumbers and dry cleaners existed long before Silicon Valley was a thing.
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How's the opera/theater/sporting events?
Most people living in big cities go to the opera, theatre, or big sporting event about as often as someone living in the countryside, i.e. once in a blue moon.
How many kinds of pizza are there that you can walk to?
Who gives a fuck? It's like asking how many different burger joints you need.
Do they have conveyor belt sushi restaurants in your town? Is there even a real Japanese restaurant
Probably. At least here in the UK, even medium sized towns have dozens of different types of restaurant including lots of different Asian cuisines.
Big cities have one real advantage: when you're young and single there are many more opportunities for meeting random sexual
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That's why you don't live in a small city. You thought the reduced cost of living was free? It comes at the expense of reduced quality of life.
Not always true. This story is about a delivery service by Amazon which is being tried out in Seattle. Seattle has no broadband internet service. I live in a tiny town and I can watch Netflix, which is something that people in Seattle cannot do. I'm already thinking about where I want to move next in a year or three, and while I am looking at larger cities, Seatt
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If you have Comcast, you probably don't actually live in Seattle.
Internet in the Seattle Metropolitan Area (Kirkland, Bellevue, Renton, Burien, etc) is fine.
Internet in the City of Seattle is often OFFENSIVELY bad (LTE, ISDN, Satellite, Dialup, and in some cases 768mbps DSL being the options).
It's because the City of Seattle is legitimately insane and demands that any new company that wants to provide infrastructure must pay for all repairs/maintenance that the previous companies have neglected. So no one i
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768kbps -_-
I should have noticed that before posting. Oh well.
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It doesn't sound like you're too big a fan of city life in general, though.
I've lived in cities and large metro areas before. I used to live outside NYC, and wouldn't mind living in Manhattan if I could find a job that paid well, but the industries there don't work too well with my skillset and I really don't like the idea of working in finance.
I just don't like the idea of DSL speeds. As the other poster noted, if you have Comcast and those speeds, you don't live in Seattle. Other cities don't have that
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Not all of us consider living at Google HQ the sum of human existence.
Insurance policy (Score:4, Interesting)
Check the insurance policy on your car before rushing to Amazon to offer your services... Chances are that this is considered as a commercial usage of your car and you're not covered.
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And $18-25/hr? How is that supposed to give us our Everyday Low Prices?
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If they get one driver to deliver a bunch of packages to a group of closely-located addresses which is 15 minutes away, it'll be a lot cheaper than paying FedEx $5-10/box.
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What a ripoff! A taxi driver easily makes $60-100/hr, before his expenses (assuming around $2/mile and 30-50 miles traveled).
So you get minimum wage for doing delivery work + using your car for Amazon's benefit.
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Read my post again... that's before expenses. He still has to pay for gas, for car maintenance, for his medallion, for time and fuel wasted finding customers etc.
If you still don't believe me, here's the US per mile taxi rates [taxifarefinder.com] and they range from roughly $2 to $3 per mile. That's $60 to $150 per hour for a distance of 30 miles to 50 miles. Yup, if you can cut expenses, and limit time wasted on finding customers, a taxi driver can make more than any engineer.
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Came here for this. It most definitely is use for commercial purposes.
I would hope that Amazon has a way to mitigate that issue otherwise it's pretty cruddy to let people hang themselves without fair warning.
Also, I wonder how USPS feels about this considering they expanded delivery to sunday for amazon.
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Came here for this. It most definitely is use for commercial purposes.
I would hope that Amazon has a way to mitigate that issue otherwise it's pretty cruddy to let people hang themselves without fair warning
No doubt it's covered by Amazon's own insurance, or whatever the Uber line is this week.
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Check the insurance policy on your car before rushing to Amazon to offer your services... Chances are that this is considered as a commercial usage of your car and you're not covered.
It's all part of the monopolistic government-delivery service-insurance industry complex that is ruining the Western world.
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It's all part of the monopolistic government-delivery service-insurance industry complex that is ruining the Western world.
Of course... of course... Can you just stay still for a moment?
Give me your arm... you will only feel a little prick... There, relax, it will all be over in a moment.
Re: Insurance policy (Score:2)
Where I live, we call that fraud...
Does this work out for the driver? (Score:5, Insightful)
8 hour shift is $200 max. Out of that comes fuel & vehicle wear and tear, IRS say 57c per mile and I would have thought 20 miles an hour was reasonable including stops etc so that $91.20 on an 8 hour shift. Add to that cost of capital of the car, insurance, accountants, other ancillary "run your own business costs" and I'm struggling to see you making $10 an hour.....
Re:Does this work out for the driver? (Score:5, Insightful)
Over here in the Netherlands delivery services mostly started using "independent contractors" (but not really) and that's about how it ended up, they were working for less than minimum wage.
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They tend to be independent contractors in Australia as well. But I know they are making more than minimum wage, a friend works for Couriers Please. It's hard work but she seems to enjoy it compared to other things she has done.
But what I don't understand is why you wouldn't just go and work at Maccas you would probably take more home with less stress.
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But what I don't understand is why you wouldn't just go and work at Maccas you would probably take more home with less stress.
Maccas... swell done.
Some pimply-faced assistant manager might be on your ass at Maccas, so I don't know about the less stress angle, but some folks will take a cut in pay to be the boss.
Even their own boss.
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And I do get that. But at $10 an hour with having to put in your own capital..... I dunno, I kinda think I would prefer to offer lawn mowing services.
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like begging or being a food/crack whore
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Sadly, that's the new way whether it's done by Uber, Amazon, even pizza delivery. It will soon be global except for intellectual workers, construction workers to some degree, and some others (police, etc).
People always talk about minimum wage and hiking it.
But the value of their work is less than the minimum wage because of technological advances. In this case, when drones can deliver the value of these delivery contractors might drop from ~$15/hr to $0.50/hr.
Instead, the focus should be on price deflatio
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The only way I see this being worthwhile is if you can plan it out so that you can swing by the Amazon warehouse and grab some stuff and deliver it to a place that happens to be along a route you're already traveling along, such as your commute home.
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I wouldn't want to give random, untraceable people the ability to tamper with packages either.
Well presumably, these drivers wouldn't be people who just signed up that day with their phone, they'd have to go through some kind of application process with Amazon to get this job, and then Amazon would track which drivers got which packages.
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Add to that the cost of subscribing to a commercial insurance for your car.
Re:Does this work out for the driver? (Score:4, Insightful)
vehicle wear and tear, IRS say 57c per mile
Unless you are putting miles on a brand new luxury car, there is no way that normal wear and tear is going to be anywhere close to 57c per mile ... yet you can still deduct that much, which makes most of your actual income tax-free.
I'm struggling to see you making $10 an hour.....
Plenty of people would be happy to clear $10 an hour in a job that allows them to be out on the road with no boss looking over their shoulder. You live a sheltered life if you think $10/hour is a bad wage for someone with no skills.
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A significant portion of the income would be taxed still. And call it sheltered if you like but the National Minimum Wage where I live is $17.25 per hour. So in my opinion $10 per hour for work in a first world country where you have to invest significant capital upfront to get the job IS a shit wage. Especially when you combine it with no guarantee of work so no guarantee of pay.
Looking at numbeo the average monthly rental on a 1 bedroom apartment, not in the city is 802.14 per month. That means that t
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"the National Minimum Wage where I live is $17.25 per hour"
What nation is that?
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Australia.
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I believe that 57 cents is for all costs. Capital investment, gas and other consumables, insurance (for commercial driving you need commercial insurance), maintenance and repair, miscellaneous costs, whatever. For me, it's still going to come well under 57 cents, but I drive a reliable small car.
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8 hour shift is $200 max. Out of that comes fuel & vehicle wear and tear, IRS say 57c per mile and I would have thought 20 miles an hour was reasonable including stops etc so that $91.20 on an 8 hour shift. Add to that cost of capital of the car, insurance, accountants, other ancillary "run your own business costs" and I'm struggling to see you making $10 an hour.....
Though I'd suggest the 57 cents per mile reimbursement allowance is fairly generous for a courier with an economical auto, you are indeed onto the crux of the issue.
Delivery contractors will be incentivized to cut corners on things like maintenance, replacement tires, oil changes, and so on.
I've been in business when I had money, and when I did not. It is infinitely more difficult to do everything properly when you are poor.
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Same. I work for myself and have had times when I have struggled to meet the bills. But I haven't been tied to an hourly rate which meant I had more that I could achieve when things go well.
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"IRS say 57c per mile"
Just because the IRS allots 57c/mile doesn't mean that it actually cost that to run a vehicle. I'm not saying you'll get rich driving your own vehicle, but if you're willing to drive a cheap fuel efficient car into the ground, you can make ok money being a delivery person.
why uber has not done this? (Score:2)
Please no, just stop with this (Score:1)
Sure we can "leave a bad review" but by then it's too fucking late. And to what end - they get "fired" and I got broken shit - big deal, they just move on to the next Uber job.
With the traditional services, you jack around - like the fedEx monitor delivery guy and get caught, you rea
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I've noticed UPS just delivering packages to the local post office recently. This is just BS.... as USPS takes another extra day to deliver stuff.
Because USPS can do last mile cheaper than UPS, at least under certain circumstances. FedEx has shipped "Ground" to Alaska by flying it to Anchorage and letting the Post Office deliver it. It's just business.
My first thought is, Please, No! (Score:3)
I got the infamous You were not home for your delivery! Why were you not home for your delivery? Please visit the USPS site to reschedule your delivery! email this month. Well, if Amazon _really_ sent the package USPS like their order confirmation email said, USPS would know that I had a fraggin HOLD on my mail during the labor day week surrounding that day.
I really, really, really do not want more creative delivery. I just want really stable, logical, predictable delivery. I dont want people on bicycles trying to find my address. Sweet Christ on a Pogo Stick, is that really too much to ask?
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be a better option if amazon let you choose which delivery method to use. My building security won't let just some asshole in but a uniformed delivery person with proper authorization acquired before hand can enter.
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I do this whenever I go to the west coast: schedule a redeye back east on Saturday night, go eat a nice dinner, pick up the bags around 9-10, head to the airport, enjoy a nice, quiet lounge, and spare myself a ni
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"My building security won't let just some asshole in "
Maybe you will need to alert them that you have a package coming within an hour from an unmarked/nonuniformed courier. Problem solved.
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i don't think they are using pogo sticks but bicycles and maybe mono-cycle may apply. also having Christ based delivery system be pretty nice near water properties.
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I just want really stable, logical, predictable delivery. I dont want people on bicycles trying to find my address. Sweet Christ on a Pogo Stick, is that really too much to ask?
Send it to a business location then. Like your place of employment. I get stuff dropped there all of the time. The nice person in the warehouse signs for it, puts in in or under my mailbox. No fuss, no muss. UPS / FedEx loves that. No driving in the hinterlands to drop off a single package. Much easier to drop the pallet off and pick it up later.
end user may get sued if the delivery driver gets (Score:2)
The end user may get sued if the delivery driver gets in accident. As amazon can say they are a IC and we don't have to pay up.
Scary (Score:3)
http://marshallbrain.com/manna... [marshallbrain.com]
I shall just leave these here, eh?
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Iain Banks' Culture just got more realistic XD
1930s depression all over again. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like that Laser delivery company they use (Score:3, Informative)
Stranger Danger (Score:2)
Umm, I'm really not interested in random/first-time/first-day/once-and-never-again drivers coming to my house, thank you very much.
3,...2,...1,... (Score:3)
I wonder how long it will last before some company, fearing for their income, is calling the cops for "illegal package delivering".
LaserShip Redux? (Score:2)
Amazon won't release their contract (Score:2)
I emailed them and here was their response.
"When you come to our onboarding session and download the app, you can review the Terms of Service. "
Not good if you want to study it before making a commitment. Also, if you down load it what if they force you into an NDA?
Wow... (Score:2)
...something else that will need to be made illegal posthaste lest it upset the existing package-delivery services unused to the idea of gasp! - competition... I give it a year before the crap begins to fly and governments and business demand shutting it down.
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Guess what - anyone who sees your house on the street knows where you live.
Next up: Worrying about the existence of neighbors and pizza delivery men.
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" I care when his meth head roommate knows I'm buying expensive electronics from Amazon"
How often are you buying "expensive electronics" ? This would seem to be a rare occasion. Or are you having $1000 items delivered daily?
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because the UPS guy actually makes money doing this and has more to loose by being fired.
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This may terrify you: Any stranger can find out where you live any time. I mean unless you are like in witness protection or something.
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A FedEx driver isn't a "random person"? I don't know about you, but I have no idea who the typical people who deliver USPS, UPS, and FedEx packages to me are. They might be wearing a uniform, but that doesn't mean much; anyone can get one of those. It's amazing how much trust we place in people wearing uniforms.
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The Fedex van they got out of is a little more an investment though.
I don't know about you, but I'll answer the door if there's a fedex van out front and fedex uniform at my door.
I'm much less inclined if its random people knocking... usually they're either trying to recruit me to a religion, beg for money, or want to sell me something.
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Yeah, if you can see the van, that's a good point.
What if you're in an apartment though, and don't have view of the street and didn't or couldn't hear the van pull up?
Also, what about other delivery services? Do you refuse to answer the door when you order a pizza and some guy driving his personal car shows up? Do you check to see if his car has a Domino's sign on top, or ask him for ID or call Domino's to make sure he's an employee there?
Remember also, this is supposedly a service so people can have stuf
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What if you're in an apartment though, and don't have view of the street and didn't or couldn't hear the van pull up?
Yeah, its not universally applicable.
Also, what about other delivery services? Do you refuse to answer the door when you order a pizza and some guy driving his personal car shows up? Do you check to see if his car has a Domino's sign on top, or ask him for ID or call Domino's to make sure he's an employee there?
Not if its around 30 minutes after I ordered a pizza and he's holding a pizza box.
Remember also, this is supposedly a service so people can have stuff delivered from Amazon within an hour. It's not like Fedex when it could show up any time during the day; you place the order, and within an hour someone shows up with your item, not much different from pizza delivery really.
That's a good point.
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Delivery employees were random people already. Their only special trait is being in their employer's records. Much like Amazon will have.
Much like USPS/etc, local citizens already had "random access" all along. That may be a shocking realization, much like when I informed entitled, squeamish, cleanworld types that they're constantly swallowing a stream of mucus.
Would you like to know more about the bottled water you're obviously a patron of?
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I take it someone hates pizza delivery.
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I take it someone hates pizza delivery.
I've only ever had pizza delivered when I'm too drunk to walk, so my standards of food hygience have already gone out the window.