Not the brown santa

[elizilla]

Lately Amazon is using a shipper who has non-uniformed delivery people that bring things to the house in unmarked cars, tap as quietly as possible on the door, drop the packages on the doorstep and run. If you get to the door fast enough to holler thanks, they pretend they didn't hear you as they flee. They act guilty, like they just left a box of flaming poo on the porch, or toilet paper in the trees.

But hey, my new toaster over is nice. Tomorrow I can eat toaster strudel for breakfast again. Yay!

Comments

[lyudatwa.livejournal.com]

Met them in the same fashion!
I remember an NPR story that talked about people who do deliveries, and how they are greatly impacted by the large companies that advertise 'free delivery', and especially 'free two-day delivery'. They work outrageous hours, they run out to drop the package in -30 chill and +100 heat, rain or shine, no matter if your driveway is 300 yards or or 100 steps up the hill. You can be ordering a pair of pants or an anvil - they will get it to your door. These delivery guys get paid per delivery. They pay their own gas, and the vehicle can be their own or a loaner from the big-name delivery service, which they have to pay 'rent' on.

So if they are running off, it is probably because they are trying to make ends meet.

[elizilla]

I wonder if technology is also facilitating this? I mean, before GPS was ubiquitous, it would be awfully hard to send out a passenger car-sized pile of packages with a low-experience driver, and have that driver able to find all the residential addresses and route themselves to them in an efficient fashion. Especially in a place like, say, Boston. You pretty much had to have either a large enough pile of packages to justify a pre-set route, or a driver with amazing local knowledge.

[foms.livejournal.com]

I've been a dispatcher. Taxis, limousines, couriers. I've been a courier. Bike, car, truck. City, rural. I can talk about this at length. In my time, there have been a lot of changes.

Certainly, there has been amazing local knowledge. I have known taxi drivers who could tell you the colour of the door at any given address within a fifty-mile radius. The taxi drivers' test for London, England is famous (www.theknowledgetaxi.co.uk).

There used to be route books that described every intersection and every turn between cities (before the system of large roads). There used to be books that described the address numbers at every intersection in cities. There were reverse look-up books, like telephone directories, for addresses and telephone numbers. I used to collect small-town local maps wherever I went (the town hall, the library, the police station were good places to get them).

For deliveries, we often used postal codes. Many people have various parts of postal code systems memorized (first character, in Canada, denotes province; East to West and North to South, in the USA; first three characters are identifiable subareas in cities, sometimes, down to the building).

I used to compile sublists describing the edges of taxi and/or delivery zones. In the 1980s, I thought about transposing some of these lists onto computerized maps, with look-up/concordance tables and various search functions. Somewhat later (in the late eighties to early nineties), I started seeing expensive data-bases that would put a list of delivery addresses into a logical order, taking into account one-way streets, obstacles such as railways, et cetera). Stuff that I'd been doing in my head. GPS has made this much easier. Large companies have done the work and are often allowing use of it free of charge.

There are still difficulties. GPSs are not yet very good at knowing about real-time stuff like construction and traffic (unexpected or regular patterns). They also don't usually know short-cuts (sometimes illegal or quasilegal -- think of the opening scene in Snow Crash).

Places that are identified by building name rather than an address number. In Japan, I've been told of and I've seen a little of buildings that are numbered by the chronological order in which they were built (in Japan business cards are more common and they often have little maps on the backs). The ubiquity of carrying the internet in one's pocket is helping with these, too.

The amount of time per delivery varies according to the distance, the speeds of the routes involved, time used in not finding the right route or address immediately, and time getting from vehicle to the right person or location within the delivery address (as alluded-to above, this last is often the kicker). I knew bike couriers who just wrote down delivery times in increments of six minutes because it worked.

[elizilla]

Do you think the GPS has de-skilled this sort of work? Ie: Far more people think they can find the addresses well enough to make money at it, so delivery jobs get more applicants, driving wages down?

[foms.livejournal.com]

Almost certainly so, in a lot of cases.

Other than in London, my understanding is that taxi driver is and has been treated as a right-off-the-boat sort of job. If there is a test, it's often minimal and unsecure (I've certainly known people who claimed that someone else took the test on their behalf). They've had maps for a long time. A GPS is probably a bit better than a map but I don't think that it makes a huge difference. People may complain but they also expect to have to give directions to cabbies.

Taxi dispatch is now largely done by computer at a lot of companies. They are even dispensing with order desk/data entry clerks by means of computerized telephone prompt systems. In the 1980s, taxi dispatch was a skill that could yield two to three times minimum wage. I doubt that many such jobs exist, anymore.

I don't know about whether rush courier service is affected (yet). Both dispatch and courier jobs are complex, real-time pattern-matching tasks. I have thought about some aids that could be helpful but I don't know of any being put into use.

I suspect that multiple-day delivery (overnight or longer - the distance doesn't matter) probably had more revolution from what I understand to be Federal Express' innovation of sending everything to a hub and then reshipping than from computers (either GPS or route-planning). Nevertheless, there are some savings to be eked out in finding locations that are not of the usual, quicker training up the learning curve, and that sort of thing.

One place where electronics have really altered therbligs is in the paper-work. Ordering over the internet speeds things up and down-loads effort onto the client. Bar-coded stickers/way-bills and scanners have done away with a lot of time-consuming writing for people who are doing pick-up, sorting, and delivery. This probably decreases the number of jobs both by increasing the amount that a worker can do (this says nothing about unreasonable expectations by employers) and by eliminating some companies' need for some jobs, altogether. I am reminded of the article linked, herewith: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

[foms.livejournal.com]

Which led me to thinking about some related stuff so I found this: http://www.roodbergen.com/warehouse/background.php

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

It's even weirder if there's someone else who is shipping stuff to your house and not warning you beforehand.

Twice now, I'm sitting on my front porch having my morning coffee, when a car I do not recognize skids to a halt in front of my house, a guy jumps out and runs up to my door, and hands me- ...a box.

Each time, I wonder if this is some kind of prank.

The first one was a cartoon DVD. The second one was porn. Both were completely surreal experiences, at least until the person who ordered them confessed.

[elizilla]

That would be startling.

I order so much stuff online, if a mystery package arrived I'd assume it was something I forgot about, until I opened it and found the unexpected item.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Around here they're using a company called LaserShip that apparently use contractors in privately-owned, un-logo-ed vehicles.

[ckd]

I've seen some with cheesy-looking magnetic "LaserShip" signs on them, not that that's much better.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

I've had a few things from Amazon arrive via LaserShip but I've only ever caught sight of one of their vehicles. Looked like someone's privately-owned passenger car.

There are plenty of negative reviews about LaserShip floating around the web, but I personally have never had problems.

[elizilla]

I always see them, at my old house and my new, because I have always set up my home offices facing a window onto the street.

[(Anonymous)]

Amazon still uses either UPS or FedEx here. But they do the truck-door-truck turn around pretty spritely.

If I wave or yell a thanks to them, they all wave back.

Must be a little town thing.

-B