Amazon could buy FedEx after failing at this attempt to shake things up, or buy FedEx to expand these successful efforts. Maybe they are doing this just to devalue them enough to get a prime deal when its takeover time?

That local distributor idea makes even more sense now given that Amazon has the regional distribution centers, but lacks last mile hubs.

Fedex is the least suited to Amazon's needs, ships the least of Amazon's packages, and at the highest price. That would make no sense.

There is zero chance that Amazon wants to turn your aunt Mabel's spare bedroom into a local distribution center. Hint: Amazon has last mile hubs. They're called post offices and they operate at a loss.

Doing this business is a bet on amazon taking over logistics in the USA eventually and you having a substantial piece of your current market.

It's definitely better than Herbalife. I guess. Sorta.

Is there anything more to this than just a clever way to take the cost of health insurance / pension/etc out of the cost of delivering a package by having it done by small businesses that won’t offer it?

You also get to have your rates set by the customer. A customer who already pays the lowest rates in the industry and wants even lower rates. So theres that.

What are some of those opportunities?

More than $10k would be fine, too.

It sounds like Uber but instead of driving a single car, you are managing an entire fleet. I can't believe anyone would actually do this. If you have the skills, experience and money to successfully "run" a delivery business for Amazon, you should be doing something on your own.

So the people who know how to run a business would never do this, thus Amazon is weeding out their best potential people. The only people who would do this are people who don't realize how bad a deal it is and incompetent people who couldn't run a regular business on their own.

I order over $50k a year in amazon but have shifted a lot of that to alternate vendors since they started doing more of this uber style deliveries. They don’t do regular routes like usps and get confused often.

For personal home deliveries it has hardly been a problem because someone is usually there and a household is much less tricky to deliver to, however because many business offices are in suites or sometimes not as obvious the companies who regularly have routes and familiar drivers will always have an edge over the rando uber style drivers.

The current crop of amazon delivery is terrible in many ways, I’ve experienced rude and unprofessional behavior, deliveries outside of business hours left out in public (past 8pm) and a number of other issues. Pushing more of this crappy service will catch up with amazon eventually hopefully.

semi-grunching but i have to agree with what i saw one poster say......

classic race to the bottom.......... avoiding paying minimum wage or taking any liability for accidents etc. (i could be wrong about this)....... will be dominated by poor immigrants (illegal) who are willing to work for sub-minimum wage, partially because other cultures are much more comfortable than WASP's living super communally.....

i can't necessary see making a reasonable sized successful business out of this. seems like you can't pay people sub-minimum wage (can they pay them per package?) and you will have big liability for accidents....

of course companies like fedex, UPS, USPS (protected by govt), domino's, little caesar's have been able to deal with the issues i mentioned...

i would think it'll gravitate towards very small enterprises, like familiies or a few families of certain ethnic groups (east indians here in canada) working together.....

it is certainly interesting

How much do you make per package delivered? I think if it was one van and your own thing like uber it would be fine. Finding 4 other guys who are dependable and responsible with your vans would be hard. The first couple months would be fine but once your employee gets burned out attendance and responsibility will become an issue.

This is what trucking industry people think: https://www.thetruckersreport.com/tr...-again.996464/. Notice that they all honed in on the 'you could make up to 300k a year' rather than the 'get started for as little as 10k'. They think that's at least as stupid as all of us investor types think the 10k is.

was hoping BS would be posting when I opened the thread. good to hear your take.

Not seeing an Amazon catch thread and did not want to start a new thread so i'll park this here.


FTC says Amazon took $62 million in tips from drivers

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon is paying nearly $62 million to settle charges that it took tips from its delivery drivers.

The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that Amazon didn't pass on tips to drivers for more than two years, even though it promised shoppers and drivers it would do so. The FTC said Amazon didn't stop taking the tips until 2019, when the company found out about the FTC's investigation...

...Amazon took elaborate steps to mislead its drivers and conceal its theft, sending them canned responses that repeated the company’s lies.”

The drivers were part of Amazon's Flex business, which was founded in 2015 and allows people to deliver Amazon packages with their own cars. The drivers are independent workers, and are not Amazon employees.

The FTC said Amazon at first promised workers that they would be paid $18 to $25 per hour. It also told them they would receive 100% of tips given to them by customers on the app.

But in 2016, Amazon started paying drivers a lower hourly rate and used the tips to make up the difference, according to the complaint. Amazon didn't disclose the change to drivers, the FTC said, and the tips it took from drivers amounted to $61.7 million...

...The FTC said the money Amazon is paying for the settlement will go back to delivery drivers whose tips were taken.

There needs to be the ability to impose significant 'punitive penalties' for stuff like this so that the threat of such penalties makes it not worth risk doing it. If the only penalties are 'you have to give it back if caught', and only a fraction of them are caught, then it makes it worth the corporate gamble.