> I suspect it's because of its GPS-driven gig-economy implementation

Agreed, and specifically it's the yield they expect from their drivers. AMZL expects nearly double the deliveries from its drivers than UPS does. UPS has been doing this for decades across the globe, I would bet they've squeezed just about every last bit of efficiency out of their routes and process... so AMZL's expectations are outrageous, which leads to packages thrown from cars, packages found in ditches, etc. The drivers can't possibly complete their deliveries. The drivers are unhappy, the customers are unhappy and soon Amazon will be unhappy if they don't figure this out.

> the customers are unhappy and soon Amazon will be unhappy if they don't figure this out.

Yeah, AMZL's awfulness opened my eyes to how uncompetitive Amazon's prices have become. The one-two punch of that broke my Amazon-first shopping habit.

For some reason, my packages are rarely delivered by AMZL (although it does happen). But, I too have stopped my amazon-first habit... I noticed a couple shipments that I bought on amazon were actually drop shipped from walmart.com and target.com by the third party seller. Sure enough, I looked up the products on those sites and they were 15-20% cheaper.

It takes a little more time now, but I do a quick google price search before buying anything on amazon. Sometimes, if it's only a small difference, then it's worth the frictionless experience of buying through amazon, but as I create accounts on more and more sites, the frictional difference is becoming marginal.

Having read a bit about the amazing logistics involved in modern package delivery, I am stunned. You can't beat UPS/FedEx. Not because they're superheroes, but because they've simply taken things to their logical conclusion. Unless you have rockets, drones, or some radically different form of transportation getting involved or something, you're not delivering more packages.

It stinks a bit of modern employers desires to ignore the fact that their employees are human beings. I expect any day now to hear of a big company tearing out all the bathrooms in their offices and cancelling lunch hours because it will 'improve efficiency.' If you don't want to deal with the basic truths of human employees, then you don't belong in business, period.

I thought they had a the equivalent of a Service Oriented Architecture internally, where Amazon departments had to sell their services to other departments on an equal footing with outside vendors. That's what allowed them to make AWS available so easily, they already treated internal customers as if they were external.

Has that changed in recent years?

How do you apply that principal to the last mile problem?

To be fair, Amazon is fair at handling Customer Service complaints. I ordered a package with a scheduled 2 hour delivery window ({Fresh, Now}) and it came 2 hours late. The package needed a signature so I was at the delivery site for a total of six hours. My $100-$150 package expense was credited to my account after a short call to customer service.

> How do you apply that principal to the last mile problem?

Isn't the answer obvious? Make the Amazon Logistics team compete on an even footing with UPS, USPS, and FedEx. If the retail team has process for one of its customers to blackball UPS because it had a bad experience with it, then they should have the same process to blackball Amazon Logistics. (I'm 'should' here to mean that would comport with the SOA style business structure, not to make an ultimate judgment on whether it is a good model for a business overall.)

I was able to have them remove amazon logistics after repetive drivers called me first thing in the morning demanding I meet them at the street because they couldn’t find the entrance to an apartment building.

odd. after several repeated issues with amazon logistics (the worst was a package marked "out for delivery", then "business closed" for a full week of attempted deliveries - this was to a private residence up on a hill), I've only had packages shipped usps - it took several conversations with support staff, and after a few rounds of "free prime extensions", they stopped the shipments via amazon.

> it took several conversations with support staff, and after a few rounds of "free prime extensions", they stopped the shipments via amazon.

That's what it takes. IIRC, they'll only consider deprioritizing AMZL if you've had 3 misdeliveries (by their reckoning) in the last 6 months. I haven't had the time to basically go to war with them to get them to stop, I just shifted my shopping habits instead.

Really, how do you deprioritize?

I'm in Canada, so it may be US only. I do know you can force them to use Canada Post if you enter a PO Box.

Also, amazon's delivery service has been excellent here, chiefly because they don't require signatures. Using any other courier means it often goes to some depot in the suburbs, which is a terrible policy for urban Montreal.

To be fair, Amazon is directly able to influence the details of how Amazon Logistics works for your address, and they likely want to improve it, using customer feedback to do so. They have less leverage and incentive for other carriers.

> and they likely want to improve it, using customer feedback to do so

I know, but the other carriers are already good, and I'm not super interested in being the guinea pig to train Amazon's. They're just brain-dead in so many different ways:

1) I'm not a dispatcher, I don't want to give directions to a driver or talk him to my address. That's Amazon's job.

2) I'm not Amazon's cartographer either, and it was super annoying to have to talk a phone rep through dropping a map pin on my place.

3) Every other carrier seems to be able to read the sign with delivery instructions at my door, why not Amazon? They ignore it so often I got tired of calling and complaining about that.

4) They should leave door-notes when there's a problem like every other carrier.

A lot of the stuff they need to improve on is simple stuff they could have easily learned by looking at the customer experience of their competitors, so I'm not really willing to cut them much slack. Especially since they force their carrier on me rather than giving me options.