Why do they do that? Are they penalized for working overtime too often?

bombcar · 2025-09-29T18:18:26 1759169906

Yes. The shipper (the smaller local organization that FedEx or Amazon contracts with) turns around and hires drivers. FedEx pays the contract company per piece, the company turns around and pays the drivers per hour.

FedEx has some mystical software that helps them gauge how many employees per delivery, etc they need, but that stuff always leans toward "perfect scenarios". End result is the driver is asked to be perfect or more than perfect, never break any laws, never get delayed by ringing doorbells, etc, and still get all the deliveries done.

One easy way out for the driver is to mark everything in the computer as it is supposed to be, and then go back and fix it later (which eventually doesn't happen - there are stories about it).

UPS has something similar, but the drivers get paid overtime and are more unionized (protected) but even THEY will pull the above bullshit because there are often federal laws about truck drivers that they're skirting around.

I've seen my normal UPS driver stop by my house past 10PM near Christmas, dressed in normal street clothes and in his minivan with family, to drop off ap package that had been marked as delivered earlier in the day.

The above is why more and more of the systems require the driver to take a picture of the delivery, which of course adds time, and slows things down ...

Spooky23 · 2025-09-29T13:55:01 1759154101

They work for contractors -- alot of the companies that used to do stuff like newspaper and courier delivery got into this, but it varies dramatically be region.

For the lousy contractors, it's sort of an uncanny valley between UPS and a crowdsourced model like DoorDash or Laser. The employees are sketch. At work, i used them to ship WFH user equipment -- they'd do shit like deliver laptops to dumpsters at apartment complexes (complete with pictures). In NYC, the couriers park on a side street, stack packages on the street and have casual labor deliver them.

I've also had bad experiences with dropboxes where the couriers pilfer high value items - return iphones in particular. They get misdelivered to incorrect addresses on purpose.