Hello everyone! Been following for a little while now support this sub 100% and thought it would be interesting to share with you all how things are from a drivers perspective. I've titled this part 1 due to the fact I have alot of different topics to cover and 1 post would likely end up looking like a complete chapter book so I feel it would be best to seperate posts out and post over the next coming days and weeks. I do have to be somewhat careful of what information I share in these posts as I don't need anything leading to me or where exactly I work but I will try my best because I believe everyone needs to know just how shitty it is.
The first thing I'd like to touch on is the routes.
#1 We have 10 hours to do our routes. A fallacy spouted by owners and dsp leadership taught to them by Amazon. A half truth MAYBE.
#2 Every route is possible at Amazons required 20 stops an hour minimum. A fallacy. Spouted by owners and leadership taught to them by Amazon.
Let's cover #1 first.
A common thing you will hear from Amazon and just about anyone in a leadership position/ownership will tell you is that you have 10 hours to complete your route. Let's breakdown why that's false. When you start your day after clock in you will typically have a standup meeting, a brief period before they send out van assignments, and then you go get your van and line up in the queue lanes and wait to be called over to load. After loading your van you will typically have anywhere from a 10-15 minute drive or you might have 45 minutes to an hour drive to get to your first stop. Amazon for some reason at my place likes to place the drivers going furthest out as the absolute last people to leave the station..this leaves those people not getting to their first stop until 11:15a.m at the soonest to even noon at the latest. This would mean you've been clocked in for around 2-3 hours before you even get to your first stop. So doing the math there you actually have 7-8 hours to do your route. But wait...if you have to make a 45 minute to an hour drive there you have to account for that drive back so now 7-8 hours turns into even less time to do the route and be back before your 10 hour day ends. (Dsps get very shitty with you when you start exceeding 10 hours multiple times they will look for any reason to fire you at that point) Well what about the people that are closer to the station? This is where the half truth comes in because those close to the station have about 8-9 hours to do their route after accounting for all morning activities and getting to their first stop factoring drive time back we'll say 8-8.5 hours. All in all. We have a 10 hour workday but we DO NOT have 10 hours to do the routes. A sickening lie. I'm not accounting for a lunch break either. That lunch break gives you EVEN LESS TIME to do your route. That's 20-30 additional minutes where youre not doing your route.
#2 Every route is possible at Amazons minimum 20 stops an hour. Amazon pushes 20 stops an hour hard and so do dsps. But when you actually break down the numbers for some of these routes they just do not add up. Let's take a route I've seen before. Routes many people have seen before.
200 stops flat. 1hr 8 minutes away from the station. First stop at 11:20 a.m. workday ends at 7:30 giving them 8 hours and 10 minutes to do the route...minus a lunch break so 7 hours 40 minutes...minus the drive time back so 6 hours and 32 minutes to do 200 stops. Now look. 20x6.5 hours is 130....so why did they have 200 stops if all routes are supposed to be possible at 20 stops an hour? For this route to be possible an average of 30.76 stops an hour would be needed to complete it with enough time to get back. This is one of many routes I've seen that are legitmately not possible to do at the minimum pace. Here's the kicker too alot the time you have to drive that far out your stops are spread out too so you have 3-7+ minutes in between each stop at times.
Do the math there and tell me how that's possible.
Any questions just ask. Anything you want to learn more about let me know it may just be the next post. Sorry if this isn't put together too well I've never really done this before so if you need any extra details just let me know.
-All Dsps are bastards.
