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Amazon Drivers Are Instructed To Drive Recklessly To Meet Delivery Quotas (vice.com) 134

Posted by msmash from the new-lows dept.
Amazon delivery companies around the United States are encouraging reckless and dangerous driving by ordering delivery drivers to shut off an app called Mentor that Amazon uses to monitor drivers' speed and give them a safety score to prevent accidents. Drivers say they are being ordered to turn the app off by their bosses so that they can speed through their delivery routes in order to hit Amazon's delivery targets. From a report: Sign out of Mentor if you haven't already," an dispatcher at an Amazon delivery company texted a delivery driver at DDT2, an Amazon warehouse in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan a little after noon on a day in March, according to a screenshot obtained by Motherboard. This was less than five hours into his 10-hour shift. "Starting tomorrow everyone needs to be logged into Mentor for at least 2 hours no more no less, so make sure that's one of the first things we're doing in the mornings," a dispatcher at DAT2, an Amazon delivery station in the suburbs of Atlanta told drivers who work 10-hour shifts in a group chat in May 2020.

Mentor is a smartphone app made by a company called eDriving, which partners with Amazon to monitor the driving behaviors of delivery drivers at Amazon Delivery Service Partners, which are quasi-independent companies who are contracted by Amazon to deliver packages in Amazon-branded vans. Using sensors in a driver's smartphone, Mentor collects information about a driver's acceleration, braking, cornering, and speeding. It also detects "phone distraction" based on how much a driver is using their phone outside of the Mentor app. It then gives drivers a "FICO Safe Driving Score" in order to "objectively measure how safe a driver is." Amazon ties driver bonuses to several metrics, including a delivery worker's driving score.
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Amazon Drivers Are Instructed To Drive Recklessly To Meet Delivery Quotas More

Amazon Drivers Are Instructed To Drive Recklessly To Meet Delivery Quotas

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  • Is gaming the metrics. Been that way since I was there 10 years ago. Bezos don't really care.

    • Re:Amazon Technology (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:08PM (#61355526)
      Odds are Bezos don't know. When companies end up that large, there's a whole lot of middle management that is so eager to advance they never want to create the illusion of failure. So you have the workers reporting problems to their supervisors who are reporting to their managers.. the managers minimize the issue.. then the managers report to the middle management the minimized version of the issue.. and then as it goes up the chain it gets minimized more and more. Nobody wants to report a problem, or be the squeaky wheel because they all want their raises, bonuses, and promotions. Middle management is probably responsible for 90% of the dysfunction in large corporations.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:30PM (#61355630)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • The managers, yes. Amazon, no. It is not the fault of the company what one of 100,000 of its employees do. Parent is right. Middle management want to push numbers and upper management isn't any wiser. It is wrong to say Amazon asked them to shut off an app when Amazon wrote the app in the first place (and likely expects it to be used).

          • Re:Not knowing is about as bad. (Score:5, Informative)

            by bws111 ( 1216812 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:44PM (#61355710)

            Amazon is not who is telling them to turn off the app. The drivers work for a company CONTRACTED to deliver for Amazon, and that company is telling them to turn off Amazon's app.

            • Exactly. And since the name of the contractor is public, I wouldn't be surprised to see the listed as a *former* Amazon delivery contractor. USPS and UPS also deliver for Amazon. Will every bad deed by employees of them be blamed on Amazon?

            • Amazon allows them to turn it on 2 hours out of 10 to optimize their profits.

              • Sounds like Amazon is complicit. If they don't know, they should know better, but we all know that they know, just like with Wells Fargo.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            Legally, Amazon is responsible for what it's employees do. That includes responsibility for crappy managers instructing drivers to drive unsafely and assigning schedules incompatible with safe driving.

            Ask a CEO why he makes millions a year plus bonuses that are never not paid out and they'll tell you it's because he is responsible for every single thing that happens in the company.

            BUT, when something bad happens, watch him point his finger down the hierarchy.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by bws111 ( 1216812 )

              They are not Amazon employees. They are employees of companies Amazon has contracted with to do deliveries. At least read the damn summary.

      • Indeed - "American Management Methodology" and don't the rest of us poor schmucks in the rest of the world regret it rearing it's ugly head about two decades ago. "Empowerment" and "you decide how you do your job" to "micromanagement" and "do as I say unless it goes wrong and then it's your responsibility" in just 20 years.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        Odds are Bezos don't know.

        There are no 'odds' about it. Bezos doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and employs people to ensure he never finds out. Successful leaders are obligated not to know. The whole point is diffusion of responsibility.

      • Or at least his direct reports do. Amazon has, if nothing else, amazing logistics people. Part of that, hell most of that, is understanding how fast your drivers can go and deliver all their packages on time. He knows he's setting impossible goals, everybody does.

        We set the speed limit lower than it needs to be in an effort to push back on these games, but it fucks over the drivers who have to constantly be worried about getting pulled over (and maybe shot). Periodically they get screwed and end up losi

      • The issue has existed for a very long time. I saw this:
        http://web.mnstate.edu/alm/hum... [mnstate.edu]
        while I was in the military, long before the world wide web.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by flink ( 18449 )

        This is a common pattern. You set impossible goals that can only be met by eliding important safety or environmental regulations, while at the same time sub-contracting out the work. You see it in textiles, waste management, infrastructure maintenance, logistics, etc. The parent company gets the increased profits, pays out less benefits, and when someone gets hurt or killed, they get to play ignorant and lament that the poor stupid SOBs at the sub were too greedy to follow the regs.

        There is no way that A

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by lsllll ( 830002 )

      I hate Amazon, but I fail to see how this is Amazon's fault. Amazon probably has a contract with the delivery company. The delivery company agreed to a certain metric regarding delivery. They probably also agreed to have the drivers run the Amazon app, since Amazon doesn't want any backlash because of an Amazon truck hitting a pedestrian or be named as a reckless driver.

      It's the delivery company that should be blamed for agreeing to the metrics and then forcing their drivers to shut off the app. The del

      • The "it's their own responsibility" defence is not without merit, but the moment they released the app they lost the standing to use it. Now they are just hypocritical liars by pretending the app is relevant while they designed the system to only have it be turned on 20% of the time.

        They could have been ethically consistent assholes, they chose to be hypocritical lying assholes instead ... that's entirely on Amazon.

      • Deniability is only plausible if Amazon doesn't know. Now we are all sure that Amazon knows what is being done with their money. Either they do something about it or they become complicit. Knowingly doing business that involves unsafe practices gives you a part of responsibility for these unsafe practices.

    • Such a hurry to FP you couldn't take time to decipher "Amazon delivery companies"? Not really blaming you, but it's the time thing driving flawed FPs. I guess the systems that promote "highly liked" comments are offering the better solution approach... So my solution approach should be another round of searches for such a discussion website that doesn't have bigger flaws than Slashdot's?

      Oh well, my first attempt at a joke around the story was also flawed. And now it feels likes it's too late to wrestle anot

    • I don't get it. If it was just gaming the system why say '2 hours no more no less'? Almost seems like a way to have a sample size without flooding the system with more info than they're willing to pay or already paid for.
      Especially since Amazon would be incentivized to run it all the time if their bonuses could be directly impacted by capturing more data and therefore the possibility of bad behavior.

  • Why is it that "metrics" companies set are almost always unrealistic and near unattainable except by luck?

    • Re:It's the company gaming their own system. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:27PM (#61355614)

      It is because there is a lack of interest in looking at the metrics to see what they really mean.
      Oh look driver A who drives in the City gets stuck in traffic a lot, has to do crazy parking, vs driver B who does the Suburbs, where it is just house to house.

      So Driver A looks bad while Driver B looks really good. No one wants to do a deep dive into why Driver A is performing Poorly in comparison, or swap driver routes around to see what the differences are. They will just give Driver B a raise, and his manager a gold star for good management. While Driver A gets demoted, and his manager gets less attention.

      Metrics are a tool to find differences, between things, but not a good way to rate their quality.
      If you find someone exceeding or lagging, that means there is a target for a deeper dive.

      • Re:It's the company gaming their own system. (Score:4, Informative)

        by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @02:07PM (#61355798) Journal
        Metrics are a tool to find differences, between things, but not a good way to rate their quality.
        If you find someone exceeding or lagging, that means there is a target for a deeper dive.

        That is the literal (in the truest sense of the word) synopsis of a paper on metrics I read years ago (and still have a copy). In short, you have to know what you want to measure then figure out how to properly measure it.

        One of the examples used was a help desk. If you measure people solely on the number of tickets they resolve, you can have a situation where someone tells their friends to call them every so often with easy issues. The person will then have a bunch of tickets closed quickly which makes their metrics look good.

        Meanwhile, the gal beside them is taking calls from Billy Bob who is barely able to speak coherently, let alone operate a computer, and has to spend an inordinately long time trying to resolve the person's problem or ends up getting the more difficult calls in general. To those looking at metrcis, she's far behind the other person because she's closing substantially fewer tickets.

        What's not being looked at are the tickets themselves. If someone is getting a password reset ticket, that can be closed in a minute whereas if you're trying to diagnose and fix someone who is getting feedback on a video call, that will take longer. The question becomes, who do you want on your help desk? If you go solely by metrics, you want the first person. If you look deeper, clearly you want the second person.

    • The problem is that there are conflicting metrics: "deliveries per hour" and "safe driving".

      There are different people with their bonuses attached to each metric, so at the corporate level, you get schizophrenic behavior. Legal and PR are pushing safe driving while the dispatchers tell the drivers to turn off the monitoring and drive faster.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        "Dispatching" is the separate contracted business that the driver works for. Legal and PR are Amazon. They're not the same thing.

    • Because that is how one gets record productivity to show that they don't need more employees and thus contain payroll costs so that managers and executives get bigger bonuses.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      Exactly.

      I used to work (20 years ago) at a technical hotline for an ISP. We had a number of call target (dailay average over one month) that we had to make to get a bonus. It makes at-a-glance sense: you want your people to help people quickly and effectively.

      But that number was completely unrealistic. You could not hit that number typically. I think it was 37 calls per day (that was a long time ago.) so one call per 12 minutes for an 8 hour shift.

      In summer, there were not enough calls for each of us to mak

  • Amazon Delivery Service Partners seem like they get seen as joint employers.

    Also in cases of drivers driving Recklessly if they get into an bad crash amazon will get sued and they may not be able hide behind an Amazon Delivery Service Partners even more if in court it comes out that the Quotas are unsafe.

      • The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deiverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      This is why pizza is no longer delivered in 30 minutes or less. The liability. There is an Amazon warehouse nearby, I pass it every day, I dont see drivers being reckless. If they are independent contractors, I would not imagine they would take on the liability just to meet goals. Not like tow truck drivers. I suspect if the tool is turned off, it is because it is too rigid.

  • Do you want unions? That's how you get unions. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:14PM (#61355546) Journal
    40-hour workweeks, safety equipment, safe environment, ... work quotas low enough to guarantee safe working conditions. Maybe someday.

  • Slow AI (Score:3)

    by BenBoy ( 615230 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:18PM (#61355564)
    Corporations are Slow AIs [boingboing.net]; paperclip makers [wikipedia.org], if you will. They have a goal, which is to increase shareholder value. Our outrage is directed at the root causes inherent in that system or it's wasted.

    • Re:Slow AI (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DaveV1.0 ( 203135 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:31PM (#61355646) Journal

      They have a goal, which is to increase shareholder value.

      That is the goal of a generic corporation in principal. In practice, the goal of many corporations have been subverted by executives to be increasing the executives' wealth.

      • Who are stock holders in Amazon. So it's not fair to say they just enrich the CEO. Now, go look up how many people own enough stock to matter (the little bit you have squirreled away in a 401k not withstanding). That's the real problem. The interests of those stock owners and CEOs don't align with most reading this, but somehow they convinced a majority that they do.

  • Those Apps Are Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NoSleepDemon ( 1521253 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:27PM (#61355608)
    I signed up to one to try and get a lower insurance premium. Here's the thing - they actually encourage worse driving. The app I used was Belair Direct's Automerit, and it routinely dinged me for harsh braking. The problem was that it was not only incorrect several times, it offered no way to contest the event. Thus, to "beat the system" it was often better to cruise through a late yellow than to stop - safely, and risk a harsh braking event. Moreover, the rate of deceleration required to avoid such an event was so slight, that my stopping distance was artificially increased well beyond the reasonable stopping distance for any vehicle. I cancelled the program after a couple of weeks.

    • I'm also using the Belair Direct Automerit system and have had the exact same experience. Their hard braking detection is far, far too sensitive. I tried to ease off on the breaking to avoid getting dinged by it. And I got two traffic tickets for running a red light for my efforts. It's just not possible to brake in time for a red without setting offer their "hard braking" detection.

      I continue to use the system because I have a short ~10 minute commute, so it doesn't have a lot of opportunity to get upset

      • You have the patience of a saint - my commute is 7 minutes long ;) There's a particular corner at the end of a downward slope that would always set the system off, so in a bid to stop getting hit by harsh deceleration I tried to change my route. The problem was the new route also had a corner - this time at a pedestrian crossing. Not wanting to risk turning right (North America for those not acquainted, so one drives on the right) and possibly clipping someone, I stuck to the original safer route. In the en
    • Once upon a time a colleague got one of those devices to save on his insurance. They only started the discounts once you had 30 days of straight "safe driving". On the last day of the 30-day period, one of his back tires on his pickup was on a patch of ice and spun out when he tried to drive forward from a stop. His safety score immediately plummeted from "extra safe" to "worst possible" due to the infinite acceleration.

      He canceled the program after that.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by bws111 ( 1216812 )

        Yeah, bullshit. They measure acceleration with accelerometers (the same ones that measure hard braking), not engine speed. If a wheel 'spun out when he tried to drive forward' his acceleration was 0. These things also look for patterns, not single events.

        • Belair Direct's automerits used to use a dongle not your phone. The newer app uses the phone, but the moment you trigger a "bad thing" your score plummets. It's only after a week or two of subsequent "safe" driving that your score is restored. Ergo, GP's account is entirely plausible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gr8dude ( 832945 )

      I'm involved in usability research that partially covers such forms of car insurance as you describe. The problem you pointed out is not uncommon - many users complain that this actually leads to worse driving, because one keeps adjusting their driving style in an attempt to "make the program happy", which pushes them out of their well-established routine. The lack of a possibility to contest the system's verdicts is also a common source of dissatisfaction.

      If you had a magic wand that could produce an excel

      • Assuming there is no "easy answer" (e.g. Increasing the threshold for triggering bad driving events)... It appears from my experience and your analysis, that reducing anxiety through expecting a poor outcome from individual commutes is important. I would place less emphasis on individual acceleration and deceleration events as a means of rating the driver. Instead, I would like to see some form of coaching from the app, where it attempts to identify spots on the driver's commute where these events occur fre

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gr8dude ( 832945 )

          Thanks for your elaborate feedback, I greatly appreciate it.

          You might be interested in this paper http://www.jtle.net/uploadfile... [jtle.net] (I am a co-author). Table IV summarizes a list of recommendations for insurers, where R18 is related to worse driving, R16 is about giving users a way to challenge the results; R4 and R5 are about turning these programs into a coach that helps drivers get better (rather than maintain an unforgiving attitude, where a single deviation results in a "no soup for you!" verdict).
          Our

          • That's a fascinating paper. Sorry for not replying sooner I've had the pdf open and have been reading it over the weekend. I do hope insurance companies take your analysis onboard - usage based insurance done "properly" (whatever that eventually means) seems like a logical future to me.

  • been there (Score:4, Interesting)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:41PM (#61355694)

    My first real job ever was a delivery job. The owner told me which roads to drive and what speed to go on them - he wanted me to drive 50% over the speed limit pretty much all the time.

  • Instead of the Deliverator, delivering pizzas for the mob, Hiro Protagonist is an Amazon delivery truck guy, working (ultimately) for Jeff Bezos.

  • Delivery jobs have always been thus (Score:4, Interesting)

    by opencity ( 582224 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:57PM (#61355764) Homepage

    Amazon is relatively sure that by subcontracting deliveries they have no liability here. I'm guessing there are more than a few ambulance chasers willing to test this at the slightest hint of a fender bender. Every single one of them has bookmarked and screenshot the Vice article.

    • Re:Delivery jobs have always been thus (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BeerFartMoron ( 624900 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @02:30PM (#61355888)

      Honestly, Amazon would be better off just hiring actual independent contractors. Generic white box vans full of Amazon, Etsy shop, print shop, etc. packages being delivered by unshowered dudes wearing Army surplus fatigues screams "I am a true Independent Contractor!"

      But they had to go and make it Amazon branded vans full of Amazon branded boxes driven by folks wearing Amazon branded uniforms. This "Two-Day Delivery 'Amazon Experience'" crap is going to come back to bite them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nadass ( 3963991 )

        Honestly, Amazon would be better off just hiring actual independent contractors. Generic white box vans full of Amazon, Etsy shop, print shop, etc. packages being delivered by unshowered dudes wearing Army surplus fatigues screams "I am a true Independent Contractor!"

        But they had to go and make it Amazon branded vans full of Amazon branded boxes driven by folks wearing Amazon branded uniforms. This "Two-Day Delivery 'Amazon Experience'" crap is going to come back to bite them.

        Amazon already hires their warehouse staff/equipment, and their long-haul logistics staff/equipment, and parts of their delivery staff (Flex Drivers), and rolls out tech to help manage and orchestrate all of these things... and they're incorporating automation/robotics into the fray also... And you're arguing that they need to spend more HR efforts hiring even MORE delivery staff/equipment?!

        Instead of hiring two hundred thousand ICs across all territories (and getting into the gig economy realm like uber

  • With his persistent advocacy of "Safety Third". The unintended side-effects of systems like this are that people who have to get a job done have completely different incentives from the people who want this sort of should-surfing.

    https://mikerowe.com/2020/10/o... [mikerowe.com]

  • I frequently berate drivers who speed up the tiny little lane I live on, our doors open right onto the road, there's cats, kids etc.
    The max driving speed should be about 5mph, but I've seen them fly up the lane at 30mph - bat shit crazy.
    This is a lane where two cars cannot pass, where the biggest delivery vehicle that can actually get up here, is a transit van. (not sure what those are called in the US).

    But I know I'm complicit in all of this - the sheer contented comfort of getting pretty much anything del

    • I don't see the problem with delivery, it's far more efficient than everyone driving to the city.

      Mercenary subcontracting and general erosion of Christian morals are entirely orthogonal.

  • A few months ago, there was a slew of fire-breathing posts talking about how Mentor was dangerous spyware. People on slashdot were talking about how evil Mentor was.

    Now the media is equating disabling Mentor with "dangerous driving" which is false.

    Slashdot is now full of posts talking about how the drivers are driving dangerously because the spyware is being turned off, buying the false premise of the article.

    What DO we believe, exactly?

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday May 06, 2021 @02:17PM (#61355838)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Hiding evidence of a crime is a huge no no, legally.
    As is firing somebody for refusing to do that.
    Basically, it means you already lost before even going to trial.

  • ANYONE REMEMBER THE NOID FROM DOMINOES IN THE 80'S - 90'S? There was a lawsuit, dealing with the deliver in 30 minutes or its free. they were pushing the pizza delivery drivers to drive reckless to get the pizzas there on time. Dominoes lost, and they stopped doing the 30 minutes or its free stuff. this is the same thing in a different flavor.

    • Every time the kids ask for Dominos, I tell them "Avoid the Noid!". Because the Noid lives at Dominos.

  • Also (Score:2)

    by sjames ( 1099 )

    This would also explain things like the lady on the neighborhood app who shared a doorbell video of her package being chucked out of the driver's window of the amazon van onto her porch.

  • Have you driven in urban areas lately? People are less courteous, the roads are more congested, and everybody thinks they're in a NASCAR race.

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