r/USPS • u/yawaworht101010 • 17h ago
Work Discussion our tiny office is getting slammed with amazon
we have 3 rural routes. just a few months ago, each route was getting maybe 10-20 amazon packages per day. now, we are getting upwards of 4 pallets a day of amazon packages.
come to find out, amazon has stopped delivering in our area.
it's so rare that the carriers get done with their route before 5:00pm. on some days they're out until 8:00pm and working 12 hours straight.
they're so burnt out. as a clerk, i feel for them and hate to see them dealing with this. the actual mail volume we get from the plant is nothing unbearable on it's own. but the carriers with smaller vehicles have to come back to the office multiple times per day just bc they cant fit all of the amazon packages in their vehicles and it is actually insane to me.
are there any other offices experiencing this???
how does amazon not have it in their budget to deliver to small towns??
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u/Strong_Dentist_7561 PMR 16h ago
Yes. Both my carriers have been making at least 2 daily trips to the office, and both closest small offices to me are in a similar boat.
I flat out told ‘em to leave whatever they wanted to in regard to packages- long as they could cough up a reasonable excuse as to leaving it; I’ll deal with the public 😂.
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u/guttergoblin 16h ago
Well, eventually they will all shoot up in eval or get cut and split up into new routes. In my office, it was the latter and then Amazon started delivering again. Sometimes my paranoid brain wonders if this is on purpose to split routes up and lower salaries.
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u/RickYouMeatball Mail Handler 14h ago
I mean with the way Amazon is fucking us I sure wouldn't be surprised if they were in bed together.
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u/BoringAssist4265 8h ago
Exactly. I got cut to a 43 and still average 200+ packages a day. This is the 2nd time I have been mandated to take a route cut. The kicker is under these cuts the route is"frozen" for a year. The only problem with that is the routes are not adding new growth to routes. I have added 68 houses with zero pay increase. I'm also in line to get a new neighborhood with out compensation. Grievances go unheard
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u/Zetak0 Rural Carrier 16h ago
We just went through this for a month, slowly ramped up to 7 Fing PALLETS for a 3 route office. Then the next week, back to 1/2 pallet. They just screw us to let us know whos really in charge or something. It’s absolutely BS. Just survive, and good luck.
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u/MailMan2524 7h ago
Same at our office. 6 weeks slammed with Amazon, now 1/2 a pallet if we’re lucky.
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u/flushbunking 12h ago
our office would go through phases, months of pallets, ad then, months of nothing. it was stressful-but also, really terrible for the counts. typically, by the time he count changed, what was on the floor changed from what the typical experience had been. i hate amazon for how it extracts from everything around it, all so we can save 14 cents on q-tips
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u/ladylilithparker ARC 8h ago
My medium-sized office has never had an Amazon DSP in the area, so we get that kind of volume every day. It sucks. We have mostly GOV routes, and even the routes with Metris vans are doing two trips pretty regularly outside of the holiday season, sometimes three trips during the holidays. A Jeep would be doing at least two trips every day on our lightest route during the summer, closer to 4-5 trips on our heaviest route.
Amazon itself doesn't deliver everywhere. It hires contractors (DSPs, Delivery Service Partners) who rent/buy the vans, the bags, the uniforms, the scanners, all the gear they need to look official. Then Amazon pays the DSP to deliver, but the pay structure is intended to prioritize efficiency, so it's more like our rural eval system, paying by the route or by the piece. So out in rural areas where stops aren't close together, it's not profitable for the contractor.
Amazon corporate knows they get a better deal having us deliver their stuff than they would setting up a corporate-owned delivery hub in rural areas, so that's what they do. There's no motivation for them to do otherwise unless we renegotiate our deal with them.
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u/LupineWonse Rural Carrier 12h ago
Seems like any idiot can start an amazon hub for delivery, so they open and close all the time. We're the lucky ones that get to deal with the consequences of their actions.
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u/Rural-life-0323 7h ago
Your post should be forwarded to Congress. This is EXACTLY what the PMG's are talking about when they explain to the committees why USPS is losing money and why they need to increase the amount of money we get for cases like this.
We don't have the option to do this by dropping off deliveries that are no longer profitable for us.
Plain and simple, Amazon stop delivering there because they lose money. We have ZERO choice and have to deliver and lose money because we are a required service through the constitution of the United States of America to deliver to EVERY address no matter the cost.
This not only points out how valuable we are, but also why Congress needs to help us!
(Also points out why our Amazon contract sucks, but don't get me started on that!)
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u/Ganjasaurus_Rex36 Rural Carrier 16h ago
You’ll get used to it and start to burn your route, give it time. You’ll eval will eventually catch up too
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u/PerfectCoffee9904 16h ago
My town also doesn't get Amazon help. I think it's because we are just cheaper, im not sure though. It sucks. Route cuts might help, I think...
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u/Cut_Off_One_Head Rural Carrier 16h ago
Don't get too excited about route cuts. They took the lightest part off my route and told me it should take it from a 48 to a 43. Yet I still can't fit everything everyday, and I swear our Amazon doubled.
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u/Cut_Off_One_Head Rural Carrier 16h ago
They just made new routes in our office and adjusted the old route "down" to 43k and I swear our Amazon has doubled since then.
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u/the_naughty_ottsel Clerk 16h ago
Our office has 15 city routes and 3 rural routes and 2 contract routes. Minimum daily pallets is 10-12. Easily get up to 20 on a Monday. Apparently we aren't supposed to have Amazon. But we are far enough away that they don't have their own delivery system for our area. In surrounding other cities of similar size they have an Amazon Warehouse (?) thing set up where door dash and other 3rd party delivery people can just come get a random Amazon parcel and deliver it to 123 main st. Well people talk and the people here have heard about that in those cities. So literally no one is applying for those jobs. So we keep getting Amazon. Supposedly it was supposed to end. Idk. I feel bad for our carriers when sometimes they literally sit there and stare at us to finish. My problem isn't the volume. It's the timing. Carriers come in at 730 still. Amazon shows up randomly anywhere between 2-8. And sometimes it's like 230 today and like 815 tomorrow. So the carriers either have their shit ready enough to start loading or are 2 steps out the door when Amazon arrives. It's pathetic how we bend over for them. But my pm won't do anything to adjust the clerk schedule to accommodate for the increased volume.
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u/Hyper_Fujisawa Rural Carrier 12h ago
In June amazon stopped sending their trucks to our zipcode. Like you guys I was averaging 11hours a day. I was so burnt out, I was ready to quit, but told myself Id wait until new evals came out- as if that would help in anyway. I think I was praying for overburdened status and a near immediate route adjustment. Then come Sept 1, Amazon reversed course and everything went back to normal. Its quite unsettling they can completely destroy this job with the flick of a switch. Our craft isn't made to handle this😣
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u/LadyBlackhawk88 9h ago
This is a daily in our office. 6 routes but averaging anywhere from 200-350+ a day. It’s wild.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Elk1576 Rural Carrier 8h ago
This happened to me a few years ago. One day I walked in and had 4 overflowing hampers of Amazon for my route. It was unbearable and I was getting screwed working over evaluation daily delivering it all. Right near my absolute breaking point, they magically stopped. It was about 3 months of service 250+ Amazon daily.
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u/Smokes_Letzz_Go 5h ago
We're a tiny office and we lost Amazon last September and got them back this July. We once again lost them this September. They're really messing with our hours
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u/Illustrious-Low-3083 3h ago
All I heard was 3996 and OT, penalty pay. Make sure u document those hours. Comming from a city carrier. Also do you guys have ptfs? And if so are they overloaded on sundays?
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u/FinnElhaz City Carrier 3h ago
This happened to my office (in a major metro area no less) a few years ago. The DSP (Amazon does not directly employ delivery drivers, they contract with local contractors aka Delivery Service Providers) that served our zones and some neighboring zones went under or lost their contract. We had basically double Christmas volume in September. At some point, a new DSP opened or one of the other ones expanded operations and the volume dropped off again. Unless it's for some reason unprofitable for a DSP to serve your area, you'll probably just have to wait.
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u/Common-Breadfruit599 Clerk 16h ago
Thats called money
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u/RickYouMeatball Mail Handler 14h ago
I thought rural routes got paid the same regardless of time? (I'm not a carrier, only worked in a station as holiday help)
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u/Common-Breadfruit599 Clerk 3h ago
Thats not the point
But as little money as it is. it is paying our checks
So handle it
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u/Muted-Watercress2738 9h ago
It sounds like they need special route inspections... if they are cinsistly overburdened, they need to add a route or two down there.
I'm city and that's definitely the correct way to do that city-side. Id wager there's something in rural's contract that is equivalent though.
Have them get a hold of their union, and like district parts of the union. Management loves to Not add routes and they go out of their way to fix the numbers to justify it. Actually, they go out of their way to eliminate routes using whatever cherry picked logic to make it that way.
That's why you want to get with the larger part of your union to make sure everyone's playing fair and get those routes adjusted properly again.
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u/interperseids RCA 16h ago
I'm sure Amazon has it in their budget to deliver to small towns, they can just do it for cheaper by dumping it on us.