Amazon's massive nationwide hiring spree underway
- Thread starter Gemini
- Start date
If they keep fucking with Lasership they wont. Was about to go ahead and keep Prime membership but the last 2 packages were shipped with Lasership and 1 never got here,(Amazon sent a replacement and I got lucky with the Post office) and the other was 3 days late.
If the US Post office subsidy for Amazon goes away, expect Amazon to SLOW THE FUCK DOWN
Don't they have a deal with UPS who still has a deal with USPS?
whats the deal with lasership and you sure your last package wasnt stolen..??
Doubt it. If so it will only be temporary.. Between drones, on demand delivery services, and possibly their own shipping service, they wont miss a beat ultimately.
They like to pull the "Attempted" move, but I have a doorbell camera that can pick up a damn mosquito flying by. Its 50/50 if its delivered on time with them regardless of the seller. UPS, FedEX, USPS are money, but anytime I see Lasership I already know Im not getting my shit on time.
hmmmm I got to peep that out thanks....
They are the worst. If you have to deal with Lasership. Get your tracking number and call the dispatch to message the driver directly. Give them specific delivery instructions or get a more accurate ETA. I am glad that Amazon stopped using them in my area.
Good luck to those folks.
That work is no punk and the conditions inside a warehouse can be a bitch. Your every move from when you stop walking to when you go take a piss is tracked and if you don't keep at the hourly rate they will toss you out in an instant. And they might as well cancel plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas because they'll be at the gig.
That work is no punk and the conditions inside a warehouse can be a bitch. Your every move from when you stop walking to when you go take a piss is tracked and if you don't keep at the hourly rate they will toss you out in an instant. And they might as well cancel plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas because they'll be at the gig.
They have there own delivery service now. If it says AMZL as the shipper that amazons service, I've had a few packages delivered by them now.
Here is what I know for sure..
The best time to work in these warehouses is now! Amazon system is not as good as it will be in a year. Right now if you work there you get a list of shit that "suppose to be in the van" and if you take the shit and say it was not in the van they essentially take your word for it. I know about three people right now that come up on shit every week working for Amazon. They tracking system is not what it will become yet thus it is easy to take shit and say you never received it for delivery.
As some one said above this job is not for the weak. Your ass will work driving and delivering packages that range from one pound to sixty pounds. This job have mofos coming home tired, worse that ups and fed ex.
The best time to work in these warehouses is now! Amazon system is not as good as it will be in a year. Right now if you work there you get a list of shit that "suppose to be in the van" and if you take the shit and say it was not in the van they essentially take your word for it. I know about three people right now that come up on shit every week working for Amazon. They tracking system is not what it will become yet thus it is easy to take shit and say you never received it for delivery.
As some one said above this job is not for the weak. Your ass will work driving and delivering packages that range from one pound to sixty pounds. This job have mofos coming home tired, worse that ups and fed ex.
Yea we have a local post office who have one empolyee that goes in on Sunday's just to get amazon orders ready for Monday...that's the life of a post office as a amazon hub
you dont have a clue what youre talking about.
amazon doing self delivery now, and in a lot of cities, they offer SAME DAY shipping.
This man knows what he is talking about. They try to find any and every way to fire muhfuckas. And expect for your feet and back to be in serious pain. Fuck that shit. Not worth the money and they get stingy on OT
the new walmart as far as employment
I worked at the twinsburgh,oh plant for a few weeks late last year. It was called the cleveland(CLE#5) plant. You aint lying about the dont make plans for thanksgiving and christmas. Though I got lucky I didnt work those days. Because of the shift I was scheduled. There was cameras everywhere in and around that mothafucka. I only stopped working there. Because i was working there and a full time job. And I couldnt handle that shit.
so you're saying now is the best time to get hired so u can steal shit???
That's exactly what I am saying...
Brooklyn May Be NYC’s Best Bet to Win New Amazon Headquarters
Brooklyn may emerge as an attractive lure in New York City’s long-shot bid to become Amazon.com Inc.’s new home.
The borough’s image as a hip hub for millennials could give it a leg up as the e-commerce giant hunts for the perfect locale for its second U.S. headquarters, according to Ofer Cohen, president of TerraCRG, a Brooklyn-based commercial-property brokerage. Brooklyn is in the midst of a building boom, with about 7 million square feet (650,000 square meters) of offices planned, as developers seek to leverage the area’s popularity with young people who have migrated across the East River to escape Manhattan’s sky-high rents.
“Everybody got excited in the Brooklyn real estate community” when Amazon announced its intentions, Cohen said. “Brooklyn has been waiting for a technology company to say, ‘I want to make Brooklyn my home.’”
Amazon, aiming to build a corporate compound that will rival its original campus in Seattle, has solicited proposals for the project, which will cost more than $5 billion and create 50,000 jobs over the next 15 to 17 years. New York City entered the fray last week, touting its big-city living, diverse workforce and extensive university system as attributes that officials hope will help overcome the drawback of being one of the country’s costliest housing markets.
Developers across New York are working to assemble their pitches, according to Seth Pinsky, an executive vice president at RXR Realty.
“This is a really exciting opportunity and I certainly hope, as a New Yorker, that Amazon looks very seriously at the city,” he said. “No landlord or developer is going to ignore a request like the one Amazon has put out.”
Industry City
Brooklyn’s boosters say the large amount of space under development may entice Amazon to put down stakes in the borough, which has so far come up short in its effort to attract big-name companies. As of May, not one non-government employer had signed a lease for more than 100,000 square feet, a typical minimum size for a building’s anchor tenant, since mid-2015.
There are several sites in Brooklyn that could potentially meet Amazon’s need for 500,000 square feet for the first phase, and as much as 8 million square feet over the next 10 years, according to Cohen. Possibilities include Industry City, a complex on the Sunset Park waterfront being redeveloped as a hub for artists, tech startups and manufacturers; the nearby Brooklyn Army Terminal; and undeveloped land between the Barclays Center arena and the Fulton Mall, he said.
At Industry City, Atlanta-based Jamestown and its partners have become landlords to 450 businesses, up from 100 since acquiring the neglected industrial plot in 2013, according to Andrew Kimball, chief executive officer of Industry City. The 35-acre (14-hectare) site is well-positioned to meet Amazon’s need for space, especially if neighboring sites along the waterfront were to be integrated in a unified project, he said.
Young Talent
One of the biggest draws for businesses relocating from Manhattan and other areas is that Brooklyn is where the young talent wants to live, according to Kimball. In many cases, companies discover that many of their employees already reside there, he said.
In Williamsburg, Rubenstein Partners’ Jeremiah Kane is making the case for a speculative office building his firm is co-developing. The project, 25 Kent, will have 500,000 square feet -- exactly what Amazon says it needs for the first phase of its new headquarters. Banding with other local developers, he’s suggesting to the city that Brooklyn’s western waterfront can accommodate the rest of the tech giant’s expansion plans.
“We started looking at Amazon’s requirements and started looking at what type of campus they built for themselves in Seattle, and the parallels with Brooklyn are really uncanny,” including its walkable streets, vibrant urban environment and plentiful restaurants, he said.
While New York has an extensive mass-transit network -- cited by Amazon as one of its preferences -- the city’s subways are already overcrowded and in need of repairs. The L train, with direct access to Williamsburg, is scheduled to shut down for 15 months starting in April 2019, about when Amazon would like to start settling into its new locale.
An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.
Deal Breaker?
New York City can probably find enough space to make it competitive in the bidding, according to Albina Reydman, an analyst at CoStar Group Inc. for the Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island markets. But there’s one thing that can’t be changed: affordability.
“At the end of the day, the deal breaker -- if there is one -- would be cost of living. That’s something that you can’t really get around,” she said.
Other cities that have announced their interest in Amazon, such as Chicago or Denver, have a lot of the cultural benefits that draw people to New York, and housing costs that are far cheaper. Average monthly apartment rents are $2,400 in Chicago and $1,600 in Denver, according to Reydman. That compares with $3,800 in downtown Brooklyn and $4,300 in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, she said.
“Yes, there’s art, there’s culture, there’s all these great things in Brooklyn, but in order for your employees to benefit from that, they need to be making enough money,” Reydman said. “Making enough money to benefit from these things in Brooklyn and New York is different than making enough money to afford it in Chicago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...st-bet-for-nyc-to-win-new-amazon-headquarters
I hate them. Fuck Amazon for using them 
Waiting on a same day package today that was suppose to be delivered yesterday. Its says delivered on the website 
LaserShip, Amazon’s New Shipping Partner, Might Be the Most Hated Company on the Internet
There are certain industries that inspire outsize amounts of rage when they screw up. Airlines are one. TV providers are another. But angry comment for angry comment, there may be no more rage-inducing business than package delivery. If you want to garner widespread customer fury, just deliver a package late or damaged and wait for the storm to roll in. LaserShip — an Uber-like service that delivers packages for Amazon, Walmart, and Sephora, among others — might just be the most hated company on the internet. Some comments, helpfully gathered by the criticism website LaserShit.com:
LaserShip — and the ocean of dissatisfied customers it leaves in its wake — is an inevitable result of stratospheric growth. Reliable shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, and the USPS aren’t able to deliver all of the same-day, next-day, and two-day packages that Amazon’s Prime customers are paying for, and the infrastructure just isn’t there to do it as cheaply and efficiently as Amazon needs. That’s led to parasitic companies popping up to take advantage of Amazon’s need for cheap, fast package delivery. The poster child might just be LaserShip.
Amazon uses a variety of ways to get people their packages. Because its volume is so huge, an algorithm automatically chooses the best available option between the USPS, UPS, FedEx, Amazon’s own Flex delivery service, and any of several companies Amazon calls DSPs, or delivery-service providers. Customers can’t select which shipping service they’d prefer; there’s too high a chance that one of those companies is maxed out on how many deliveries it’s making, or that the cost for Amazon would be too high. A same-day delivery done by FedEx could cost Amazon $50, according to Kevin Porter, who has worked for LaserShip, FedEx, and UPS as a courier. So Amazon sources cheaper options. One of those is LaserShip.
Twitter and many message boards, including posts on Amazon’s own forums, are full of complaints about LaserShip. Packages aren’t delivered. Packages are delivered late — this is more troubling given that Amazon often claims a strict delivery window of the same day, the next day, or in two days — or are left outside. Packages are marked as delivered and not delivered. Packages are delivered to the wrong address. Packages are often just completely lost. (The message for that one is, “LaserShip is unable to confirm control of your package at this time.”) Sometimes, an error will show up on the tracking page: “Parcel damaged and will be discarded.” Customers who attempt to contact LaserShip report being totally unable to solve their problems; they are better off contacting Amazon or whichever company they originally purchased their item from.
There are thousands of complaints about LaserShip. Do a Twitter search for the company’s name and you’ll find dozens of tweets per day, essentially none of them positive. (There’s a slight bias there; when was the last time you tweeted that the mail got to you on time? Still, though.) A single one of the threads on Amazon’s forums about LaserShip has nearly 6,500 posts, with more added frequently. Yelp reviews of a facility in New Jersey — one star out of five, 192 reviews — are almost entirely from people who have just had packages delivered, or not delivered, by LaserShip. Few people seem to have actually interacted with the New Jersey facility in any direct way. There’s even a Change.org petition for Amazon to stop using LaserShip.
LaserShip was started in 1986 as a document-delivery service, but within a few years, landed Barnes & Noble as a client during the dot-com boom. Ever since, the company has expanded from its Vienna, Virginia, headquarters, just outside Washington, D.C., to deliver to most of the East Coast. The company, despite its age, is structured like a sharing-economy service: Its couriers are independent contractors, not employees, and those couriers must use their own cars and pay for all expenses, including gas and repairs. Couriers for LaserShip are paid by the package; Porter told me that he was paid between $2 and $4 per package earlier this quarter.
But to make its service affordable, LaserShip cuts corners at every available opportunity. (The company did not return multiple requests for comment.) “Their equipment sucked,” said one former employee who asked to remain anonymous. “It was hard to do our job with bad supplies.” The handheld scanners, said this employee, frequently broke down and were hard to use. The routes, set up by LaserShip employees, were often wrong or incomplete. The company delivers in major cities, but unlike the USPS, does not get apartment codes or keys, meaning that packages are often left outside to be stolen or damaged.
Again, unlike Amazon’s Flex service, which pays its similarly structured couriers by blocks of time, the LaserShip couriers are paid by the package, which encourages them to make as many deliveries as possible in the shortest amount of time. There are many videos of LaserShip couriers throwing fragile packages out of car windows in the general direction of houses.
“I saw piles of packages that weren’t delivered,” says the anonymous former LaserShip courier. They would sit in those piles for days, the courier said, sometimes never actually leaving the facility, and eventually marked as “undeliverable.” One of the most common errors that LaserShip commits — marking an item as delivered when it has not been — makes more sense in that context; couriers have a financial incentive to simply claim an item was delivered and deal with the consequences later, if there are any.
Partly, the problem is also due to the apparent lack of screening or training for couriers. “LaserShip has the worst drivers. No training. All independent contractors,” says Porter, who delivered packages in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. An anonymous LaserShip courier conducted a Reddit AMA where he claimed many drivers had a limited understanding of English, which could impact their ability to navigate a route. “They will hire anybody (seriously) you don’t even have to know a lick of english. Have a car and drivers license? Bam you’re hired,” he wrote. Pay seems to vary; couriers I spoke to reported wages ranging from $500 per week to $1,500 per week, though that’s before gas and wear-and-tear on the courier’s car, which can cost hundreds of dollars each week.
LaserShip primarily handles the most demanding aspects of delivery, while simultaneously being the least capable of performing that job. The company often delivers same-day packages or provides extra deliveries during peak periods like the Christmas season, according to former couriers I spoke to. Several former couriers also said that some blame might lie with Amazon, that packages LaserShip is supposed to deliver do not actually arrive to the LaserShip dispatch centers. Whether that problem lies with Amazon or with the path that packages take from an Amazon distribution center to a LaserShip dispatch is not clear.
LaserShip has also been embroiled in several lawsuits. The company settled a 2014 lawsuit for $800,000 after Massachusetts couriers accused the company of misclassifying them as independent contractors instead of employees. A New York lawsuit accused the company of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act by making unlawful deductions to their wages, failing to pay wages, and failing to pay overtime when the couriers worked in excess of 40 hours per week.
Amazon declined to give me an on-the-record interview about LaserShip, but did provide the following statement: “Across the U.S., small and medium sized businesses provide work opportunities to thousands of individuals who deliver packages to Amazon customers. These businesses have their own employees and are required to abide by applicable laws and Amazon’s Supplier Code of Conduct, which focuses on fair wages, benefits, appropriate working hours and compensation. Safety and customer trust are our top priorities, which is why we require delivery service providers to conduct comprehensive background checks for their employee drivers.”
What I learned from the LaserShip employees, as well as customers, suggests that LaserShip is not conducting anything like a “comprehensive background check,” which may be in violation of the company’s contract with Amazon. In any case, frequent LaserShip victims recommend that Amazon customers opt for two-day shipping — usually done through big, respectable organizations like the USPS and FedEx, which Porter says “babysits” their packages — rather than same-day or next-day shipping, which might be shipped through LaserShip. To take the step of opting for a slower delivery in order to ensure that your package arrives at all feels crazy, but this is all a result of a nation-state company like Amazon growing so fast; the infrastructure of existing delivery services is not capable of doing what Amazon needs. The weird little parasites like LaserShip are a species that’s found a niche in the market wherein Amazon doesn’t really have much of a choice but to put up with them. Customers, though, don’t seem all that eager to do the same.
http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/09/...mpaign=select-all&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1
Waiting on a same day package today that was suppose to be delivered yesterday. Its says delivered on the website LaserShip, Amazon’s New Shipping Partner, Might Be the Most Hated Company on the Internet
There are certain industries that inspire outsize amounts of rage when they screw up. Airlines are one. TV providers are another. But angry comment for angry comment, there may be no more rage-inducing business than package delivery. If you want to garner widespread customer fury, just deliver a package late or damaged and wait for the storm to roll in. LaserShip — an Uber-like service that delivers packages for Amazon, Walmart, and Sephora, among others — might just be the most hated company on the internet. Some comments, helpfully gathered by the criticism website LaserShit.com:
LaserShip — and the ocean of dissatisfied customers it leaves in its wake — is an inevitable result of stratospheric growth. Reliable shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, and the USPS aren’t able to deliver all of the same-day, next-day, and two-day packages that Amazon’s Prime customers are paying for, and the infrastructure just isn’t there to do it as cheaply and efficiently as Amazon needs. That’s led to parasitic companies popping up to take advantage of Amazon’s need for cheap, fast package delivery. The poster child might just be LaserShip.
Amazon uses a variety of ways to get people their packages. Because its volume is so huge, an algorithm automatically chooses the best available option between the USPS, UPS, FedEx, Amazon’s own Flex delivery service, and any of several companies Amazon calls DSPs, or delivery-service providers. Customers can’t select which shipping service they’d prefer; there’s too high a chance that one of those companies is maxed out on how many deliveries it’s making, or that the cost for Amazon would be too high. A same-day delivery done by FedEx could cost Amazon $50, according to Kevin Porter, who has worked for LaserShip, FedEx, and UPS as a courier. So Amazon sources cheaper options. One of those is LaserShip.
Twitter and many message boards, including posts on Amazon’s own forums, are full of complaints about LaserShip. Packages aren’t delivered. Packages are delivered late — this is more troubling given that Amazon often claims a strict delivery window of the same day, the next day, or in two days — or are left outside. Packages are marked as delivered and not delivered. Packages are delivered to the wrong address. Packages are often just completely lost. (The message for that one is, “LaserShip is unable to confirm control of your package at this time.”) Sometimes, an error will show up on the tracking page: “Parcel damaged and will be discarded.” Customers who attempt to contact LaserShip report being totally unable to solve their problems; they are better off contacting Amazon or whichever company they originally purchased their item from.
There are thousands of complaints about LaserShip. Do a Twitter search for the company’s name and you’ll find dozens of tweets per day, essentially none of them positive. (There’s a slight bias there; when was the last time you tweeted that the mail got to you on time? Still, though.) A single one of the threads on Amazon’s forums about LaserShip has nearly 6,500 posts, with more added frequently. Yelp reviews of a facility in New Jersey — one star out of five, 192 reviews — are almost entirely from people who have just had packages delivered, or not delivered, by LaserShip. Few people seem to have actually interacted with the New Jersey facility in any direct way. There’s even a Change.org petition for Amazon to stop using LaserShip.
LaserShip was started in 1986 as a document-delivery service, but within a few years, landed Barnes & Noble as a client during the dot-com boom. Ever since, the company has expanded from its Vienna, Virginia, headquarters, just outside Washington, D.C., to deliver to most of the East Coast. The company, despite its age, is structured like a sharing-economy service: Its couriers are independent contractors, not employees, and those couriers must use their own cars and pay for all expenses, including gas and repairs. Couriers for LaserShip are paid by the package; Porter told me that he was paid between $2 and $4 per package earlier this quarter.
But to make its service affordable, LaserShip cuts corners at every available opportunity. (The company did not return multiple requests for comment.) “Their equipment sucked,” said one former employee who asked to remain anonymous. “It was hard to do our job with bad supplies.” The handheld scanners, said this employee, frequently broke down and were hard to use. The routes, set up by LaserShip employees, were often wrong or incomplete. The company delivers in major cities, but unlike the USPS, does not get apartment codes or keys, meaning that packages are often left outside to be stolen or damaged.
Again, unlike Amazon’s Flex service, which pays its similarly structured couriers by blocks of time, the LaserShip couriers are paid by the package, which encourages them to make as many deliveries as possible in the shortest amount of time. There are many videos of LaserShip couriers throwing fragile packages out of car windows in the general direction of houses.
“I saw piles of packages that weren’t delivered,” says the anonymous former LaserShip courier. They would sit in those piles for days, the courier said, sometimes never actually leaving the facility, and eventually marked as “undeliverable.” One of the most common errors that LaserShip commits — marking an item as delivered when it has not been — makes more sense in that context; couriers have a financial incentive to simply claim an item was delivered and deal with the consequences later, if there are any.
Partly, the problem is also due to the apparent lack of screening or training for couriers. “LaserShip has the worst drivers. No training. All independent contractors,” says Porter, who delivered packages in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. An anonymous LaserShip courier conducted a Reddit AMA where he claimed many drivers had a limited understanding of English, which could impact their ability to navigate a route. “They will hire anybody (seriously) you don’t even have to know a lick of english. Have a car and drivers license? Bam you’re hired,” he wrote. Pay seems to vary; couriers I spoke to reported wages ranging from $500 per week to $1,500 per week, though that’s before gas and wear-and-tear on the courier’s car, which can cost hundreds of dollars each week.
LaserShip primarily handles the most demanding aspects of delivery, while simultaneously being the least capable of performing that job. The company often delivers same-day packages or provides extra deliveries during peak periods like the Christmas season, according to former couriers I spoke to. Several former couriers also said that some blame might lie with Amazon, that packages LaserShip is supposed to deliver do not actually arrive to the LaserShip dispatch centers. Whether that problem lies with Amazon or with the path that packages take from an Amazon distribution center to a LaserShip dispatch is not clear.
LaserShip has also been embroiled in several lawsuits. The company settled a 2014 lawsuit for $800,000 after Massachusetts couriers accused the company of misclassifying them as independent contractors instead of employees. A New York lawsuit accused the company of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act by making unlawful deductions to their wages, failing to pay wages, and failing to pay overtime when the couriers worked in excess of 40 hours per week.
Amazon declined to give me an on-the-record interview about LaserShip, but did provide the following statement: “Across the U.S., small and medium sized businesses provide work opportunities to thousands of individuals who deliver packages to Amazon customers. These businesses have their own employees and are required to abide by applicable laws and Amazon’s Supplier Code of Conduct, which focuses on fair wages, benefits, appropriate working hours and compensation. Safety and customer trust are our top priorities, which is why we require delivery service providers to conduct comprehensive background checks for their employee drivers.”
What I learned from the LaserShip employees, as well as customers, suggests that LaserShip is not conducting anything like a “comprehensive background check,” which may be in violation of the company’s contract with Amazon. In any case, frequent LaserShip victims recommend that Amazon customers opt for two-day shipping — usually done through big, respectable organizations like the USPS and FedEx, which Porter says “babysits” their packages — rather than same-day or next-day shipping, which might be shipped through LaserShip. To take the step of opting for a slower delivery in order to ensure that your package arrives at all feels crazy, but this is all a result of a nation-state company like Amazon growing so fast; the infrastructure of existing delivery services is not capable of doing what Amazon needs. The weird little parasites like LaserShip are a species that’s found a niche in the market wherein Amazon doesn’t really have much of a choice but to put up with them. Customers, though, don’t seem all that eager to do the same.
http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/09/...mpaign=select-all&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1
I hate them. Fuck Amazon for using them
LaserShip, Amazon’s New Shipping Partner, Might Be the Most Hated Company on the Internet
There are certain industries that inspire outsize amounts of rage when they screw up. Airlines are one. TV providers are another. But angry comment for angry comment, there may be no more rage-inducing business than package delivery. If you want to garner widespread customer fury, just deliver a package late or damaged and wait for the storm to roll in. LaserShip — an Uber-like service that delivers packages for Amazon, Walmart, and Sephora, among others — might just be the most hated company on the internet. Some comments, helpfully gathered by the criticism website LaserShit.com:
LaserShip — and the ocean of dissatisfied customers it leaves in its wake — is an inevitable result of stratospheric growth. Reliable shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, and the USPS aren’t able to deliver all of the same-day, next-day, and two-day packages that Amazon’s Prime customers are paying for, and the infrastructure just isn’t there to do it as cheaply and efficiently as Amazon needs. That’s led to parasitic companies popping up to take advantage of Amazon’s need for cheap, fast package delivery. The poster child might just be LaserShip.
Amazon uses a variety of ways to get people their packages. Because its volume is so huge, an algorithm automatically chooses the best available option between the USPS, UPS, FedEx, Amazon’s own Flex delivery service, and any of several companies Amazon calls DSPs, or delivery-service providers. Customers can’t select which shipping service they’d prefer; there’s too high a chance that one of those companies is maxed out on how many deliveries it’s making, or that the cost for Amazon would be too high. A same-day delivery done by FedEx could cost Amazon $50, according to Kevin Porter, who has worked for LaserShip, FedEx, and UPS as a courier. So Amazon sources cheaper options. One of those is LaserShip.
Twitter and many message boards, including posts on Amazon’s own forums, are full of complaints about LaserShip. Packages aren’t delivered. Packages are delivered late — this is more troubling given that Amazon often claims a strict delivery window of the same day, the next day, or in two days — or are left outside. Packages are marked as delivered and not delivered. Packages are delivered to the wrong address. Packages are often just completely lost. (The message for that one is, “LaserShip is unable to confirm control of your package at this time.”) Sometimes, an error will show up on the tracking page: “Parcel damaged and will be discarded.” Customers who attempt to contact LaserShip report being totally unable to solve their problems; they are better off contacting Amazon or whichever company they originally purchased their item from.
There are thousands of complaints about LaserShip. Do a Twitter search for the company’s name and you’ll find dozens of tweets per day, essentially none of them positive. (There’s a slight bias there; when was the last time you tweeted that the mail got to you on time? Still, though.) A single one of the threads on Amazon’s forums about LaserShip has nearly 6,500 posts, with more added frequently. Yelp reviews of a facility in New Jersey — one star out of five, 192 reviews — are almost entirely from people who have just had packages delivered, or not delivered, by LaserShip. Few people seem to have actually interacted with the New Jersey facility in any direct way. There’s even a Change.org petition for Amazon to stop using LaserShip.
LaserShip was started in 1986 as a document-delivery service, but within a few years, landed Barnes & Noble as a client during the dot-com boom. Ever since, the company has expanded from its Vienna, Virginia, headquarters, just outside Washington, D.C., to deliver to most of the East Coast. The company, despite its age, is structured like a sharing-economy service: Its couriers are independent contractors, not employees, and those couriers must use their own cars and pay for all expenses, including gas and repairs. Couriers for LaserShip are paid by the package; Porter told me that he was paid between $2 and $4 per package earlier this quarter.
But to make its service affordable, LaserShip cuts corners at every available opportunity. (The company did not return multiple requests for comment.) “Their equipment sucked,” said one former employee who asked to remain anonymous. “It was hard to do our job with bad supplies.” The handheld scanners, said this employee, frequently broke down and were hard to use. The routes, set up by LaserShip employees, were often wrong or incomplete. The company delivers in major cities, but unlike the USPS, does not get apartment codes or keys, meaning that packages are often left outside to be stolen or damaged.
Again, unlike Amazon’s Flex service, which pays its similarly structured couriers by blocks of time, the LaserShip couriers are paid by the package, which encourages them to make as many deliveries as possible in the shortest amount of time. There are many videos of LaserShip couriers throwing fragile packages out of car windows in the general direction of houses.
“I saw piles of packages that weren’t delivered,” says the anonymous former LaserShip courier. They would sit in those piles for days, the courier said, sometimes never actually leaving the facility, and eventually marked as “undeliverable.” One of the most common errors that LaserShip commits — marking an item as delivered when it has not been — makes more sense in that context; couriers have a financial incentive to simply claim an item was delivered and deal with the consequences later, if there are any.
Partly, the problem is also due to the apparent lack of screening or training for couriers. “LaserShip has the worst drivers. No training. All independent contractors,” says Porter, who delivered packages in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. An anonymous LaserShip courier conducted a Reddit AMA where he claimed many drivers had a limited understanding of English, which could impact their ability to navigate a route. “They will hire anybody (seriously) you don’t even have to know a lick of english. Have a car and drivers license? Bam you’re hired,” he wrote. Pay seems to vary; couriers I spoke to reported wages ranging from $500 per week to $1,500 per week, though that’s before gas and wear-and-tear on the courier’s car, which can cost hundreds of dollars each week.
LaserShip primarily handles the most demanding aspects of delivery, while simultaneously being the least capable of performing that job. The company often delivers same-day packages or provides extra deliveries during peak periods like the Christmas season, according to former couriers I spoke to. Several former couriers also said that some blame might lie with Amazon, that packages LaserShip is supposed to deliver do not actually arrive to the LaserShip dispatch centers. Whether that problem lies with Amazon or with the path that packages take from an Amazon distribution center to a LaserShip dispatch is not clear.
LaserShip has also been embroiled in several lawsuits. The company settled a 2014 lawsuit for $800,000 after Massachusetts couriers accused the company of misclassifying them as independent contractors instead of employees. A New York lawsuit accused the company of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act by making unlawful deductions to their wages, failing to pay wages, and failing to pay overtime when the couriers worked in excess of 40 hours per week.
Amazon declined to give me an on-the-record interview about LaserShip, but did provide the following statement: “Across the U.S., small and medium sized businesses provide work opportunities to thousands of individuals who deliver packages to Amazon customers. These businesses have their own employees and are required to abide by applicable laws and Amazon’s Supplier Code of Conduct, which focuses on fair wages, benefits, appropriate working hours and compensation. Safety and customer trust are our top priorities, which is why we require delivery service providers to conduct comprehensive background checks for their employee drivers.”
What I learned from the LaserShip employees, as well as customers, suggests that LaserShip is not conducting anything like a “comprehensive background check,” which may be in violation of the company’s contract with Amazon. In any case, frequent LaserShip victims recommend that Amazon customers opt for two-day shipping — usually done through big, respectable organizations like the USPS and FedEx, which Porter says “babysits” their packages — rather than same-day or next-day shipping, which might be shipped through LaserShip. To take the step of opting for a slower delivery in order to ensure that your package arrives at all feels crazy, but this is all a result of a nation-state company like Amazon growing so fast; the infrastructure of existing delivery services is not capable of doing what Amazon needs. The weird little parasites like LaserShip are a species that’s found a niche in the market wherein Amazon doesn’t really have much of a choice but to put up with them. Customers, though, don’t seem all that eager to do the same.
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Problem with some of these companies that are partners with Amazon is that they ask these drivers to deliver anywhere from 100 packages to 280 packages day.....you getting in and out of that car 280 times? You gonna be throwing that shit. They need to limit what the drivers take. Limit that shit to 40 or 50 and the services will be better.
Coupled with the fact that the work pool is sorry, its a recipe for disaster. Shipping all around had become a stretched industry. I rarely had issues like 10 years ago. I lose a packages now on the REGULAR.
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