Originally Posted by
Mobile 155
I looked at you link on what Amazon was looking for did you read what they are doing and how it works now in England as I posted?
They are looking for sub contractors that improve delivery times and cost from what they now have. They will determine the area that van and driver services. Their scanning and computer software will route the packages. And they will pay that driver and van based on the packages.
If that driver has 180 packages they will only get the money if the packages are delivered. So the driver and the van mich have an hours driving time to get to their assigned delivery area.
That driver will get paid the full amount based on deliveries registered on the Amazon scanner. You can trace your package today on your home computer or smart phone. When it is dropped at your front door it shows up on your computer within seconds.
Now if you pass off part part of your deliveries as you origionally suggested the cyclist would need a scanner as well. What then happens to their routing? But for arguments sake let’s say you figure that part out the first hour out is still making nothing from deliveries. The transfer time from the van to the bicycle is still time taken away from deliveries. Remember the van will have a one hour return trip take out of your delivery time. So if your cyclist does deliver 100 packages who will deliver the other 80 packages? If the van and driver make the 80 deliveries how does the cyclist get their second shift?
All in all if if you were getting 180 packages delivered at one dollar a package you would have to split the 180 bucks between two people making it 90 bucks each. 90 bucks for 12 hours work for the van driver isn’t minimum wage. It is 7.50 an hour.
I enjoy these kinds of logistical challenges. We should discuss this kind of thing more and bicker less about philosophical differences.
One possibility is that the van would spend all its time going back and forth to the warehouse. The driver would probably want to load the packages directly into crates that could be moved from the van to the bikes directly and secured without rearranging them. Somehow they're going to have to be organized in a way that's logically efficient for the bike couriers, which could probably be done by how the packages are coded, e.g. by the four digit add-on of the zip code (i.e. zip+4), which I'm hoping would correspond with an ideal number of packages for a cyclist to carry, at least.
As for splitting the $180, that doesn't really make sense because the $180 is the amount of packages a single van can deliver without cyclists helping. With the van going back and forth to the warehouse only and passing organized crates to the cyclists, the number of packages per day goes up. The question is whether it would go up enough to pay everyone enough for their time, as well as paying for the van, fuel, etc. And of course the cyclists have vehicle expenses too. Those could be offset by giving them discounted bikes and parts, though, the same way the cost of the van seems to be discounted.
Anyway, I think the ultimate question is whether more packages can be delivered per hour with a system of vans making runs between a warehouse and bike couriers, or whether more get delivered by the van-driver doing the door-to-door deliveries as well. I think the answer is probably with the cyclists involved, but they might get the work done so fast they'd run out of packages and then some people would want them to slow down to make Amazon pay out more hours-per-job.