r/offbeat • u/fortune • 1d ago
Police say an Amazon driver ditched 80 packages in the woods before Christmas because they were 'stressed'
https://fortune.com/2024/12/27/amazon-delivery-driver-abandoned-packages-before-christmas-stressed/116
u/SlipDizzy 1d ago
Just looking at the headline: Is it common to put stressed packages in the woods for a nature bath to decompress?
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u/cocteau17 1d ago
I am absolutely certain that this is why I’ve had packages marked as “nowhere safe for delivery” when I have tons of other packages delivered just fine. They just didn’t want to be bothered to make the delivery. But by marking them that way, they stay on the truck and become somebody else’s problem.
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u/Disconnected_NPC 1d ago
Those are due to trying to avoid missed deliveries and bringing their delivery stats down. When I was with XPO on the Amazon contract, they had a hardline of 97% on time delivery requirement. This was fudged by using these reasons for no delivery.
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u/wickedcold 1d ago
Corporate America is rife with this stat-masturbation bullshit that leads to shit like this. It's why McDonalds has you pull up to the curb and wait after the drive through even though you know it's going to take longer now to get your food because you have to wait for someone to grab it and bring it out. Now their drive-through stats look better. Yippee! Except everyone is more annoyed and customer satisfaction is not actually improved. Shit like this is everywhere you look, I see examples of it constantly. Large companies instituting policies and demanding impossible standards from local/regional management who then cheat/fudge things in order look good on paper and not be the worst performer during some weekly KPI conference call, and the VP level folks think it's all going great.
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u/Crabcakes4 1d ago
I drove through Taco Bell one night and there was no one behind me in the line, at the window the lady asked me to back up a car length and said she’d wave me up when the order was ready. She said it’d help them so that I wasn’t sitting in the sensor range waiting while the timer was running.
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u/Mr_Tiggywinkle 1d ago
I always assumed that was because your 12 burger meal was going to take longer than the guy behind you who just wanted a coffee. So they ask you to go to the side so the person behind can get going.
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u/m_busuttil 1d ago
I worked drive-thru for a couple years. This is the reason they’re supposed to use it for - when there’s a slow order that would otherwise hold up orders that can be cleared out - but if you’ve got one car in the drive-thru, and their order’s going to take a minute, and they can either wait at the window and add that minute to your timer or wait at the front and not add it, and your manager’s been on you all week about keeping times down because if you don’t his boss is going to come yell at him… pretty quickly you start sending people around the front as a matter of principle, and the entire system of measuring how long people are waiting for their food is broken but no-one cares because the numbers look good.
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u/wickedcold 1d ago
They do this for a mcdouble and a diet coke half the time if there's someone behind you in line, the faster they move you through the line the better their drive through stats are, which is the holy grail of McDonalds performance metrics. I am sure this is a manager driven thing because it varies from restaurant to restaurant.
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u/Particular-Pen-4789 23h ago
Lol I watched my driver yesterday deliver packages for 9 hours before finally getting to me. I doubt I was the last stop
I tried to find the driver and give them some money but I missed their delivery
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u/Disconnected_NPC 1d ago
Was GM of the SE for Amazon contract when Amazon deliveries were handled by 3PLs when they first started building their DCs.
My better story to this is, in Lakeland Florida I was contacted by one of my 3PL owners. His driver was currently held at gunpoint with a shotgun by a farmer that found his driver in his land in back of box truck opening packages. The reason the farmer caught him is the driver had done it the two days prior and driver would just throw the empty boxes outside.
Another one is a driver hated going to his last stop because it was out of way of his remote parking and normally a very small pallet of 10 small packages. He dumped them at the Goodwill across the street from his second to last stop and then just go home. He did this for a month before somebody at Goodwill called.
I have 100’s of these type of stories. They are fairly normal and bet it’s worse for the Van carriers as my drivers had at worst 5 stops, not 280.
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u/Rock4evur 1d ago
Supply and demand not only affects the quality and price of goods, but also the quality and price of labor. If the pays shit you will always be scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of talent and ethics.
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u/dirtymoney 1d ago edited 1d ago
sloppy, sloppy
Gotta be almost paranoid when getting rid of the evidence. At least from my experience.
Even still.... they were gonna get caught eventually for not making the deliveries.
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u/PrateTrain 1d ago
This is exactly why the USPS is so important
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u/tolndakoti 1d ago
Going postal is an American English slang phrase referring to becoming extremely and uncontrollably angry, often to the point of violence, and usually in a workplace environment. The expression derives from a series of incidents from 1986 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, police officers and members of the general public in acts of mass murder.
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u/PrateTrain 1d ago
Sus.
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u/tolndakoti 1d ago edited 1d ago
I remember the news about this when I was a kid. It became pop culture. There was even a shooting game call Postal).
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u/OpinionLongjumping94 1d ago
Before anyone blames the driver let's not forget how overworked and underpaid they were.
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u/blinkomatic 1d ago
Understandable. Fuck your Bezos
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u/Away_Bad3961 1d ago
What did Bezos do? The driver obviously is in need of therapy. If driving a truck and delivering boxes to the correct address stress him out, I don't know what kind of job would not stress this person out. Imagine if he was a doctor.
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u/Hoody2shoes 1d ago
Imagine if the average redditor was capable of empathy
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u/stumpyraccoon 1d ago
He had options that didn't involve ditching stuff in the woods to try to hide his inability to do his job. He didn't steal them at least so I guess bravo for not taking a shitty option instead of the worst option?
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[deleted]
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u/Hoody2shoes 1d ago
Happens. I’ve had two items turned around and labeled undeliverable after shipment confirmations in the last month.
Shit happens, I’m not gonna get my panties in a twist about it
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u/BraveMoose 1d ago
If your package not being delivered on time is enough for you to throw a tantrum over you have more fuckin problems than the overworked employee who ditched the packages.
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u/Charon_the_Reflector 1d ago
Says the guy posting weird shit on r/conservative
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u/Hoody2shoes 1d ago
Trolling the trolls. If you honestly see no problem with that picture, then perhaps the problem is within… (you)
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u/natfutsock 1d ago
I was driving down the highway once and got distracted by a flickering mess. Realized it was letters sucking out of the back of a mail truck. Anytime someone says "you didn't get that yet?" I'll think of that moment.
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u/nobleheartedkate 1d ago
My best friend has a video from her Ring camera showing the UPS guy overhead two-hand CHUCKING her $800 espresso machine onto her porch. She complained and they told her “our guys are stressed this time of year”. Thankfully the machine wasn’t damaged
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u/meowymcmeowmeow 1d ago
That's a person that needs a gofundme. All these people with houses and several cars need to realize cutting back on subscriptions isn't struggling.
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u/way2lazy2care 16h ago
Dude was trying to steal a bunch of holiday packages and used stress as an excuse. You don't go out of your way to hide thousands of dollars of deliveries in the woods because you're stressed. That's just what you tell the cops so you have a defense.
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u/JustSomeMindless_ 2h ago
Okay so I’m good friends with FedEx drivers and usually they complains if they have over 80 stops for a DAY. I know this says it was 80 packages but how many more stops did this poor driver STILL have at 7pm? Even if every drop had 2 packages, he would have still had to make 40 stops and that was at 7pm so I wonder how many he actually started with.
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u/cozy_pantz 1d ago
I get it. Sometimes I just throw out my pile of bills and my anxiety disappears!
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u/fortune 1d ago
Early Sunday morning, around 2 a.m. in southeastern Massachusetts, Sgt. Shawn Robert from the Lakeville Police Department was on patrol when he spotted three large Amazon totes with more than 80 packages sitting in the woods.
A driver later admitted they left the packages on the side of the road “because they were stressed.”
An Amazon spokesperson told Fortune the company encourages “drivers who aren’t able, or don’t feel safe completing their routes, to report back to their employer."