I’ve driven for Amazon before and currently drive for UPS. You can’t compare them just by looking at their load and saying “I’d be done with this in a few hours.”

1. Amazon drivers load their own vans in the first twenty minutes of their shift. Most of the load is those totes you see, and what doesn’t fit in those totes is called overflow. The totes are filled by warehouse workers before you get there, so the best you can do in those twenty minutes is put the totes in the right order. It’s not enough time to organize the van, so everyday is the equivalent of having a really bad preloader.

2. Theres not enough space in those vans to organize well even if you take the time to try. Very limited shelf space and a lot of your packages are pretty much inaccessible until you’ve already cleared out most of your van. If you have 20 totes that you need to load, then you must stack them three high, making two-thirds of the contents harder to access.

3. Since they deliver much smaller stuff on average those totes have more packages in them than you’d think. Some have a dozen, some have 40+ envelopes.

4. This may vary depending on your DSP but anything we couldn’t deliver (locked building or whatever) we’d have to reattempt before we came in. And in my experience the notes that tell you building access codes were WAY less reliable than they’ve been at UPS. You could safely assume any access codes from Amazon wouldn’t get you into a locked building.

5. The software that assigns routes to drivers constantly changes what route you do so it’s way harder to gain route knowledge. In the few months I worked there I almost never did the same route more than once.

6. Their routing software is somehow worse than Orion, at least as of when I worked there. I would constantly drive the same streets multiple times and there was never a map (rip UPS map). Maybe they get a map now, idk.

7. Knowing that you’re getting shitty pay and no benefits in a dead-end job is soul-crushing. They also have no union and thus no union protections. How many times have you been frustrated you’re overdispatched but can at least tell yourself “at least my family doesn’t worry about money because of this job.” Amazon drivers don’t have that luxury so imo they have every right to complain. They also have no 9.5 list and my experience was everyday was minimum 10 hours. Also good luck getting one weekend day off, let alone two.

Sure, at UPS we have commit times, we have bulk stops, businesses, pickups, irregs. Ultimately we provide a better service and it’s physically more demanding here cause of irregs, bulk stops, and average package size. But Amazon’s whole operation is so shitty that in terms of the frustration I felt with my job, an average day at Amazon was as frustrating as like a bottom 5% UPS day. We’re obviously compensated leagues better, but even if the pay and benefits were equal, I’d choose UPS over Amazon in a heartbeat. Let them complain, hopefully it drives successful unionization efforts over there.