# Delivering at night must be a nightmare



## dmason2k (Dec 30, 2017)

I just signed up and the only shifts available are after the sun goes down. No way I'm taking those especially for my first time. Are morning shifts grabbed within seconds?


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## Brandon Wilson (Aug 13, 2017)

dmason2k said:


> I just signed up and the only shifts available are after the sun goes down. No way I'm taking those especially for my first time. Are morning shifts grabbed within seconds?


Depends where you live. Where I'm at there are no morning blocks anymore. The Van contractors got those now. Earliest Block possible is 12:30pm at my station.


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## mke (Dec 19, 2016)

Night delivery varies, you never know what you'll get, sometime I show up for a 3 hour block and they only have 5 packages for me. Some ays it super suburban mcmasions easy to throw on a porch. Some days it' rough neighborhoods i'd never leave a package out in and have to return boatloads of packages.


It gets dark here early now, 4pm and the earliest shifts are 1 pm...so it' likely to end up in the dark. Buy a good flashlight and it' not too bad...usually.


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## getawaycar (Jul 10, 2017)

I wouldn't do evening blocks if you're new, but you can try it out and see how you like it.
Morning blocks were super easy to get during the holidays but may be a lot harder to get now.


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## Woohaa (Jan 15, 2017)

The quickest way to deactivation is night blocks. You'll be late finishing your route more often than not. Harder to see addresses from the street. Paranoid people. No porch lights. Sometimes deliveries in unincorporated areas so no street lights. At all.

Just sucks all around.


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## dmason2k (Dec 30, 2017)

I've been reading forums for side hustle type of jobs for a while now and it seems like it's the same story for every one of them. New service wants to get drivers and customers so they pay their drivers great. Once they gain some traction in the market and realize they are still losing money they slowly drain their drivers until it ruins all morale. Honestly though, I'd rather spend 10-12 hours in a car making min wage than working a 9 to 5 job dealing with bosses. Thats what an unlimited cell phone is for. But that's just me. I don't have a wife or kids, so it's a different story for most. 

Anyways, I'm starting to think Doordash is a better option. Only have to deal with one customer per order/block. I can't imagine the frustration of having to drive all the way back to the Amazon warehouse over 1 box that didn't get delivered.


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## 5000watts (Nov 29, 2017)

I would avoid night blocks if I was you, unless you know the area you are in like the back of your hand. I ended up being deactivated after only a week on Flex because almost all of my blocks were at night and trying to find addresses in the dark isn't the most fun thing in the world, especially when it is raining. One of my three hour blocks started around 7-7:30 and I was still penalized for all packages that were delivered after 9pm.


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## Brandon Wilson (Aug 13, 2017)

5000watts said:


> I would avoid night blocks if I was you, unless you know the area you are in like the back of your hand. I ended up being deactivated after only a week on Flex because almost all of my blocks were at night and trying to find addresses in the dark isn't the most fun thing in the world, especially when it is raining. One of my three hour blocks started around 7-7:30 and I was still penalized for all packages that were delivered after 9pm.


One week? ouch!


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## CigarBoxJimmy (Jan 2, 2017)

It has challenges as mentioned above. Another one you need to learn to look out for is commercial packages after 5PM. Try to find them before you scan them into your inventory and avoid them/give them back. Turn on some acting skill and ask the vests to help you. If you start barking at them they won't even try and just make you take it. People, in general, want to be helpful. Especially when they are under the watchful eye of an employer.

Night runs are usually, not always, the leftovers from the day routes. You can look at the date on the package label. If it's more than 2 days old you are most likely dealing with a boomerang that has already been out for delivery at least once. 

The same approach with attitude applies to returns. The vests can help you if you try to put them in the proper mind frame. Any type of poor attitude, barking, or demanding and they just put it down as a ding against you. I had 8 returns for various reasons the week of Christmas on night runs. I only took a ding on 2. That is the difference of a 4% undelivered rate (rounded) and a 99% delivered rate (rounded). 

With all I've stated I still would recommend against after dark runs at base rate. I adhere to this standard.


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## Cynergie (Apr 10, 2017)

dmason2k said:


> I just signed up and the only shifts available are after the sun goes down. No way I'm taking those especially for my first time. Are morning shifts grabbed within seconds?


Like Brandon Wilson says, it depends on what market/region you operate in (aka supply v demand). If you like in high cost of living/high demand area like Bay Area/SF, your odds of getting AM runs are that much higher. But there also appears to be a recent trend (seems nationwide) which suggests Amazon is quitely shifting the majority of its flex/prime business to its white van contractors.

So if you see a lot of those at your local WHs, then it's a high probability you and other Flex drivers are having to deliver whatever BC/UTA/NSL packages were left over from their shift. I'll never understand the logic of Amazon drones putting BC packages on Flex weekend routes. Especially if those packages have government address on them.....

I also suspect backlash from extremely bad PR incidents Amazon (through Uhaul etc) may affect this shift. Like that Flex driver (who got caught on home owner camera) who was driving a Uhaul van and decided to take an ill timed dump in the customer's driveway.  Or numerous customer and 3rd party videos of Flex drivers delivering and stealing packages caught on camera.

IMO the growing number of concessions like these appear to have become a significant enough concern. Enough to cause Amazon to reconsider its operational and security risks where the Flex/Prime driver program is concerned.

Even with nightmare PR like this

https://uberpeople.net/threads/amaz...ster-by-delivery-man-caught-on-camera.226772/

It's far easier for Amazon to control concessions from theft etc. made by employees of a few tens of thousands of professional white van contractors. Instead of having to micromanage via app tracking/data metrics, the hundreds of thousands of independent drivers the likes of you dmason2k

It's the price an independent contractor has to pay for doing a business gig in this sector IMO.



5000watts said:


> I would avoid night blocks if I was you, unless you know the area you are in like the back of your hand. I ended up being deactivated after only a week on Flex because almost all of my blocks were at night and trying to find addresses in the dark isn't the most fun thing in the world, especially when it is raining. One of my three hour blocks started around 7-7:30 and I was still penalized for all packages that were delivered after 9pm.


not trying to troll here, but did they carry a flashlight? Ideally, one that can be clipped onto your vest (or even a head mounted one in the extreme). The moment a driver accepts those blocks, they were under contract to deliver. Amazon KNOWS the probability of completing those routes are low for Flex drivers. But Amazon is about making profit regardless of the delivery challenge. By accepting that challenge, the driver legally and contractually made that insane logic a reality. I sure hope Amazon was paying well north of $23/hr for whatever 3.5hr to 4hr blocks they put out....

Reality check: If no drivers accept the bad blocks, Amazon can't deliver. Period. Amazon will be forced to come up with a better solution (hiring more white van drivers, giving existing Flex drivers better pay or performance incentives etc) to meet their obligation to the customer.

Accepting bad blocks like that allows Amazon to legally cuck out of their customer obligations --- by transferring 100% of their operational risk to YOU the driver. Period.



Woohaa said:


> The quickest way to deactivation is night blocks. You'll be late finishing your route more often than not. Harder to see addresses from the street. Paranoid people. No porch lights. Sometimes deliveries in unincorporated areas so no street lights. At all.
> 
> Just sucks all around.


...and pissed off, unchained 4 legged K-9's. Who go original gangsta on your property trespassing @$$ for disturbing their sleep and being in the wrong hood....

LMAO. Anybody who takes one of those suicidal blocks deserves to be deactivated IMO. Particularly for the crime of contaminating the human gene pool with their stupid genes. Amazon needs to be held more accountable for the way it views its Flex drivers -- 100% dispensable like TP.


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## wb6vpm (Mar 27, 2016)

lol


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## StevenInRVA (Oct 26, 2017)

I think it just depends on your location/the route etc.... I just did a 2 hour block from 6:15-8:15 tonight, took 50 minutes, 6 deliveries all in the same subdivision. BUT I've had night routes that were terrible too, the nights like tonight I try to enjoy so the bad nights aren't as bad


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## 5000watts (Nov 29, 2017)

Cynergie said:


> not trying to troll here, but did they carry a flashlight? Ideally, one that can be clipped onto your vest (or even a head mounted one in the extreme). The moment a driver accepts those blocks, they were under contract to deliver. Amazon KNOWS the probability of completing those routes are low for Flex drivers. But Amazon is about making profit regardless of the delivery challenge. By accepting that challenge, the driver legally and contractually made that insane logic a reality. I sure hope Amazon was paying well north of $23/hr for whatever 3.5hr to 4hr blocks they put out....
> 
> Reality check: If no drivers accept the bad blocks, Amazon can't deliver. Period. Amazon will be forced to come up with a better solution (hiring more white van drivers, giving existing Flex drivers better pay or performance incentives etc) to meet their obligation to the customer.
> 
> Accepting bad blocks like that allows Amazon to legally cuck out of their customer obligations --- by transferring 100% of their operational risk to YOU the driver. Period.


I have several flashlights, to include flashlights I could mount on my head, and they would not have helped in my situation. For the four night blocks I did, the GPS would occasionally send me close to the house, but the actual house number was several houses away, or the house numbers were out of sequence. Or, in the case of two different trailer parks I had to deliver to, the GPS would get me to the trailer park entrance, and I had to drive around in circles to find the actual trailer I needed to deliver the package to. During my third night block, it was pouring rain, and during my final block, there was a bad accident blocking one of the roads I had to drive down, and I had to take an alternate pathway that added over 30 minutes to my block.

Despite that, I was deactivated, and my appeal was denied even after telling them in my appeal exactly what happened. No warning email (which would have resulted in me not taking anymore night blocks), just a week of work followed by an e-mail firing me despite 100% delivery rates and me working past my block to make sure everybody got their package that night versus bringing it back to the warehouse. Trust me, if I knew night blocks were that bad, and that I would be fired after only one week, then I would have never took it and would have just stuck to Uber and Lyft at night. I have a day job, so I couldn't do day blocks anyway except on weekends.


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## Cynergie (Apr 10, 2017)

Cross referencing the house address (which is on the package) with Google Maps or Waze might have helped significantly. Regardless, I think a driving factor for your deactivation was exceeding Amazon's weekly and/or performance metric for the 9pm cut off. And fact you were consistently time busted on all those blocks. Sounds like Amazon put the 9pm cutoff to be just as bad as getting a high value amount of concessions for your area. Based on my experience with white vans/Flex once you hit hard coded metrics like that, no amount of pleading will move them to reactivate. Especially if your area is saturated with drivers.

You can't rely on house/apt numbers being in sequence. Lost track of the number of times Wizard home owners put a Fidelius Charm on their properties to confound my poor Muggle brain. I've made deliveries to residences the size of garages and tool sheds with random illogical street numbers on same/opposite sides of the street. As a Flex driver, the most exotic delivery I made was to a tiny Koa Campground sized cabin. Hidden in plain sight--behind the typically narrow, combustible SF city Victorian tinderbox. With no discernible street or ped access. 

As a white van driver, I had exactly one house address to date in SF city which was located INSIDE another house....I've yet to find an Amazon drone who could explain to me how this particular sorcery worked to date....

Which is why I never do PM deliveries after 8pm. Operational knowledge that comes with experience I guess.


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## Benzri (Sep 24, 2015)

.


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## damphoose (Jul 6, 2017)

Some people have day jobs so the nights shift availability is not a given. But yes, night shifts are a pain sometimes. Stick to the city, apartments are easier in the dark than houses. Flashlights, reflective vest etc.

In the summer its not so bad since its light out until around 10pm


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## 5000watts (Nov 29, 2017)

Cynergie said:


> Cross referencing the house address (which is on the package) with Google Maps or Waze might have helped significantly. Regardless, I think a driving factor for your deactivation was exceeding Amazon's weekly and/or performance metric for the 9pm cut off. And fact you were consistently time busted on all those blocks. Sounds like Amazon put the 9pm cutoff to be just as bad as getting a high value amount of concessions for your area. Based on my experience with white vans/Flex once you hit hard coded metrics like that, no amount of pleading will move them to reactivate. Especially if your area is saturated with drivers.
> 
> You can't rely on house/apt numbers being in sequence. Lost track of the number of times Wizard home owners put a Fidelius Charm on their properties to confound my poor Muggle brain. I've made deliveries to residences the size of garages and tool sheds with random illogical street numbers on same/opposite sides of the street. As a Flex driver, the most exotic delivery I made was to a tiny Koa Campground sized cabin. Hidden in plain sight--behind the typically narrow, combustible SF city Victorian tinderbox. With no discernible street or ped access.
> 
> ...


I ended up using Google Maps whenever I couldn't find a house to match it to the picture on the app. Doing that ended up adding a few minutes to the delivery, especially if I originally missed a turn and had to find a place to turn around, or in the case of a one way street, having to circle back. Some places in and around Baltimore just suck. In the case of the trailer parks, Google Maps only showed the front entrance of the trailer park, and there were dozens of trailers to navigate around in the dark.

When everything was said and done, I told myself that night deliveries probably aren't a good idea, and if I still had an account I would have just stuck to the weekend day deliveries until the summer when the sun set around 9.


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## Transporter316 (Jan 12, 2018)

I always keep a flashlight strapped at night to see hard to find addresses


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## dkcs (Aug 27, 2014)

Get some good flashlights to make your life much easier. I use a headlamp mount Skilhunt H03 which leaves both of my hands free to do the deliveries. This is a high power flashlight with a headband and runs on 18650 lithium rechargeable batteries and puts out 1200 lumen in a small sized package. It looks dorky but keeps your hands free. You can buy it directly from China for about $30 or so with a coupon. This flashlight is so bright you can use it as a defense weapon as well since it will temporarily blind anyone looking at the beam.


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## icantdeliverhere (Jan 7, 2018)

flashlight, headlamp, and at .25 mile of te stop i drive at average speed of GPS say...if its in the mountains i look at google maps to see if there shoot of house or even just an arial of it just to make sure. 

but once its foggy up there and i lose GPS signal i turn around and i swipe cant find address. email it in due to lost signal.


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## getawaycar (Jul 10, 2017)

The couple times I did a block at night the miles I drove doubled or tripled from my daytime average of 15. Sunday blocks are even worse. You will be driving 50 to a 100 miles or more on Sundays. Evening blocks are the random leftovers of the day, Sundays are leftover packages for the week which explains why you will be driving all over the place to deliver them putting crazy miles on your car. So I don't do them anymore. All the money you're making is going into gas, vehicle maintenance and depreciation and you end up making minimum wage or less.


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## CatchyMusicLover (Sep 18, 2015)

When you say 15 I assume you mean from first stop to last stop, right?

Sundays here are just like any other day, except they don't have businesses (unless it's not marked commercial, in which case it can slip through now and again).


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## getawaycar (Jul 10, 2017)

Correct. Average 15 miles per 4 hour weekday block. Which is less than my round-trip commute of 20 to 30 miles depending on the city the block is in that day.

At my warehouse in the mornings the packages are always neatly organized in bags and you can just scan the bags.
But with evening and Sunday blocks the packages are all loose, unorganized with no bags - which are obvious leftovers.


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## Brandon Wilson (Aug 13, 2017)

getawaycar said:


> Correct. Average 15 miles per 4 hour weekday block. Which is less than my round-trip commute of 20 to 30 miles depending on the city the block is in that day.
> 
> At my warehouse in the mornings the packages are always neatly organized in bags and you can just scan the bags.
> But with evening and Sunday blocks the packages are all loose, unorganized with no bags - which are obvious leftovers.


I wish I could say the same. I'm doing a average of 80-90 miles a block no matter the day, commute included.


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## getawaycar (Jul 10, 2017)

I get offers from 4 or 5 different warehouses but only accept from one that's 10 miles away. The other warehouses are around 30 miles away from me and the block could be another 10 to 20 miles away. No way I would drive that far for this job.


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