u/Crayen5

I've been working at a DSP for a long time, and for years (outside of Prime sales and close to Christmas etc) every residential route was around 140-160 stops, often less if it was in a town a bit further away from the city.

Our delivery process was standard, anything small goes through the letterbox if it fits, if not you knock and wait for the customer, then if no-one is home you leave it in their safe place, if nothing is listed you find somewhere safe and dry or ask a neighbour, then you always leave one of those "We missed you" cards whenever a parcel is left anywhere. Everyone has always been happy to do this, it's standard for everyone in this country and the route times allowed for it.

However in the past half a year or so, at least at my station, Amazon have done the following;

- Increased city routes to around 180-200 stops, for towns that are an hour or more out, I haven't really seen those below 150 either unless there are rural parts, but those have all increased too

- Decided we can't select safe places if none are listed, if there's none on the account we should only click "handed to resident" as it ruins the scorecard or something

- Stopped supplying us with the "We missed you cards" so we can't even let customers know where their parcel is, unless we text them but who has time for that. The only reason I heard was digital shift and convincing more customers to actually select a safe place

- Also made it so if we select the customer's safe place, any DNR claimed will get wiped off the scorecard (regardless of where it's actually left) which is a cheeky way to just blast out stops without knocking and waiting for old people if you are seriously behind on schedule

These changes feel like they want us to just doorstep parcels and not find safe places any more, however as usual we still have to deliver basically everything first try and avoid taking any returns back at all, due to mandatory reattempts and DCR.

Essentially, if there is no safe place we just have to doorstep now, but I'm sure only drivers will get the blame for that, and there is 0 chance Amazon is clear about this with any of their customers. The thing that bothers me the most is, the 190-200 stop routes are actually doable now that I don't spend as much time searching through someone's garden for a shed or storage box and writing a note for them, but I know most customers will be upset that Amazon don't seem to want us to do that anymore.

I'm just wondering if this is happening at other stations and what is Amazon trying to achieve with these changes? I feel like they are trying to shift more to the USA style, as it definitely allows more parcels to be delivered, however it doesn't work well in this country with our housing layouts, especially in back-to-front estates, terraced houses, high-street areas and the fact that people have relied on We missed you cards for so long.

I'm also curious if anyone from the USA who worked here before covid had a similar system? I recall someone saying they used to hide parcels and leave cards as well before they shifted to default front door delivery.