u/OkWay1305

Unexpected opportunity fell into my lap. Someone I used to work with got me a 9-5 office job.

Drove for a DSP a bit over a year. Many bad days I felt like eff this but generally I liked the work. Plus it kept me afloat when I was otherwise in desperate straits. The new one is more money but worse otherwise imo. Sitting alone in a 95% empty cubicle farm all day because everybody else is WFH. Nobody to talk to and everything is monitored at least as much as Netradaddy w/ cameras on the work areas and spyware on the computers (regulated industry). I already miss throwing totes in the morning, running all day and chitchatting with customers and I just left Saturday.

Gave my DSP notice and they let me work all my normal shifts up to the very last day. Said if I wanted to work weekends I could so technically I'm still employed but dunno if I'll ever go back. While I was working out my notice period it kinda felt like the magic was gone.

Hope y'all make the best of your current situation and find your way to better life circumstances. Don't work hard because Amazon forces you to and don't slack off to stick it to them either. Work for yourself so you can be more tomorrow than you are today. Also hope that the BS you deal with isn't so much that you can never see the good parts. Enjoy those days where everything is just clicking, you're in the zone and your body feels good because they won't last forever. There is some magic there. Hope you can take the good with the bad instead of letting the bad overwhelm the good.

P.S. Use Next Mile

A DSP set up as a co-op where each of the drivers also owned a piece would run circles around the average DSP. It wouldn't even be close. F+ every single week, forever.

Amazon doesn't allow this currently. They don't even like multiple owners, they want a single person to be in charge.

It would get rid of so much overhead though. If every driver is solid and locked in because the profits they're building are for themselves, you don't need nearly as much management. Instead of hiring an ops manager and multiple dispatchers and HR, you could get by with just having one guy sitting in the warehouse in case something goes really wrong. You wouldn't need to be constantly hiring either because you won't have nearly as much turnover. Your vans won't be constantly getting fucked up because if the driver is an owner, that's just as bad as messing up their own personal vehicle.

I don't think it would be enough to get each of the drivers to top level UPS driver pay but it would actually make enough that you could justify doing this job long term. And when the strain is too much, you get bought out of your share and someone else comes in.

During peak there was a thread where people listed problems and annoyances with the app. At the time it felt like nobody at Amazon paid any attention to the Flex app.

Since then you can actually see some progress on the app though. Off the top of my head, two things they fixed were a) having different scanning sounds depending on whether a scan was good or bad and b) the map doesn't tell you to drive the wrong direction every single stop (it still does sometimes but it's better than it was).

Both of those things were brought up by people in the reddit thread at the time so there's at least some chance that people bringing them up here led to them getting fixed.

Making a new thread to collect that info again and hopefully get more stuff fixed.