You probably see them in your neighborhoods, those grayish blue vans delivering the stuff that you and your neighbor has recently bought on Amazon dot Com. Climbing in and out of those vans are delivery drivers wearing Amazon uniforms. But they aren't Amazon employees. They work for what Amazon calls Delivery service Partners or DSPs for short. Over the last few years, Amazon has been on a hiring spree looking for entrepreneurs who are willing to sign up as delivery company owners. Somebody from HR from Chicago calls me and gives me the congratulations you are you have been chosen to be a dsp oh and I was like, oh wow, now this is serious. That's Ted Johnson. He was a veteran who ran a small consulting business in Illinois. He stumbled onto an online ad looking for delivery partners, interviewed with an Amazon recruiter, and a few weeks later, Ted got a phone call Where am I going to work out of? And she gives me ten locations Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Brooklyn, Long Island, Pennsylvania. We've never been to New England. We did a lot of research and we said, let's uh, let's pack up. Ted and his wife Karen were optimistic. It seemed like an opportunity to prove themselves. Amazon was opening a brand new delivery station and they'd be helping to build it from scratch. I was pretty excited. I'm gonna be straight up with you. Um, I've run a small business, uh, me and Karen and what they had told us during our training on how many packages we'd be delivering, how much money we'd be making, and uh, it was a quality of life changing. It would be more money that I could make in any other job in my life. Amazon said the delivery partners could earn up to three hundred thousand dollars and profits each year. But there were a lot of costs associated with making Amazon deliveries that Ted would learn about the hard way. I've done a lot of big projects and everything, and this thing was overwhelming. How are we gonna do liability insurance? How are we gonna do workman's comp insurance? You know, we're how we're going to do a payroll system? And oh, by the way, you may not get vans, so go out and on the market and look to get white Man's So it was kind of a shoot from the hip show, and I thought, well, you know Amazon, you know, there's this big tech company. Uh, and maybe the reason they're shooting from the hip is because the station is new. From the start, the experience felt rushed and disorganized. And on top of that, Amazon had aggressive expectations for how fast they could deliver a package, so drivers were rushing to make these delivery targets. Minutes and seconds mattered, which led to injuries. Yeah, a lot of drivers um slip and falls probably our biggest. And then the next one, believe it or not, up here were dog bites. Dog bites are a big problem. Actually, it's horrible. We had them getting bit on the hand. We've had them getting bit on the the calf, on the butt. We get him to the doctor as soon as possible, you know. But Amazon's remember, uh, it's it's the customer. It's the package that's important, So be smart about it. And oh, by the way, you're the business owner, so it's your decision and it ain't ours. Ted tried to be a responsible employer to his injured employees. His insurance paid for it, but it wasn't lost on him that he was doing all of this for Amazon, that in a way, a big part of his role was to absorb responsibility and liability for his driver's I would have never thought I would assume so much liability and so much headache as as I did, UH to serve uh this company that could give her rat's ass about people. And that's that's that's the truth. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host, brad Stone. We'll get back to Ted Johnson's story in a bit, but first we're going to tell the story of Amazon Logistics, the transportation division of a company that fulfills the promise of delivery in one or two days, but at a hidden cost. It's a story that begins with Amazon being blamed for ruining Christmas, leading to the fury of Jeff Bezos, and it ends with the formation of one of the world's largest delivery fleets. There are also thousands of people like Ted Johnson, stuck in an unhappy codependence with one of the largest companies in the world. We'll tell you that story after the break. We start during the holiday shopping season two thousand thirteen. Amazon was a much smaller business then. It had about one tenth as many employees as it does today. Even though sales were growing, it barely eked out a profit that year, So the holiday season was crucial for Amazon. Back then, Amazon didn't have of a delivery arm. It's relying on large carriers like UPS, a one hundred year old company with a unionized fleet of drivers. It's an existential crisis every Christmas, in every peak season that they may not have enough capacity to deliver packages to their customers. And you know, if Amazon fails, if UPS fails, like the whole country locks up. Right, Chris, there's no Christmas. Uh, some kids going to be unhappy. That's Dave Click, a former logistics vice president at Amazon. He said that back then Amazon sales were growing at more than twenty a year, but UPS was growing their capacity at about two. It wasn't a problem in Amazon's early days. And so back in UH, UPS was fine, right, we were dropping the bucket. Uh. They had effectively infinite capacity. But as Amazon grew much much faster than UPS and the other carriers, UH, they to uh to use a material portion of that capacity. Amazon was becoming a burden on UPS. The companies were mismatched because think about it, UPS gives its driver Sundays and holidays off. Meanwhile, the Amazon website is always available. It's kicking out packages seventais a week, twenty four hours a day. So the backlog of Amazon packages was growing like water pushing against a dam. And then over the holidays and there was bad weather, and for UPS the dam was breached. They just got a little over their skis. Yeah, you know, you sprinkle some snow in there, and that makes everything just that much worse. And and these you know, if you're running your plant, whether it's fulfillment, sortation, chemical or whatever, if you're running your plante at full out capacity and you lose a day or you lose it two days because of weather event, you can't catch up. Bad weather is being blamed for ruining some Christmas mornings. Up us admits it failed to deliver a lot of packages despite guarantees from online stores like Amazon. UPS and Amazon will offer refunds to customers whose packages did not make it in time for Christmas. Some people are still waiting to get the gifts they ordered in the first place. Some of them guaranteed huge delays this year for some FedEx and UPS shipments. You know, we had one mom talked about how do you explain to your kid that Sannah didn't show up? Holiday gifts were stranded on the tarmac. Amazon had to issue twenty dollar gift cards and attempt to make amends, and the Great e Commerce Christmas Meltdown made national headlines. I think we were all appalled, and this is like the worst possible customer experience for Amazon, and nobody knows. Oh, it's ups is fault. They bought a package from Amazon. They bought a product from Amazon, and Amazon needs to deliver it. Jeff Bezos was apoplectic in his universe. This was just about the worst thing that could happen, and Bezos directed his anger at a guy named Dave Clark. He's known as the driving force behind the growth of Amazon's warehouses and delivery network. Here he is in talk to us about that fulfillment center. I don't see too many humans. Help us understand the amount of robots you have versus the amount of people you employ. Well, our focus is about combining software with automation through robotics and the human performance and process development. And we continue to focus on automation for cost reduction and speed improvement for delivery. And we're excited about the results. When Dave took over Amazon operations in there were about a dozen warehouses, there were almost two hundred. He's known as a drill sergeant. He keeps things marching forward. He also has a reputation as kind of a ruthless guy. Some of his underlings called him the niper because in his early years as an East Coast regional manager he was quick to see who was slacking off from the shop floor and fire them. But in Dave Clark was the one on the chopping block. Bezos made it clear he would fire Clark if another Christmas meltdown happened. To save the company and himself, he would have to reshape a major part of Amazon. Dave had a very keen interest in all things transportation. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man. That's Mike Indrasano, another former logistics executive at Amazon. So here's what happened. After the Christmas fiasco. Dave decided Amazon could no longer rely so heavily on UPS and FedEx. So Amazon turned to the US Post Office because UPS was out of capacity, but the Post Office was seeing the volume of regular mail decline. They had excess capacity and they were already o to practically every house in the country six days a week. Now, while the Post Office is great at mail delivery, they're actually not all that fast and mail sorting. And that's where Amazon stepped in. They would build out sortation centers where packages get organized by zip code, and then they'd hand those off to the mailman. Here's Mike. I got a phone call I think it was Deer six and it was Dave Clark and and then he asked me, he said, so, you know, how many sort centers do you have in the plan? And I said, well, we had. We have sixteen queued up to launch over the next couple of years. And he simply said, launched them all. And I said, okay, gulp um, and we did. I mean, it was amazing. I've never seen anything like that in my thirty years in transportation. They raced to build all six sortation centers in just a year, and they had a loose formula. Put the sortation centers near a major interstate, near big cities, near colleges that provided a hard time workforce. It was a huge operation inside the company. They called it the Sweet sixteen. The next step to Amazon reducing their reliance on UPS and FedEx was acquiring planes. Here's Mike. I remember getting a phone call from day saying I need you to get an airplane. I'm like, I need to get an airplane. Get can you you know, do you know how any contacts? Can you get us an airplane? And I'm like, what for? The planes come in to shuffle inventory around, particularly when Amazon needs to meet its prime delivery promise. They'll fly an item across the country if it's out of stock at the local warehouse. And the first thing they wanted to rush out was a batch of kindles in December, when they had sold out in Seattle once again, UPS and FedEx said they were out of capacity. They couldn't help Amazon at its most critical time of year, so Dave asked Mike to charter some cargo jets. It worked out naturally. Jeff Bezos and Dave Clark immediately wanted to double down right after it was how many planes can we get? And hey, if we can fly one plane, you know how many should we be flying. This was the start of Amazon Air in Amazon least forty seven sixty seven freighters from two airlines. It also started to develop a cargo hub at Cincinnati Regional Airport. Amazon was learning that it could mold a transportation network to its own needs, control costs, and most of all, keep up with its growth. Bezos, of course, watch this build out carefully. Jeff was very concerned and stayed closed Beazos's email addresses public Jeff at Amazon dot com. Whenever he got an email from customers about a botch delivery, he'd forward it on with a single piece of punctuation, the question mark. Throughout fourteen I got a lot of emails from Jeff with question marks, and oh what a powerful tool. Mike says that executives would have to craft detailed solutions to these emails and fix the core problems, or else you cannot reply with a surface answer. In fact, one response to Jeff could take three or four weeks and could have twenty people involved. Jeff was not looking for an answer to his question. He was looking for a solution to the underlying problem. At the time, there was no bigger question at Amazon than how to deliver packages reliably and fast. Dave Clark wasn't happy relying on the Post office either to keep up with its rapid growth. The company was going to have to start delivering packages itself, kicking off another wave of very public problems. Will tell that story next. First they built sortation centers, then they leased planes. They also added long haul trucks. This speaks to Amazon's strength. When they find something is working, they throw money and technology at it and rapidly expand. They do not equivocate. And the last piece of the puzzle, Amazon wanted to deliver their own packages to customer doorsteps in transportation. They call this the last mile. There were a number of false starts in countries like the UK and India, and a grocery delivery, but these early efforts were costly and slow. Inside the company, there was a feeling like they really hadn't figured out how to navigate home delivery. Here's Mike again. There was a lot of discontentment at times. I think the belief was speed wasn't happening fast enough. Why couldn't we go faster, Why couldn't we get to a lower cost. To get that lower cost and to move more quickly, Dave Clark introduced a service called Amazon Flex that let gig workers take delivery jobs, just like they might sign up for Uber or Lift. It was Amazon's first major attempt to get delivery drivers without hiring them as employees. Amazon didn't actually want to employ drivers, just as it didn't employ pilots or truckers. They wanted a hands off relationship, which is a model that's also used by FedEx and d h L. One big reason trucking tends to be heavily unionized, and Amazon absolutely avoided unions at all costs. Jeff Bejos explains his mindset in an on stage interview with Business Insider. When you are just in a new way, and if customers embrace the new way, what's going to happen is incumbents who are practicing the older way are not going to like you. You know, in our view, you know, we have very we have we have workers councils, of course, and we have very good communications with our employees. We don't believe that we need a union to be an intermediary between us and our employees. But of course, at the end of the day, it's always the employee's choice, So Basio says, it's always the employees choice. But as we've seen in union elections at Amazon warehouses, like the high profile one in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon fights tooth and nail to persuade employees to vote against unionizing, and transportation is a heavily unionized industry, more than warehouses. Even after all, this is the turf of the famous hard bargaining Teamsters union, Amazon wanted no part in it, which is one reason why they brought an independent contractor. Here's Mike. You know, when I look to the industry, I certainly would say that the independent contractor models tend to be non union and the employee models tend to be union. In bazos this world, unions are a deal killer because unions agitate for higher wages, lower quotas, and fewer hours. There's one thing that I'll say about Amazonians is you know they like to control um for a lot of reasons. I mean, you know, customer experiences paramount. It is the number one thing, and so sometimes, you know, seating control or giving up control is perceived as is not doing all that you can do for the customer. Dave Clark had an ingenius plan. Amazon could have its cake and eat it too by contracting middlemen to come in to employ the Amazon drivers that June Dave gathers members the tech press at the Waterfront and Seattle to announce that Amazon was recruiting ordinary people to start independent delivery franchises. This program is really a very different program. It's about building your own business. Amazon would provide uniforms, van leases, fuel, and access to insurance. It would set quotas and control these companies with software while having none of the headaches of employing actual drivers. And this environment, our entrepreneurs don't have to fight for customers and they don't have to fight for sales. They get the opportunity with our demand to have a good consistent volume and to grow with Amazon. As we grow, Amazon starts to advertise for entrepreneurs who can start and run these delivery companies. Here's one narrated by a successful DSP owner, Sebastian Festa, who's originally from Haiti. THENDA thank you say starting the delivery service partner business wasn't easy have a logistics background at all. Amazon provised me with the expertise, They guide me, counsel me, They provide me with the tools that I need to be successful. The rest is up to me. Within months, tens of thousands of people applied. Amazon was throwing open the gates for small business owners come build a business delivering packages for the world's largest online store. But Amazon ran this business in a very Amazon like way, with software and algorithms running everything instead of human managers, just like how it operates the global marketplace. This goes back to Bezos because automation allows for faster growth, higher revenue, and lower costs that allows him to fund his pet projects like Alexa and Amazon Studios. That was the recipe that had made Amazon one of the largest companies on the planet and Bezos one of the richest people in the world. So in Dave Clark's new transportation business, instead of human dispatchers handing out routes and calculating payments, it was algorithms and software, and a lot of it was new For entrepreneurs like Ted Johnson, who we heard from at the beginning of the episode. The drawbacks of Amazon's approach started a great soon after he moved to New England. I'd always say, you know, how can a company I think at the time a million and a trillion and a half evaluated company, the richest man in the world, the biggest employer in the world. They gotta have their stuff together. But I'm gonna be honest with you. They were half baked and they were winging it. Ted says his drivers were overloaded with packages. The software seemed to set quotas based on how many packages needed to be delivered. It didn't take into account what was realistic or safe, particularly in bad weather. The estimated delivery times were as low as three minutes. Here in real New Hampshire. You know, every house is five acres apart and each driveways feet. It's icy, so you're not gonna You're not gonna do a delivery in three minutes. Ted said. The Amazon software pressured business owners to make deliveries in hazardous weather like snowstorms. They'd say it was up to him, but if he didn't make the deliveries, then he would get a bad report card. Amazon's tracking systems issued weekly score cards for the drivers and for Ted. The company was measuring their performance for things like wearing a seatbelt, speeding, hard stops, and abrupt turns. Sometimes the software made mistakes and wrongly ding drivers, and the stakes were high. Ted could lose a package or routes. If he was deemed to be unreliable. His drivers quit in droves. They were wearing my driver's out. About thirty three of my initial workforce that I recruited from day one had quit on me. If you had a driver that was kicking butt for some reason, the algorithm would train track that dry ever and would add more and more and more onto their routes to or just break them. And I had I had my you know, people that were my day one guys that I thought these guys would be with me for three years. I said, I'm done. Ted was frustrated by the working conditions of the drivers. He says, some things just didn't sit right with him. I'm gonna tell you straight up. Our employee urinating bottles, and they wore diapers, and they ship in bags and it was awful, and that redlined me. That pissed me off. Ted got started at a tough time. The pandemic was raging, stores were closing. People depended on Amazon, and Amazon's algorithms closely tracked how fast and efficiently Ted's people were working. What looked like an amazing business opportunity turned into a punishing experience, and um for the first time in my life, I had major anxiety. There were nights where I would curl up in the corner and sleep with my dog. Uh, just scared to death that how am I going to go in and and tell these people that we're gonna make it another day. By the beginning of Ted and Karen, like many other delivery company owners, were struggling. He was about to crack. That's next. So Ted and as wife Karen moved from Illinois to hooks At New Hampshire to help build Amazon's new transportation arm. He thought he would be working for one of the world's grade companies, but as boss wasn't Jeff Bezos, Dave Clark, or any one of Amazon's very smart executives. In reality, their boss was Amazon's Frankenstinian creation. It's impossibly demanding systems. It was relentless up at six down at probably seven days a week. If you cared about your drivers, you didn't quit until they got everybody got home, You go to sleep, and your mind would still spend. You're always on, you know what I mean. Then in February, with all these problems proliferating, Ted got a call from a regional executive from Amazon. He calls and there's a lawyer on the phone, and uh, he starts reading from a script. Your contract is effectively up on the third of February, and we are not renewing. Yep, we're not renewing. I said, well, what did I do? They said, we don't, we're not gonna get we're not gonna tell you why, and we're not obligated to tell you why. And I tell you what. At that point, I was so pissed. However, Um, after UM, a couple of deep breaths, ME and Karen looked at each other, and you know what, we said, Thank God, the pain is over. Ted estimates he lost more than one hundred thousand dollars delivering Amazon packages, largely due to damage is he had to pay for least vans. He regrets that he even went into business with Amazon. If we knew what we know now and somebody would have been out there telling we wouldn't have done this thing. There are about these small delivery companies like Ted's. Most have less than one hundred employees each. In two thousand twenty one, they allowed Amazon to deliver about two thirds of its own packages. They basically saved Amazon from the infamous supply chain disruptions of the pandemic. The program has been extraordinarily successful for Amazon, even though many of the delivery company owners shared Ted's complaints, My colleague Spencer talked to fifteen delivery partners. They also brought up unrealistic delivery expectations, buggy software, and Amazon's dismissive attitude towards their concerns. Amazon says that about of their delivery drivers complete their routes within the designated time. They gave us a statement, as we grow, we don't always get it right, and we are committed to seeking feedback to continue improving the DSP and driver experience. This year, we made more investments than ever before in new technology, process improvements, and rate increases. End quote. There's another class of worker who has even less leverage than guys like Ted. That's drivers and their helpers just looking for anything to start making some money. But it came across just an add on. I think it was Indeed that said it was an Amazon driving job, and I said, this sounds easy enough. Might as well just do it to make a few quick bucks and get out of there. And it was a swift process. You if you could pass a drug test, you're in avery. Bernard was twenty five. He had just moved to a town outside Virginia Beach and he was looking for any work he could find. The pandemic didn't leave many options. A week after he applied, Avery was on the road in a truck. He showed up for work expecting to drive a van. To my surprise, on the first day that I showed up to the meetings were these large box trucks and a two man teams and a lot of things I wasn't expecting. So he learned that the job was to deliver large items like trampolines, inflatable pools, furniture, gym equipment, and anything else you can find on Amazon that weighs more than fifty pounds. Ever, he said he got fifteen dollars an hour to start, and after a year got a dollar raise. He says that the days were long and they were often running behind. You go into the customers home, you bring this heavy thing up, usually a couple of flights of stairs, and you place it where they specifically decided that they wanted, and the assembly which is where you do all that stuff of the rumor choice, and then you build a piece of furniture. And they usually gave you about three to five minutes to do that. Amazon disputes Every's claim that they only gave three to five minutes for assembly. They say they gave close to an hour. Still, furniture assembly is relatively new. Amazon just started the program, so once again, all its software was new, and the workers had very little preparation. But we have never seen these things in our life before. So just to get there and read the instructions for this thing when you're sweating your ass off because you've been out for six hours that day in the heat, and you're walking into this person's house and like getting on their carpet and you're just like pouring sweat into their living room. Trying to read these instructions putting it together, It's taken us hour two hours. Having any sort of furniture assembly would throw him off schedule. Traffic could throw them off schedule. Looking for parking could throw him off schedule. It was really difficult to keep on Amazon's estimated timeline. If one thing goes wrong, everything's gonna go wrong, and then you're screwed. And that happens a lot more often than you might think. So on paper, Amazon sees it and it looks all totally doable, But if you run into one thing which happens all the time. You're gonna be behind, and then you're behind for your scheduled deliveries, and you might have to skip around and come back to stuff, which adds on even more time, and it just snowballs into this huge catastrophe. At the same time, Amazon and its delivery companies went on a hiring spread through the pandemic. They don't even test for marijuana anymore. There's always a desperation for people. As time went on. It basically, I've I've seen countless people shuffle through our warehouse, stay for maybe a week and two or before they're gone, and and most people dropped off in like the first couple of months. He says that most people didn't last long because okay, it's a it's a ship job. It's horrible. I mean, in the end, it's menial labor that doesn't provide much. I mean, fifty sixty hour weeks there's pretty usual. He says that minor incidents were common, like hitting parked cars or scuffing the walls of people's homes, but eventually he had a major incident traveling down to a hotsky North Carolina on these back roll roads that are real tiny, and it was just, you know, one tiny slip onto the edge of the grass that ended up um, you know, overcorrecting into a ditch and flipping over and all that stuff. Thankfully, Avery and the driver weren't hurt. You know, it's kind of slow in the moment, and then you're flipped over and everything. You know, My my door was on the ground, so I couldn't open it. The d I mean, the driver, I don't want to put him on blast that. He was definitely panicking quite a bit, and reasonably so. But in the moment, it was just kind of like, this is dumb. Why the funk am I in a turnedover truck in the middle of a hotsky North Carolina with one stop left to deliver somebody's fucking nightstand. But the crash wasn't enough to get him to quit. For Avery, the breaking point came with Jeff Bezos's rocket launch. Afterward, Bezos thanked Amazon customers and employees for helping him to pay for it. I also I want to thank uh, every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this. So so basically he just rode the world's biggest roller coaster on my dime. Um, and boy it sure accomplished nothing. Uh so that's great. And to fucking come out after you land and be like, thanks Amazon employees, you paid for this. Yeah, I fucking quit um very shortly after. So I don't know, man, that was insulting. That was pretty personally insulting. Still, by the end of one Amazon vans called most American cities and suburbs. Amazon trucks were all over the highways, and its cargo planes were at major airports. Amazon Logistics would grow so rapidly that it eclipsed FedEx and came close to surpassing UPS's share of the US delivery market. Dave Clark had freed Amazon for relying on other delivery companies to keep up with its growth. It's one reason why Amazon's market value surpassed one trillion and why Jeff Bezos' personal wealth increased so dramatically over the past few years. Here's former Amazon exact Dave click again. Well, if you think about like, in two thousand thirteen, we delivered effectively zero packages via Amazon Logistics, and you know, I think in two thousand nineteen they delivered three point five billion packages in uh in two thousand nineteen, and so we went from zero to three point five billion in like five years. And now every single other company is trying to chase Amazon to two day shipping and home delivery. But Amazon's huge success as the leader and home delivery also display significant costs onto the public. It didn't provide healthcare coverage for its contract drivers or maintained the congested roads to and from its warehouses. Some personal injury lawyers have done so far as to say that the intense time pressure Amazon places on its drivers amounts to a safety threat. Take the story of Ons Rana, who's twenty three. He was in the backseat of his brother's Tesla when they got rear ended by an Amazon Mercedes sprinter van. It was traveling nearly seventy miles per hour on an Atlanta interstate, so my brother was the one to tell me about what happened. We were going and then there was a car like I would say feed from US had stopped on says his brother tried to change lanes, but there were vehicles on both sides, so he stopped and put his own blinkers on, and then all of a sudden he told me that I looked back and I said, oh my god, and then a splinter van just crashed into us, like it's just a mess. From there. Amazon told us they're not responsible for the accident because the driver was not an Amazon employee. He works for a delivery service partner called Harbor Logistics. Anson his lawyers disagree, and as of this podcast recording, they have a lawsuit pending against Amazon. It's a murky legal area because the driver's work primarily benefits Amazon even though he's employed by the delivery company, and Amazon is facing more lawsuits like this as it puts more events on the road and more people get hurt and crashes. A week after the accident, Ons opened his eyes. After two or three weeks he was responsive. He's now quadriplegic. He lived with his sister and uses a motorized wheelchair. I lost my legs, which you know, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Like, I don't know if I'm able got able to get movement back. It's just a lot to deal with. Mentally, I can't enjoy the like the simple things that a twenty like twenty year old once, like playing video games, playing sports, even like watching TV. I can't change the channel like there's just a lot. Amazon gave us a statement, We're committed to the safety of drivers in the communities where we deliver. We work closely with delivery service partners to set realistic expectations that do not place undue pressure on them for their delivery associates as they complete their shifts. Many of Amazon's critics feel that the company is hiding behind their independent delivery company. These These are small businesses with no assets. Usually they don't even own their own bands, while Amazon is a market value of more than one point seven trillion dollars. This imbalance, as well as other controversies involving warehouse workers and small businesses, have reinforced the impression that Amazon and Jeff Bezos are ruthless capitalists. The iconic entrepreneur, once lauded for his ingenuity for inventing products like the Kindle and Alexa, came to be seen in some quarters as a villain and Amazon as a business that was hurting society instead of helping it. And all of this would come to a dramatic head when Jeff Bezos' personal life exploded into the headlines that's coming up in the next chapter of Foundering, The Amazon story. Foundering is hosted by me brad Stone Sean when Is our executive producer. Spencer Soaper contributed reporting to this episode. Raymondo as our audio engineer, Molly Nugent as our associate producer, Mark Million and vandermay Robin Agello and Molly Shutz are our story editors. Francesca Levi is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.

You probably see them in your neighborhoods, those grayish blue vans delivering the stuff that you and your neighbor has recently bought on Amazon dot Com. Climbing in and out of those vans are delivery drivers wearing Amazon uniforms. But they aren't Amazon employees. They work for what Amazon calls Delivery service Partners or DSPs for short. Over the last few years, Amazon has been on a hiring spree looking for entrepreneurs who are willing to sign up as delivery company owners. Somebody from HR from Chicago calls me and gives me the congratulations you are you have been chosen to be a dsp oh and I was like, oh wow, now this is serious. That's Ted Johnson. He was a veteran who ran a small consulting business in Illinois. He stumbled onto an online ad looking for delivery partners, interviewed with an Amazon recruiter, and a few weeks later, Ted got a phone call Where am I going to work out of? And she gives me ten locations Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Brooklyn, Long Island, Pennsylvania. We've never been to New England. We did a lot of research and we said, let's uh, let's pack up. Ted and his wife Karen were optimistic. It seemed like an opportunity to prove themselves. Amazon was opening a brand new delivery station and they'd be helping to build it from scratch. I was pretty excited. I'm gonna be straight up with you. Um, I've run a small business, uh, me and Karen and what they had told us during our training on how many packages we'd be delivering, how much money we'd be making, and uh, it was a quality of life changing. It would be more money that I could make in any other job in my life. Amazon said the delivery partners could earn up to three hundred thousand dollars and profits each year. But there were a lot of costs associated with making Amazon deliveries that Ted would learn about the hard way. I've done a lot of big projects and everything, and this thing was overwhelming. How are we gonna do liability insurance? How are we gonna do workman's comp insurance? You know, we're how we're going to do a payroll system? And oh, by the way, you may not get vans, so go out and on the market and look to get white Man's So it was kind of a shoot from the hip show, and I thought, well, you know Amazon, you know, there's this big tech company. Uh, and maybe the reason they're shooting from the hip is because the station is new. From the start, the experience felt rushed and disorganized. And on top of that, Amazon had aggressive expectations for how fast they could deliver a package, so drivers were rushing to make these delivery targets. Minutes and seconds mattered, which led to injuries. Yeah, a lot of drivers um slip and falls probably our biggest. And then the next one, believe it or not, up here were dog bites. Dog bites are a big problem. Actually, it's horrible. We had them getting bit on the hand. We've had them getting bit on the the calf, on the butt. We get him to the doctor as soon as possible, you know. But Amazon's remember, uh, it's it's the customer. It's the package that's important, So be smart about it. And oh, by the way, you're the business owner, so it's your decision and it ain't ours. Ted tried to be a responsible employer to his injured employees. His insurance paid for it, but it wasn't lost on him that he was doing all of this for Amazon, that in a way, a big part of his role was to absorb responsibility and liability for his driver's I would have never thought I would assume so much liability and so much headache as as I did, UH to serve uh this company that could give her rat's ass about people. And that's that's that's the truth. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host, brad Stone. We'll get back to Ted Johnson's story in a bit, but first we're going to tell the story of Amazon Logistics, the transportation division of a company that fulfills the promise of delivery in one or two days, but at a hidden cost. It's a story that begins with Amazon being blamed for ruining Christmas, leading to the fury of Jeff Bezos, and it ends with the formation of one of the world's largest delivery fleets. There are also thousands of people like Ted Johnson, stuck in an unhappy codependence with one of the largest companies in the world. We'll tell you that story after the break. We start during the holiday shopping season two thousand thirteen. Amazon was a much smaller business then. It had about one tenth as many employees as it does today. Even though sales were growing, it barely eked out a profit that year, So the holiday season was crucial for Amazon. Back then, Amazon didn't have of a delivery arm. It's relying on large carriers like UPS, a one hundred year old company with a unionized fleet of drivers. It's an existential crisis every Christmas, in every peak season that they may not have enough capacity to deliver packages to their customers. And you know, if Amazon fails, if UPS fails, like the whole country locks up. Right, Chris, there's no Christmas. Uh, some kids going to be unhappy. That's Dave Click, a former logistics vice president at Amazon. He said that back then Amazon sales were growing at more than twenty a year, but UPS was growing their capacity at about two. It wasn't a problem in Amazon's early days. And so back in UH, UPS was fine, right, we were dropping the bucket. Uh. They had effectively infinite capacity. But as Amazon grew much much faster than UPS and the other carriers, UH, they to uh to use a material portion of that capacity. Amazon was becoming a burden on UPS. The companies were mismatched because think about it, UPS gives its driver Sundays and holidays off. Meanwhile, the Amazon website is always available. It's kicking out packages seventais a week, twenty four hours a day. So the backlog of Amazon packages was growing like water pushing against a dam. And then over the holidays and there was bad weather, and for UPS the dam was breached. They just got a little over their skis. Yeah, you know, you sprinkle some snow in there, and that makes everything just that much worse. And and these you know, if you're running your plant, whether it's fulfillment, sortation, chemical or whatever, if you're running your plante at full out capacity and you lose a day or you lose it two days because of weather event, you can't catch up. Bad weather is being blamed for ruining some Christmas mornings. Up us admits it failed to deliver a lot of packages despite guarantees from online stores like Amazon. UPS and Amazon will offer refunds to customers whose packages did not make it in time for Christmas. Some people are still waiting to get the gifts they ordered in the first place. Some of them guaranteed huge delays this year for some FedEx and UPS shipments. You know, we had one mom talked about how do you explain to your kid that Sannah didn't show up? Holiday gifts were stranded on the tarmac. Amazon had to issue twenty dollar gift cards and attempt to make amends, and the Great e Commerce Christmas Meltdown made national headlines. I think we were all appalled, and this is like the worst possible customer experience for Amazon, and nobody knows. Oh, it's ups is fault. They bought a package from Amazon. They bought a product from Amazon, and Amazon needs to deliver it. Jeff Bezos was apoplectic in his universe. This was just about the worst thing that could happen, and Bezos directed his anger at a guy named Dave Clark. He's known as the driving force behind the growth of Amazon's warehouses and delivery network. Here he is in talk to us about that fulfillment center. I don't see too many humans. Help us understand the amount of robots you have versus the amount of people you employ. Well, our focus is about combining software with automation through robotics and the human performance and process development. And we continue to focus on automation for cost reduction and speed improvement for delivery. And we're excited about the results. When Dave took over Amazon operations in there were about a dozen warehouses, there were almost two hundred. He's known as a drill sergeant. He keeps things marching forward. He also has a reputation as kind of a ruthless guy. Some of his underlings called him the niper because in his early years as an East Coast regional manager he was quick to see who was slacking off from the shop floor and fire them. But in Dave Clark was the one on the chopping block. Bezos made it clear he would fire Clark if another Christmas meltdown happened. To save the company and himself, he would have to reshape a major part of Amazon. Dave had a very keen interest in all things transportation. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man. That's Mike Indrasano, another former logistics executive at Amazon. So here's what happened. After the Christmas fiasco. Dave decided Amazon could no longer rely so heavily on UPS and FedEx. So Amazon turned to the US Post Office because UPS was out of capacity, but the Post Office was seeing the volume of regular mail decline. They had excess capacity and they were already o to practically every house in the country six days a week. Now, while the Post Office is great at mail delivery, they're actually not all that fast and mail sorting. And that's where Amazon stepped in. They would build out sortation centers where packages get organized by zip code, and then they'd hand those off to the mailman. Here's Mike. I got a phone call I think it was Deer six and it was Dave Clark and and then he asked me, he said, so, you know, how many sort centers do you have in the plan? And I said, well, we had. We have sixteen queued up to launch over the next couple of years. And he simply said, launched them all. And I said, okay, gulp um, and we did. I mean, it was amazing. I've never seen anything like that in my thirty years in transportation. They raced to build all six sortation centers in just a year, and they had a loose formula. Put the sortation centers near a major interstate, near big cities, near colleges that provided a hard time workforce. It was a huge operation inside the company. They called it the Sweet sixteen. The next step to Amazon reducing their reliance on UPS and FedEx was acquiring planes. Here's Mike. I remember getting a phone call from day saying I need you to get an airplane. I'm like, I need to get an airplane. Get can you you know, do you know how any contacts? Can you get us an airplane? And I'm like, what for? The planes come in to shuffle inventory around, particularly when Amazon needs to meet its prime delivery promise. They'll fly an item across the country if it's out of stock at the local warehouse. And the first thing they wanted to rush out was a batch of kindles in December, when they had sold out in Seattle once again, UPS and FedEx said they were out of capacity. They couldn't help Amazon at its most critical time of year, so Dave asked Mike to charter some cargo jets. It worked out naturally. Jeff Bezos and Dave Clark immediately wanted to double down right after it was how many planes can we get? And hey, if we can fly one plane, you know how many should we be flying. This was the start of Amazon Air in Amazon least forty seven sixty seven freighters from two airlines. It also started to develop a cargo hub at Cincinnati Regional Airport. Amazon was learning that it could mold a transportation network to its own needs, control costs, and most of all, keep up with its growth. Bezos, of course, watch this build out carefully. Jeff was very concerned and stayed closed Beazos's email addresses public Jeff at Amazon dot com. Whenever he got an email from customers about a botch delivery, he'd forward it on with a single piece of punctuation, the question mark. Throughout fourteen I got a lot of emails from Jeff with question marks, and oh what a powerful tool. Mike says that executives would have to craft detailed solutions to these emails and fix the core problems, or else you cannot reply with a surface answer. In fact, one response to Jeff could take three or four weeks and could have twenty people involved. Jeff was not looking for an answer to his question. He was looking for a solution to the underlying problem. At the time, there was no bigger question at Amazon than how to deliver packages reliably and fast. Dave Clark wasn't happy relying on the Post office either to keep up with its rapid growth. The company was going to have to start delivering packages itself, kicking off another wave of very public problems. Will tell that story next. First they built sortation centers, then they leased planes. They also added long haul trucks. This speaks to Amazon's strength. When they find something is working, they throw money and technology at it and rapidly expand. They do not equivocate. And the last piece of the puzzle, Amazon wanted to deliver their own packages to customer doorsteps in transportation. They call this the last mile. There were a number of false starts in countries like the UK and India, and a grocery delivery, but these early efforts were costly and slow. Inside the company, there was a feeling like they really hadn't figured out how to navigate home delivery. Here's Mike again. There was a lot of discontentment at times. I think the belief was speed wasn't happening fast enough. Why couldn't we go faster, Why couldn't we get to a lower cost. To get that lower cost and to move more quickly, Dave Clark introduced a service called Amazon Flex that let gig workers take delivery jobs, just like they might sign up for Uber or Lift. It was Amazon's first major attempt to get delivery drivers without hiring them as employees. Amazon didn't actually want to employ drivers, just as it didn't employ pilots or truckers. They wanted a hands off relationship, which is a model that's also used by FedEx and d h L. One big reason trucking tends to be heavily unionized, and Amazon absolutely avoided unions at all costs. Jeff Bejos explains his mindset in an on stage interview with Business Insider. When you are just in a new way, and if customers embrace the new way, what's going to happen is incumbents who are practicing the older way are not going to like you. You know, in our view, you know, we have very we have we have workers councils, of course, and we have very good communications with our employees. We don't believe that we need a union to be an intermediary between us and our employees. But of course, at the end of the day, it's always the employee's choice, So Basio says, it's always the employees choice. But as we've seen in union elections at Amazon warehouses, like the high profile one in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon fights tooth and nail to persuade employees to vote against unionizing, and transportation is a heavily unionized industry, more than warehouses. Even after all, this is the turf of the famous hard bargaining Teamsters union, Amazon wanted no part in it, which is one reason why they brought an independent contractor. Here's Mike. You know, when I look to the industry, I certainly would say that the independent contractor models tend to be non union and the employee models tend to be union. In bazos this world, unions are a deal killer because unions agitate for higher wages, lower quotas, and fewer hours. There's one thing that I'll say about Amazonians is you know they like to control um for a lot of reasons. I mean, you know, customer experiences paramount. It is the number one thing, and so sometimes, you know, seating control or giving up control is perceived as is not doing all that you can do for the customer. Dave Clark had an ingenius plan. Amazon could have its cake and eat it too by contracting middlemen to come in to employ the Amazon drivers that June Dave gathers members the tech press at the Waterfront and Seattle to announce that Amazon was recruiting ordinary people to start independent delivery franchises. This program is really a very different program. It's about building your own business. Amazon would provide uniforms, van leases, fuel, and access to insurance. It would set quotas and control these companies with software while having none of the headaches of employing actual drivers. And this environment, our entrepreneurs don't have to fight for customers and they don't have to fight for sales. They get the opportunity with our demand to have a good consistent volume and to grow with Amazon. As we grow, Amazon starts to advertise for entrepreneurs who can start and run these delivery companies. Here's one narrated by a successful DSP owner, Sebastian Festa, who's originally from Haiti. THENDA thank you say starting the delivery service partner business wasn't easy have a logistics background at all. Amazon provised me with the expertise, They guide me, counsel me, They provide me with the tools that I need to be successful. The rest is up to me. Within months, tens of thousands of people applied. Amazon was throwing open the gates for small business owners come build a business delivering packages for the world's largest online store. But Amazon ran this business in a very Amazon like way, with software and algorithms running everything instead of human managers, just like how it operates the global marketplace. This goes back to Bezos because automation allows for faster growth, higher revenue, and lower costs that allows him to fund his pet projects like Alexa and Amazon Studios. That was the recipe that had made Amazon one of the largest companies on the planet and Bezos one of the richest people in the world. So in Dave Clark's new transportation business, instead of human dispatchers handing out routes and calculating payments, it was algorithms and software, and a lot of it was new For entrepreneurs like Ted Johnson, who we heard from at the beginning of the episode. The drawbacks of Amazon's approach started a great soon after he moved to New England. I'd always say, you know, how can a company I think at the time a million and a trillion and a half evaluated company, the richest man in the world, the biggest employer in the world. They gotta have their stuff together. But I'm gonna be honest with you. They were half baked and they were winging it. Ted says his drivers were overloaded with packages. The software seemed to set quotas based on how many packages needed to be delivered. It didn't take into account what was realistic or safe, particularly in bad weather. The estimated delivery times were as low as three minutes. Here in real New Hampshire. You know, every house is five acres apart and each driveways feet. It's icy, so you're not gonna You're not gonna do a delivery in three minutes. Ted said. The Amazon software pressured business owners to make deliveries in hazardous weather like snowstorms. They'd say it was up to him, but if he didn't make the deliveries, then he would get a bad report card. Amazon's tracking systems issued weekly score cards for the drivers and for Ted. The company was measuring their performance for things like wearing a seatbelt, speeding, hard stops, and abrupt turns. Sometimes the software made mistakes and wrongly ding drivers, and the stakes were high. Ted could lose a package or routes. If he was deemed to be unreliable. His drivers quit in droves. They were wearing my driver's out. About thirty three of my initial workforce that I recruited from day one had quit on me. If you had a driver that was kicking butt for some reason, the algorithm would train track that dry ever and would add more and more and more onto their routes to or just break them. And I had I had my you know, people that were my day one guys that I thought these guys would be with me for three years. I said, I'm done. Ted was frustrated by the working conditions of the drivers. He says, some things just didn't sit right with him. I'm gonna tell you straight up. Our employee urinating bottles, and they wore diapers, and they ship in bags and it was awful, and that redlined me. That pissed me off. Ted got started at a tough time. The pandemic was raging, stores were closing. People depended on Amazon, and Amazon's algorithms closely tracked how fast and efficiently Ted's people were working. What looked like an amazing business opportunity turned into a punishing experience, and um for the first time in my life, I had major anxiety. There were nights where I would curl up in the corner and sleep with my dog. Uh, just scared to death that how am I going to go in and and tell these people that we're gonna make it another day. By the beginning of Ted and Karen, like many other delivery company owners, were struggling. He was about to crack. That's next. So Ted and as wife Karen moved from Illinois to hooks At New Hampshire to help build Amazon's new transportation arm. He thought he would be working for one of the world's grade companies, but as boss wasn't Jeff Bezos, Dave Clark, or any one of Amazon's very smart executives. In reality, their boss was Amazon's Frankenstinian creation. It's impossibly demanding systems. It was relentless up at six down at probably seven days a week. If you cared about your drivers, you didn't quit until they got everybody got home, You go to sleep, and your mind would still spend. You're always on, you know what I mean. Then in February, with all these problems proliferating, Ted got a call from a regional executive from Amazon. He calls and there's a lawyer on the phone, and uh, he starts reading from a script. Your contract is effectively up on the third of February, and we are not renewing. Yep, we're not renewing. I said, well, what did I do? They said, we don't, we're not gonna get we're not gonna tell you why, and we're not obligated to tell you why. And I tell you what. At that point, I was so pissed. However, Um, after UM, a couple of deep breaths, ME and Karen looked at each other, and you know what, we said, Thank God, the pain is over. Ted estimates he lost more than one hundred thousand dollars delivering Amazon packages, largely due to damage is he had to pay for least vans. He regrets that he even went into business with Amazon. If we knew what we know now and somebody would have been out there telling we wouldn't have done this thing. There are about these small delivery companies like Ted's. Most have less than one hundred employees each. In two thousand twenty one, they allowed Amazon to deliver about two thirds of its own packages. They basically saved Amazon from the infamous supply chain disruptions of the pandemic. The program has been extraordinarily successful for Amazon, even though many of the delivery company owners shared Ted's complaints, My colleague Spencer talked to fifteen delivery partners. They also brought up unrealistic delivery expectations, buggy software, and Amazon's dismissive attitude towards their concerns. Amazon says that about of their delivery drivers complete their routes within the designated time. They gave us a statement, as we grow, we don't always get it right, and we are committed to seeking feedback to continue improving the DSP and driver experience. This year, we made more investments than ever before in new technology, process improvements, and rate increases. End quote. There's another class of worker who has even less leverage than guys like Ted. That's drivers and their helpers just looking for anything to start making some money. But it came across just an add on. I think it was Indeed that said it was an Amazon driving job, and I said, this sounds easy enough. Might as well just do it to make a few quick bucks and get out of there. And it was a swift process. You if you could pass a drug test, you're in avery. Bernard was twenty five. He had just moved to a town outside Virginia Beach and he was looking for any work he could find. The pandemic didn't leave many options. A week after he applied, Avery was on the road in a truck. He showed up for work expecting to drive a van. To my surprise, on the first day that I showed up to the meetings were these large box trucks and a two man teams and a lot of things I wasn't expecting. So he learned that the job was to deliver large items like trampolines, inflatable pools, furniture, gym equipment, and anything else you can find on Amazon that weighs more than fifty pounds. Ever, he said he got fifteen dollars an hour to start, and after a year got a dollar raise. He says that the days were long and they were often running behind. You go into the customers home, you bring this heavy thing up, usually a couple of flights of stairs, and you place it where they specifically decided that they wanted, and the assembly which is where you do all that stuff of the rumor choice, and then you build a piece of furniture. And they usually gave you about three to five minutes to do that. Amazon disputes Every's claim that they only gave three to five minutes for assembly. They say they gave close to an hour. Still, furniture assembly is relatively new. Amazon just started the program, so once again, all its software was new, and the workers had very little preparation. But we have never seen these things in our life before. So just to get there and read the instructions for this thing when you're sweating your ass off because you've been out for six hours that day in the heat, and you're walking into this person's house and like getting on their carpet and you're just like pouring sweat into their living room. Trying to read these instructions putting it together, It's taken us hour two hours. Having any sort of furniture assembly would throw him off schedule. Traffic could throw them off schedule. Looking for parking could throw him off schedule. It was really difficult to keep on Amazon's estimated timeline. If one thing goes wrong, everything's gonna go wrong, and then you're screwed. And that happens a lot more often than you might think. So on paper, Amazon sees it and it looks all totally doable, But if you run into one thing which happens all the time. You're gonna be behind, and then you're behind for your scheduled deliveries, and you might have to skip around and come back to stuff, which adds on even more time, and it just snowballs into this huge catastrophe. At the same time, Amazon and its delivery companies went on a hiring spread through the pandemic. They don't even test for marijuana anymore. There's always a desperation for people. As time went on. It basically, I've I've seen countless people shuffle through our warehouse, stay for maybe a week and two or before they're gone, and and most people dropped off in like the first couple of months. He says that most people didn't last long because okay, it's a it's a ship job. It's horrible. I mean, in the end, it's menial labor that doesn't provide much. I mean, fifty sixty hour weeks there's pretty usual. He says that minor incidents were common, like hitting parked cars or scuffing the walls of people's homes, but eventually he had a major incident traveling down to a hotsky North Carolina on these back roll roads that are real tiny, and it was just, you know, one tiny slip onto the edge of the grass that ended up um, you know, overcorrecting into a ditch and flipping over and all that stuff. Thankfully, Avery and the driver weren't hurt. You know, it's kind of slow in the moment, and then you're flipped over and everything. You know, My my door was on the ground, so I couldn't open it. The d I mean, the driver, I don't want to put him on blast that. He was definitely panicking quite a bit, and reasonably so. But in the moment, it was just kind of like, this is dumb. Why the funk am I in a turnedover truck in the middle of a hotsky North Carolina with one stop left to deliver somebody's fucking nightstand. But the crash wasn't enough to get him to quit. For Avery, the breaking point came with Jeff Bezos's rocket launch. Afterward, Bezos thanked Amazon customers and employees for helping him to pay for it. I also I want to thank uh, every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this. So so basically he just rode the world's biggest roller coaster on my dime. Um, and boy it sure accomplished nothing. Uh so that's great. And to fucking come out after you land and be like, thanks Amazon employees, you paid for this. Yeah, I fucking quit um very shortly after. So I don't know, man, that was insulting. That was pretty personally insulting. Still, by the end of one Amazon vans called most American cities and suburbs. Amazon trucks were all over the highways, and its cargo planes were at major airports. Amazon Logistics would grow so rapidly that it eclipsed FedEx and came close to surpassing UPS's share of the US delivery market. Dave Clark had freed Amazon for relying on other delivery companies to keep up with its growth. It's one reason why Amazon's market value surpassed one trillion and why Jeff Bezos' personal wealth increased so dramatically over the past few years. Here's former Amazon exact Dave click again. Well, if you think about like, in two thousand thirteen, we delivered effectively zero packages via Amazon Logistics, and you know, I think in two thousand nineteen they delivered three point five billion packages in uh in two thousand nineteen, and so we went from zero to three point five billion in like five years. And now every single other company is trying to chase Amazon to two day shipping and home delivery. But Amazon's huge success as the leader and home delivery also display significant costs onto the public. It didn't provide healthcare coverage for its contract drivers or maintained the congested roads to and from its warehouses. Some personal injury lawyers have done so far as to say that the intense time pressure Amazon places on its drivers amounts to a safety threat. Take the story of Ons Rana, who's twenty three. He was in the backseat of his brother's Tesla when they got rear ended by an Amazon Mercedes sprinter van. It was traveling nearly seventy miles per hour on an Atlanta interstate, so my brother was the one to tell me about what happened. We were going and then there was a car like I would say feed from US had stopped on says his brother tried to change lanes, but there were vehicles on both sides, so he stopped and put his own blinkers on, and then all of a sudden he told me that I looked back and I said, oh my god, and then a splinter van just crashed into us, like it's just a mess. From there. Amazon told us they're not responsible for the accident because the driver was not an Amazon employee. He works for a delivery service partner called Harbor Logistics. Anson his lawyers disagree, and as of this podcast recording, they have a lawsuit pending against Amazon. It's a murky legal area because the driver's work primarily benefits Amazon even though he's employed by the delivery company, and Amazon is facing more lawsuits like this as it puts more events on the road and more people get hurt and crashes. A week after the accident, Ons opened his eyes. After two or three weeks he was responsive. He's now quadriplegic. He lived with his sister and uses a motorized wheelchair. I lost my legs, which you know, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Like, I don't know if I'm able got able to get movement back. It's just a lot to deal with. Mentally, I can't enjoy the like the simple things that a twenty like twenty year old once, like playing video games, playing sports, even like watching TV. I can't change the channel like there's just a lot. Amazon gave us a statement, We're committed to the safety of drivers in the communities where we deliver. We work closely with delivery service partners to set realistic expectations that do not place undue pressure on them for their delivery associates as they complete their shifts. Many of Amazon's critics feel that the company is hiding behind their independent delivery company. These These are small businesses with no assets. Usually they don't even own their own bands, while Amazon is a market value of more than one point seven trillion dollars. This imbalance, as well as other controversies involving warehouse workers and small businesses, have reinforced the impression that Amazon and Jeff Bezos are ruthless capitalists. The iconic entrepreneur, once lauded for his ingenuity for inventing products like the Kindle and Alexa, came to be seen in some quarters as a villain and Amazon as a business that was hurting society instead of helping it. And all of this would come to a dramatic head when Jeff Bezos' personal life exploded into the headlines that's coming up in the next chapter of Foundering, The Amazon story. Foundering is hosted by me brad Stone Sean when Is our executive producer. Spencer Soaper contributed reporting to this episode. Raymondo as our audio engineer, Molly Nugent as our associate producer, Mark Million and vandermay Robin Agello and Molly Shutz are our story editors. Francesca Levi is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.