Do you have any source for this? It seems like a really weird assumption to make, especially given that Amazon will already bundle multiple orders into the same package.
I think their point is that you probably can't compare these two numbers very well because they measure different things, and in the case of Amazon if on average they have 3-4 packages per delivery then the two companies would have very similar numbers.
Sidenote, I hate "cant compare apples to oranges" because you eminently can. I'd argue it is much easier to compare things that are very similar! Apples and oranges both have sugars and acids, skins, are recognized as fruits, and are frequently interchangeable. Comparing apples to cranes is much more difficult. "comparing apples to oranges" should mean the comparison is relatively easy to make on a variety of axes!
I should clarify that comment with if you made a naïve assumption of 3-4 packages per delivery then it's a similar workload. I don't doubt that Amazon workers are treated worse than UPS workers but comparing packages to deliveries without normalizing somehow is not productive.
The 400 package number from the article is also specifically cited from this company and we have no idea whether that is a nationwide figure while the UPS comment implies that it is.
> if you made a naïve assumption of 3-4 packages per delivery then it's a similar workload
But you're still just making an assumption with 0 evidence. I would love to see a distribution of how common multi-package deliveries are, but we don't have that information, and I highly suspect that it's overwhelmingly one package per delivery.
It seems like an exceptionally bad assumption that Amazon is regularly shipping 3-4 items individually rather than bundling them up. After all, they are basically a logistics company at this point.
If we're just making assumptions here, you may as well assume that most Amazon deliveries are to apartment buildings, where the driver just leaves everything at the front desk, there are 200 packagers per delivery, and the driver is only making 2 stops per day.
I'm not making an argument one way or the other beyond that the OP conflating deliveries with packages is inaccurate and misleading. People are acting like drivers are expected to make 400 individual deliveries a day which doesn't remotely pass any sort of sniff test.
Bundling seems like a cost reduction when using a shipper like UPS who charge per package. If you control delivery chain end to end, paying per hours of delivery time, there's probably less savings.
Less savings doesn't mean no savings. It will still for the most part use additional packaging, additional sorting, additional space in trucks, additional labor in terms of locating packages, and additional risk if the driver misses 1/n packages.
How are you defining delivery? Packages going to the same address? I live in a development of ~100 unit apartment buildings. It will literally take the UPS/FedEx truck all day to go less than a thousand feet through the development, and in that time they're delivering hundreds of packages.
Also, Amazon has a large number of different warehouses that products are shipped from, and it's quite common for different items/orders to not ship together either for that reason or because some items' availability would slow down the others.
I don’t order much from Amazon but frequently I get a book and a USB drive or something else and it’s shipped in two boxes despite my preference for bundling into as few parcels as possible likely because of multiple warehouses
Do you have any source for this? It seems like a really weird assumption to make, especially given that Amazon will already bundle multiple orders into the same package.