The Dark Side Of E-commerce

As I mentioned in a recent post, Amazon has focused on the convenience of the customer instead of the convenience of their business. A recent NY Times article highlighted the trend for the hotel industry to do the same.

In my post, I lamented that some industries, including old school industrial companies and healthcare, have not widely adopted customer focused technologies. To their credit, Marvin Windows followed up with me and promised to accelerate their automation efforts. I was impressed.

However, all is not completely rosy in the transformation from brick and mortar to e-commerce.

In an effort to reduce costs and presumably increase the value of an Amazon Prime membership, Amazon has moved away from traditional delivery carriers — UPS, Fedex, USPS, etc. — deploying its own delivery service. The Amazon cargo vans seem to be scheduled such that there is no consistent driver who knows the neighborhood, the people, and property-specific delivery details.

Many of these drivers have no experience delivering to rural areas. Many are terrified by the chickens, guinea fowl, and ducks wandering around Unity Farm. I can tell you that poultry are not a threat to delivery people. Maybe they’ve been watching too much Monty Python.

The drivers have decided that throwing packages out the window and speeding away is the best way to avoid contact with the animals. We’ve had packages thrown at the barn, tossed into bushes, submerged into puddles, dropped out of windows, and left in the middle of the driveway. I can only guess they used this as a training video.

We’ve had so much damage that we’ve had to make a decision, choosing one of these options:

1. Stop ordering from Amazon entirely.
2. Open a post office box and hope that Amazon will deliver items there unharmed.
3. Change our shipping address to the Unity Farm Sanctuary, where horses and goats live in paddocks and the most threatening free range animal is a squirrel.

We’ve decided on option #3, giving up on Amazon’s ability to deliver to a rural setting, because it has built an army of inexperienced delivery people.

The recent United Airlines passenger dragging scandal illustrates what happens when corporations emphasize growth and profitability over long-term customer relationship management. Maybe as a society we have become desensitized to the gradual degradation of relationships with those who provide us services, and we’re unwilling to pay for higher quality experiences. As we continue to accept poorer and poorer service, we’re likely to see income disparities increase with inexperienced service people paid less and the companies they work for earning more. Is it any wonder the middle class continues to shrink?

I would be willing to pay a bit more to have a consistent delivery person who understands my neighborhood. E-commerce is great, but only when the last mile is representative of the rest of a superlative supply chain operation. At present, I would call Amazon’s move to direct delivery a failed experiment as it relates to our needs, and I will have to work around it.

[This piece was originally published on John Halamka’s blog, Life As A Healthcare CIO. To view the original post, click here.]