Sunday, December 22, 2019

Amazon vs. FedEx


Kevin S. emails:
Robert -

Love your sites and your no nonsense, uncompromising and principled view on the nutty world we live in.

I work for FedEx Freight (we're about 10% of the overall company) and follow a message board where coworkers often speculate about the direction we're headed.  Of course a lot of this is dictated by what Amazon is doing, and with that in mind someone came across this article.

I was previously not familiar with the author (Prof. Scott Galloway) or his site, but it was so well written that even though some of his ideas strike me as potentially far fetched I couldn't get enough his style.  It reminded me of your stuff and I thought you might like it.  Would love to hear your take on his predictions.  Happy Holidays,
RW response:

I have zero understanding of the delivery industry other than as a consumer.

And as a consumer, I have to say that Amazon is the most inconsistent delivery service of all and their consumer complaint system is bizarre. I always get an email questionnaire to rank their service when the delivery was successful but when there is some kind of Amazon screwup (1 in 10 times) and a delivery fails, there is no questionnaire. So you generally can't complain when things go wrong. How nuts is that? Bezos is getting major-league bad data on how well his delivery service is working.

And then there was this doozy: I once ordered an office plant via Amazon. It was about six feet tall. For whatever reason (to hit a delivery quota?), they decided to deliver it on a Sunday when they couldn't get access to my building, so they left it outside on the sidewalk--on a busy street. Fortunately, I just happened to be passing by, saw it, and took it up to my office.

So thanks for giving me the opportunity to comment on the truly despicable Amazon delivery service. I have been looking for a way to work it into a post.

But, as I say, I have no insights into the delivery industry from a business perspective, so I can't comment as to what might occur.

That said, forget about FedEx, what about you? Do you have work skills that are easily transferable if FedEx is taken over and downsizing occurs? If not, think about how you might develop some.



2 comments:

  1. Truth be told FedEx cant even compete with Amazon. Particularly in the last mile logistics handling arena nor in Employee satisfaction, (fedEx is truly abysmal.)

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  2. Personally I never order from Amazon any more. I don't want to make Bezos even one dollar richer than he is. If I shop online it is always directly from the manufacturer or distributor.

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