A viral video originally posted to TikTok is making waves Tuesday as it shows a clearly distressed Amazon delivery driver emitting a string of swears followed by a barbaric yawp on a quiet suburban street.
Kristina Danielle Zagwyn posted the video on her TikTok page, where it currently sits at over 100,000 likes and 14,000 shares. The video is being reposted all over the internet, from Reddit to YouTube. In it, an Amazon delivery driver can be heard yelling “shit!” repeatedly before devolving into a shout that unmistakably came straight from a shattered, overworked human soul:
The comments on the original video area mainly overflowing with support for the poor overworked driver. One user said they used to deliver for UPS and that they knew the feeling of finding a package buried somewhere at the end of a long day and losing it. Zagwyn told users she and her husband tried to help the driver, but he was too far gone in his breakdown. She has promised to post a follow-up video of the interaction.
Amazon drivers have a whole lot to breakdown about. Drivers work 10-hour shifts, sometimes having to deliver 400 packages in one go, while they are spied on by in-truck cameras and cellphone apps. Drivers go to extremes to meet the intense quotas set by Amazon, such as routinely disabling safe-driving monitoring apps in order to complete their deliveries within the time Amazon allows. They also skip lunches and even bathroom breaks, forcing drivers to pee in bottles and defecate in bags to complete their deliveries.
Amazon is one of the most profitable retailers in the world, bringing in $11.6 billion in 2020, which puts it just behind Wal-Mart’s $14.9 billion for the most profitable retailer in the U.S., according to Fortune magazine. Amazon’s owner, Jeff Bezos, is the first person in modern history to be worth $200 billion. You’d think such a company could afford to treat the people who make their entire business model function with a little more respect but, as one commenter on Reddit put it, “something is broken in America.”