People are asking Amazon drivers to do TikTok dances for home surveillance cameras when delivering packages.Amazon even chimed in and commented “Poppin’ and lockin’ while box droppin'” on a popular video.Amazon drivers said they are frustrated by the requests piling on to already heavy workloads.Get the latest tech news & scoops — delivered daily to your inbox.Loading Something is loading.
Email address By clicking ‘Sign up’, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider as well as other partner offers and accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy .While instructions like “Please leave the box on the porch” or “Ring the doorbell when you drop off the package” are common directives an Amazon driver might receive from a customer, lately employees are getting a more unusual note: “Dance for me.”
More and more customers are asking their Amazon delivery drivers to perform dances for them when dropping off packages, which are subsequently captured by home surveillance cameras like Ring and shared to social media, as first reported by Vice.
Many drivers aren’t happy about the requests to become unwitting TikTok stars.
The trend gained attention in recent weeks after a series of videos went viral, including one posted by an Amazon customer last month showing a driver dancing to the song “Teach Me How to Dougie” as captured by her surveillance camera.
“I put a sign asking drivers to dance,” the customer wrote in the video.
“This guy was awesome!! Anyone know him??”
@its.just.leah Maybe he was singing this song in his head…it matches pretty good.Tag him if you know him #ringcam #amazondriver ♬ original sound – ❤💙CiiNnY WaLkEr💙❤
Amazon’s official account even chimed in, commenting “Poppin’ and lockin’ while box droppin.'” Amazon did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment for this story.
For drivers, dances can eat into the already limited time they have to meet Amazon’s high delivery quotas.It can also pile onto other humiliating aspects of the job, including the fact that some drivers say they have to pee in bottles because they won’t otherwise have time to finish their deliveries, claims that Amazon has previously denied.
The requests can put drivers in a tough spot.Some fear they may be penalized for ignoring a customer’s special instructions, ultimately risking a lower review or even a complaint for not following the customer’s wishes.
“Technically if the delivery associate doesn’t follow the instructions they can get dinged on their metrics for not doing so,” a delivery company owner in the Midwest told Vice.
Still, Amazon drivers told Vice that though they receive dance requests, they sometimes ignore them.
“I’ve only seen these requests in the app,” a driver in upstate New York told Vice.”If they said it in person, I would probably smack the shit out of them.”
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