‘I dead-a** feel like I’m about to have a heat stroke’: Amazon driver had ‘194 stops’ on route and says dispatch pressured her to ‘pick up the pace’

A TikToker shared why she quit her delivery driving job, leading to a spirited conversation in the comments section about what is or isn't a reasonable delivery workload.

The video comes from creator Sara Margaret (@xxsar__maxx), who is posting from a secondary account while she tries to "get TikTok to fix the verification code." In it, she details why she quit her job — a move she describes as "so satisfying."

"Long story short, I've been wanting to quit for a while," she says. "I was gonna put in my two weeks, but my dispatch knows how to push my buttons, and they pushed me too far."

Though she doesn't name her company, references to Amazon in the texts she shared via TikTok, plus discussions of DSPs in the comments section with other drivers, indicate she worked for a Delivery Service Partner company tasked with helping Amazon make deliveries. She also hashtags #amazon and #dsp in the comments section, though the #dsp hashtag pulls up TikTok content that is unrelated to delivery driving.

She explains in the video, "Yesterday I had 194 stops, 236 locations, 320 packages delivered to four different neighborhoods, one of which was like a really rich mansion-y, farmhouse-y, spread out, long driveway neighborhood, so it took significantly longer than the other ones. On top of all that, they also made overtime mandatory. So instead of having four days at 10 hours a day, I now had five days at 10 hours a day, and this is my third day."

"Because I had no chance to recover, I was just getting more and more and more sunburned because as much as I put on sunscreen, it sweats right off," the creator continues. "About halfway through my route, I start slowing down a little bit because I dead-ass feel like I'm about to have a heat stroke. I feel sick, right? And my dispatch texts me, and they're like, 'Hey, you're a little behind. So if you get rescued tonight, you're gonna have to call the owner and explain why.'"

@xxsar__maxx #greenscreen #fyp #fypシ #foryoupage #foryourpage #oo #wtf #oof #viral #toxic #work #amazon #dsp #quit #haha #satisfying #satisfied #yikes #story #storytime ♬ original sound - Sara Margaret

That led the creator to explain that she was feeling unwell and would either be delayed or require rescue. She then shows a screengrab of her dispatcher telling her to "pick up the pace" in response.

That did not sit well with the creator. She describes coming in after the shift and trying to quit, but having dispatch tell her she needed to contact the owner. "I hear her go over to another employee and say that I am the third person to quit like that this week. So I spoke up, and I said, 'Yeah, I wonder why.'"

"She got pissed," the creator relays. "She got in my face and started screaming about how she doesn't need my negativity anymore." The creator then says dispatch removed her from all work group chats so she could no longer reach anyone to ask about the owner's contact information. However, the owner ended up reaching out directly and the creator includes screengrabs of a long message she sent the owner in the interest of being "fully transparent" about why she was "disgruntled with the company."

In the comments section, some viewers felt that 50 hours in a week was no big deal.

"You're bitching about 50 hours?" asked one commenter, leading the creator to respond with other concerns she had with the company during her time there.

Another taunted the creator, "Oooh, five 10-hour days, omg, how does anyone make it working like that?"

That led the creator to respond, "Oh, and let’s add that I did 12-hour days if you include the commute. But again, you're soooo funny. Maybe you should do it."

One person pointed out that the hours are okay under the right circumstances, observing, "50 hrs isn’t a big deal when your management cares but when they don’t you don’t want to put in that kind of work for them."

Another observed, "Congratulations, the fact you call him 'your owner' tells us how messy that situation is. So glad you got out."

That led someone to weigh in with the observation that it wasn't literal slavery being described. "I’m pretty sure she’s meaning the company owner … not her actual 'owner.'"

After more conversation about "owner" vs. "manager" and the workload being described, the creator chimed in with, "There’s a difference between being asked to do my job and being expected to forgo my personal safety and boundaries for the sake of an underpaying company."

The Daily Dot contacted the creator via TikTok comment and Amazon via email.

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