Nearly a dozen water bottles full of yellow liquid parked outside an Amazon warehouse in Atwater Village hint at what daily life is like for the drivers who deliver your packages. That’s because those bottles, scattered along streets and sidewalks, contain their urine.
As the holiday shopping season kicks into high gear, drivers contracted by Amazon say they’re under such severe pressure to make as many deliveries as possible that they don’t have time to use a restroom while on their route — and that’s on a normal, off-peak time of year.
Kelly Chemidlin, a former driver in L.A., told LAist that peeing in bottles in the back of delivery vans was incredibly common.
“It definitely made me feel a little like, you know, less than — very much just like an object,” she said.
Amazon said in a statement that the company is continually investing in its routing technology, and driver feedback is at the heart of those efforts to build safe, achievable, and sustainable routes.
What a current driver says
A current driver in Los Angeles, who LAist has granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation, confirmed it’s still a regular occurrence.
They said they only started taking their 15-minute breaks about a year into the job, and that it’s always a struggle to find a restroom. They even considered drinking less water, but that didn’t last long once they started getting headaches and cramps.
“I would like to spend my 15, you know, just trying to relax,” they said. “Not to use a 15 finding Waldo — finding a restroom.”
How female drivers cope
Chemidlin worked at an L.A. warehouse for several months and didn’t think much about the restroom situation until a trainer warned her that finding one might be difficult.
She often delivered in the MacArthur Park area, where she said businesses were quick to turn her down. Chemidlin would rely on fast food restrooms, or getting some grace from a small business.
But that wasn’t enough to stop the panic each time she had to go.
“I got to the point where I was like, all right, maybe I need to go to, funny enough, Amazon, and buy one of those, like, funnels that girls get for camping so I can, you know, use a water bottle or something,” she told LAist. “Cause that's what all the guys can do … but as a girl, I can’t do that.”
But instead of going for the funnel, she started dehydrating herself, even on hot summer days.
“I'm glad I was able to get out of [the job] sooner rather than later,” she said. “I felt down the whole time.”
How a former driver dealt with it
Michael Ward, a former Amazon delivery driver who worked at the same L.A. warehouse for about three months, said it didn’t seem like an option to not pee in bottles.
“And that's just what people do all day because you're so scrutinized as far as time and where you are,” he told LAist.
Ward would deliver around 250 packages daily, usually in Beverly Hills, downtown, and Chinatown — where public restrooms are rare.
Drivers are allotted two 15-minute breaks and a half-hour lunch per shift. But he said he never once used the shorter breaks due to delivery demands, time constraints, and Amazon’s surveillance.
There are cameras in each van and the drivers are tracked by dispatchers, who help manage the routes. If a driver goes off course for their breaks, Ward said they need to be back in the same area by the time the clock runs out.
Ward said drivers have to rely on public restrooms or the kindness of customers if they don’t want to use bottles, but, he added, that’s not usually an option.
Instead, he would wait until he couldn’t hold it anymore, rush to the back of the van with a bottle, and stash it away until he could dispose of it in a trashcan.
“You lose all hope of being able to use a regular restroom during the day,” he said.
Why you can sometimes see them on the street
Some drivers throw the bottles in a trashcan after their shift, but others will dump them around the warehouse.
In Atwater Village alone, LAist found 11 bottles across three separate visits on Oct. 3, Oct. 8, and Nov. 14 in the immediate vicinity — along San Fernando Road between the Colorado Street freeway exit and Sequoia Street.
Most of the bottles were along the street directly across from the warehouse entrances, and one was even sitting open on the sidewalk in front of the building.
Not just an L.A. issue
On the Amazon drivers subreddit, you can find several posts about the practice of peeing in bottles. Some ask where others dispose of the bottles, others discuss what the best bottle is to use.
Last year, three delivery drivers filed a class action lawsuit in Denver alleging similar situations — that Amazon’s work policies require drivers to relieve themselves in bottles, defecate in bags, and in many cases, refrain from using the restroom at risk of serious health consequences.
“Amazon, one of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the history of the world, subjects its workers to outrageously bad treatment and outrageous working conditions,” David Seligman, executive director of Towards Justice and one of the attorneys representing the drivers, told LAist.
He noted they’re also bringing a discrimination claim on behalf of female drivers, with some of his clients being told to buy “Shewee” portable urinals.
“If there is a workplace policy that effectively requires you to pee in bottles to do the job, then it's, like, inherently and on its face, illegal and discriminatory,” Seligman said. “And that's precisely what Amazon has.”
The company’s response
Amazon acknowledged that drivers do have trouble finding restrooms in a 2021 blog post in which the company apologized for tweeting “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?”
“Even though this is industry-wide, we would like to solve it,” Amazon wrote in the blog post, citing articles about Uber, taxis, and UPS. “We don’t yet know how, but will look for solutions.”
Asked what steps have been taken or explored in the more than three years since the blog post was published, Amazon said it’s continually investing in routing technology with driver feedback at the heart of those efforts.
“Our route design and technology account for real-world factors, including the type of delivery location, walking distance, getting in and out of the vehicle, the size and weight of packages, and environmental factors such as weather,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
Amazon also offered LAist a brief ride along with one of its drivers, Alejandro Elizondo Torres, who's worked at a warehouse in Chatsworth for about three years.
He told LAist he’s able to take bathroom breaks freely.
“We don’t have to say anything, we don’t have to let anyone know,” he said. “We just take it upon ourselves to do our business.”
The app drivers use for deliveries can also point them to the nearest public restroom, but Torres added that he never uses that setting. Instead, he prefers to use his personal phone to find a nearby shopping center or gas station.
How you can help delivery drivers
All of the drivers said being aware of the issue, and being gracious to the people delivering your items, can go a long way.
“The biggest message that I'd like to get out is just for businesses to maybe be a little more friendly towards delivery drivers,” Chemidlin said. “They're not going to go in and trash the place, they just have nowhere else to go.”