Workers of the world unite!

I now have it on two accounts that the delivery vans which provide most of the day's interest in suburban roads in Epsom do around 170 drops on a round. Which my laptop makes 3.52941176 minutes a drop, if we allow a 10 hour day, without breaks and excluding travelling time to and from the round. I assume one round per driver per day. Vans might do more. While few of the vans seem to have driver's mates as well as drivers, which would speed things up a bit.

And just to make sure they keep up, the central computer seems to know exactly which drop the van is on and where it is. And providing the punter, that is to say me, with a nice little window in my email about delivery telling me all about how my wine - from Majestic - is getting on. Including a map pinpointing where the van has got to.

A van driver who does too many drops out of order is put on report the following morning.

Leaving one to wonder how much of the very modest charge that I incur on my purchase gets into the pocket of what looks like a hard-worked driver. After paying for management, collection from sender, distribution depots, vans and all the rest of it. Not least the IT, although I dare say that is just a commodity these days, more or less bought off the shelf.

Perhaps, given the present demand for home delivery, it is a drivers' market at the moment and they are getting decent wages for what could easily be a twelve hour day, front door to front door. If they are not, one would have hoped that the issue would have resurfaced - it was in the news for some reason that I forget a few years ago - which it has not, to my knowledge.

I should add that the wine did turn up on the day requested, in the two hour window I was given around 1000 this morning. Supplies of alcohol secure for another couple of weeks or so.

PS: the following morning I remembered about another group of workers on a production line, our general practitioners. I think the idea is that they are allocated a little over ten minutes to the patient, with the patients coming through their door at about that rate all through their shift, I suppose the half day. As well as being tiring, it must be a bit dispiriting at times.