It’s no secret that Amazon delivery drivers have it rough. From strict delivery quotas to aggressive driver tracking and that whole thing where they’re reportedly forced to pee in bottles because they’re not allowed time for bathroom breaks, it sounds like a miserable job. Maybe if we lived in a real country with better protections for workers, things would be different. But unfortunately, there’s one challenge of the job that any country would have a hard time regulating away: bears.
Vice reports that an Amazon delivery driver recently went viral after their attempt to deliver a package was temporarily stalled by what appears to be a black bear. The encounter was captured by the homeowner’s Ring camera, which incidentally, is also owned by Amazon. As the driver walks up to the gate, blissfully unaware of what’s about to happen next, you can hear the homeowner say over the speaker, “Stop, stop, stop right now, there’s a bear right there. There’s a bear right there.”
And sure enough, a bear pops up on top of the stone wall. To the homeowner’s credit, they then tell the driver to get back into their car instead of telling them to hurry up and deliver the package. But instead of panicking as most people would, the driver stands their ground, raises their arms to look bigger, and scares the bear off. They then finished delivering the package.
The thing is, it’s not exactly a new video. The video is more than a year old and was previously featured on Inside Edition. It’s only gone viral again recently because Amazon posted it on Ring’s TikTok channel as if scaring off bears is a normal part of being a delivery driver and what they’re expected to do.
If you live in, say, the North Carolina mountains, bear encounters are a lot more normal, and black bears aren’t typically aggressive toward humans. But people do still get attacked by them, including one woman in Minnesota who CNN reports was seriously injured by a black bear on Friday.