Disclosures: My sister in the Seattle area is retired from FedEx 30+ years. Her son works for Amazon in a professional capacity (property management, I think). My daughter worked in Fulfillment at an Amazon facility earlier this summer.
Lots of misinformation here, mostly people who see one thing locally and assuming it applies everywhere.
FedEx and FedEx Ground have been operated as two separate companies. Ground is the old Roadway business they bought around '98. Regular FedEx employees hate them. They are more likely to hire contractors and have delivery issues and generate most of the customer complaints. While some of the regular FedEx deliveries are handled by contractors, that is certainly not all of them. Many (pretty sure most) FedEx drivers are employees. FedEx announced earlier this year that they are going to integrate the two businesses. They do hire contractors during the holidays due to the significant uptick in volume.
Amazon is also a hybrid system. With them, the deliveries are more likely to be handled by employees if you are in a city and during off-peak (not holiday) season. They tend to drop ship rural and/or remote deliveries to UPS or USPS, but also use contractors in that regard. By far, most of their drivers are employees.
The Amazon system of routing packages can be difficult to understand because it is not a simple hub and spoke system like most delivery businesses. Some common items are kept in local warehouses to accommodate their same day (or a few hours) shipping. Other items are more regional and will depart from another location based on where the item is in stock (rather than moving to a central hub). Still other items are shipped directly by independent merchants in their system. This helps to explain why you may get Amazon deliveries on the same day from different drivers and why you don't have a 'regular' driver. Again, those of us in rural areas will have a much different experience than our city/suburb friends.
