Dance, I Said — Dance! And Leave the Package on the Porch.

The combination of next-day delivery, Ring surveillance footage and TikTok has put a spotlight on Amazon drivers. But it’s also created a new main character: the package itself.

The TikTok video begins with a fish-eye view of a porch. Beyond it lies a sunny footpath, a yard planted with a sapling, a homogeneous subdivision. We are amid the suburban dream, and yet the view is foreboding: We are peering out from a hidden surveillance camera, and a stranger is approaching the house. We watch him execute a slow variation on the electric slide and deposit a package at the door. Then, in the manner of a servant capitulating to the whims of his liege, he curtsies toward the lens. He does this because, as the TikTok user explains by way of an automated robotic voice-over, “I asked my Amazon driver to do a dance before he delivers my package.”

The first time I saw a video like this was in 2019, when an Amazon customer left a gift of snacks on her doorstep, and her Ring video doorbell (also sold by Amazon) captured the driver’s happy dance as he collected the offering. This video and its many imitators seemed like a cynical bid at virality disguised as a selfless act of kindness, but lately the trend has taken an even darker turn. As Gita Jackson reported recently in Vice News, some Amazon customers are now explicitly asking the company’s drivers to deliver a performance along with the package. They are posting signs to their front doors or tapping unusual delivery instructions into the Amazon app in the hopes of capturing a spectacle on their surveillance feeds. One TikTok user sets a driver’s obligatory shimmy to Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack”; another soundtracks it with “Teach Me How to Dougie.” This time, there are no snacks.

Though forcing another person to dance for you is a classic villain move rooted in the folklore traditions of many cultures, these customers proceed to shamelessly post the evidence to social media. Sometimes the videos are spun into an online sleuthing opportunity, as the TikToker asks viewers to hunt for the dancing driver’s identity. And they represent just a slice of the “Amazon driver approaches the door” genre of internet video, which has become so familiar that a driver’s arrival works as an instant setup for a visual joke. Punch lines have included everything from the driver skipping down a chalked hopscotch grid to getting violently attacked by the customer’s loose dogs. But whether the video is pitched as heartwarming or sadistic, the customer is enlisting the driver into a nonconsensual pageant that doubles as a performance review. As Jackson reported, Amazon drivers who fail to fulfill customer requests risk demerits.