Starting today in Seattle, Amazon Flex will pay part-time drivers to deliver Amazon’s Prime Now packages.
Advertisement
“You can choose any available 2, 4, and 8-hour blocks of time to work the same day, or set availability for up to 12 hours per day for the future”, Amazon says on its website announcing Flex.
“Be you own boss, deliver when you want, as much as you want”, says Amazon. It may also begin covering less-than-urgent packages, too, which suggests that Amazon sees this as a more than just a way to make its high-speed shipping dreams a reality.
It works similar to Uber.
The company said on the its website that it is looking for drivers who are at least 21 years old and have a auto and a valid driver’s license.
The program is now available in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, Washington, and “coming soon” to other cities including New York, Baltimore, Miami, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Portland.
The Amazon Flex program uses an app that allows workers to sign up for shifts to deliver the packages, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
So, how Amazon Flex fits in?
It’s not clear which side would have ended those discussions: Postmates in June ultimately raised a round of $80 million at a valuation of almost $500 million, so the company may have chosen to grow independently.
Advertisement
That’s a very different tack from most on-demand companies, which typically keep overhead costs low and rely on a vast pool of independent contractors to offer various services to consumers, ranging from deliveries to instant rides, home-cleaning, and laundry. But even still, where efficiency is the name of the game, having its own on-demand workers might make good enough sense to justify the potential messiness.
