What It’s Like Working as an Amazon Flex Delivery Driver
Valued at nearly $1 trillion, Amazon is one of the most powerful companies in the world. The Seattle-based retail giant employs over 600,000 people and operates 100 sortation and fulfillment centers in North America, sometimes sending out as many as 1 million items per day to customers. But Amazon does more than just retail. Amazon publishes its own books and comics, finances TV shows and movies, operates a Texas wind farm, builds robots, streams music, delivers prescription medications, and operates web services for everyone from Medium to the CIA. And that’s not even counting its high-profile acquisitions, which include Twitch, IMDB, Zappos, and Whole Foods, among countless others.
Nearly all of us use Amazon, one way or another. But what is it like working inside the beast? Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking to workers at every level of the Amazon empire to find out.
Welcome to The Amazon Diaries.
Kris Marv is a busy guy: A father of three, including a newborn baby, he recently went back to school to prepare for a career in criminal justice. He lives in Hampton Roads, Virginia, with his wife, who is in the military and currently on maternity leave. For the last three months, Marv has been working as an Amazon Flex and DoorDash delivery driver Monday through Friday.
Although Amazon is largely dependent on UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service to make “last mile” deliveries, it supplements that workforce with Flex Drivers — independent contractors with their own cars who deliver goods to customers for an hourly wage. Every morning, Marv, and drivers like him, wake up early to look for open jobs on their phones. In the best case scenario, Marv will catch a “block” on Amazon Flex, meaning he’ll have a block of time to deliver a certain number of packages. He’ll pick up those packages from a nearby warehouse and deliver them for $20 per hour — and sometimes more, depending on weather conditions or driver shortages. Of all the delivery jobs out there, Marv says, Flex pays the best hourly wage. Then, comes Prime Now or Whole Foods deliveries, ($18 per hour plus tips), and then DoorDash ($17 per hour). As a last resort, he sometimes also drives for Walmart ($9.30 per hour plus tips).
Marv worked as a mechanic previously, where he usually put in 55 hours a week — a schedule that didn’t fit with a new baby and school. He makes less as a driver, but he says that the flexibility of the job is a huge perk: “There are times I can make just as much as when I was a mechanic if I’m willing to put in the work, but mostly I don’t because I don’t have the time.”
I spoke to Marv shortly after the holidays, as he was out making a DoorDash delivery. Marv likes his job, but says that catching blocks has gotten harder. Amazon Flex blocks have become increasingly rare in recent months, a combination of the seasonal shift in consumer habits and Amazon’s increased experimentation with third-party, delivery service providers who’ve crowded out Flex drivers.
In January, Marv made a music video from inside his car that he posted on his Facebook feed, called “Flexin’ Life.” “It’s getting even harder to catch a block, thanks to the DSPs,” he sings. “But I ain’t mad that they did it cuz it all makes sense for them logistically.”
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Kris Marv: Typically, I wake up at 5 a.m. I reserve my DoorDash hours and then I start “tapping” for Amazon. You tap and swipe on your phone until they drop the blocks and you gotta try to scoop one up before anyone else gets it. It’s super competitive and lately, it’s been super difficult to get blocks.
If I’m doing DoorDash, usually I’ll reserve my hours for 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., because I’ve got to drop my kids off at school in the morning and then I’ve gotta pick them up in the afternoon. So, I try to get my work in while they’re at school. And that’s pretty much similar with Amazon. The blocks typically start anywhere from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. and go over anywhere from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. So, it ends up working out nice for me.
For Flex, it’s $20 an hour, if you’re working the warehouse, or it’s $18 an hour plus tips, if you’re doing things like Prime Now or Whole Foods. It’s been so few and far between for Amazon right now. I’m only probably doing one block a week with them. I’m also signed up for Postmates and Walmart delivery, as well as Shipt. (Ed: Shipt is another delivery service.) I tried Postmates and Walmart once, just to see what it was about, and I’ve been kind of sticking to DoorDash and Amazon lately.
Just the rate. There’s more money in Flex and in DoorDash than there is in anything else. With Postmates, you don’t get to see what you’re making for each delivery until after you do it, which is not the greatest. I want to know what I’m making off a delivery before I go and make it. Walmart delivery pays like $9.30 per delivery plus tips, but they’ll only let you make one delivery in an hour. If the customer tips you, which is not often, you’re only making $9 to $15 an hour, where with Flex and DoorDash you’re making $17 to $20 an hour.
Right after the holidays. It’s directly linked to the holiday season. But it’s not only that — they brought in direct service partners, DSPs, which are basically van companies that work directly for Amazon. They’re kind of taking the bulk of the deliveries. We’re secondary to them. We come in and deliver what they can’t, or do the same-day routes when the DSPs are still out on the road delivering the packages from that morning. We’ll come in later in the evening and deliver the packages that were purchased for same-day, as well as Prime Now and Whole Foods. DSPs don’t dip into that.
Honestly, that is the only gripe that I have with this. As far as getting blocks and making changes and stuff, I completely understand it — they’re running a business, and logistically switching over to DSPs just makes sense because it’s putting money back in their own pocket. At the end of the day, that’s business. The only gripe that I have with any of it is that they don’t communicate. You gotta do your own detective work within the community to really figure out what’s going on.
They had announced that they were going to be doing things with direct service partners… but they never really announced their intentions as far as what percentage of the packages those DSPs were going to be doing. When they release blocks in the morning, nobody really knows how many there will be, how many routes there will be. Fifty routes versus 200 routes makes a big difference in people’s minds as to whether it’s worth it to sit there and tap on their phones at 5 a.m., every morning, to try to get one. Because if you’ve got thousands of drivers in the area — again, a number nobody knows — and there’s only 50 routes going out for that morning, most people are gonna say, “Well, forget this. I’m just gonna sleep in and try for something else later or do DoorDash.”
I feel like they kind of oversaturated the market. Right before Christmas, they brought on a whole bunch of new people and that creates a problem… Now, there’s no work to be had.
Good for him! I mean, he created something well ahead of its time and he got so far ahead of the curve that it just blew up into this monstrosity — and I mean that in a good way — that it is today. The reason he makes so much money is he, and the company as a whole, are very good at accomplishing tasks without putting themselves at risk. Five years from now, would I be at all surprised if Amazon had their own delivery service, hired their own delivery employees, and had their own vans and everything else? It wouldn’t surprise me in the least. That’s kind of the direction everything is heading.
Oh, yes. Quite often.
No, I have not had my own package before. But I have met people who have delivered to me because we have the Facebook groups and stuff. One of the groups I’m a part of is for Amazon Flex drivers only. It’s a local group just for the Hampton Roads area, which is what they call the area I live in, in Virginia. People will post a screenshot of their route and I’ve actually seen it before where one of the blips on their map was my house and I’m like, “Oh hey! You’re delivering my package.”
The community here is awesome. It’s funny, we’re all in competition with each other because when you’re trying to grab blocks you’re basically fighting for the blocks with other Flex drivers. But at the same time, we don’t treat it like a competition. We’re all still rooting for one another, we’re all hoping everybody gets a block, we’re all super friendly and we laugh and joke. It’s like a big group of friends that have known each other for years, even though a lot of us have only known each other for a few months. It’s a really good community, for sure.
At least for the duration of being in school. It’s a two and a half year program, but I’ll be doing a summer semester also, so I’m looking at least two years from the time I started in October. Could be longer. I’m planning on moving after I get out of school, so it kind of depends on whether where I move to has Flex available as an option.
If I could, that would be great. It’s just excess income. There’s no reason — if I have the time available — that I can’t run out, make a little extra money, that kind of thing. The direction that Flex is headed, and where it’s gonna be in 10 years, is completely different than it is now, but I definitely wouldn’t be opposed to doing it.
Not for me personally. I mean, the only reason it would concern me at all is just because the more people that get involved in the gig economy, the less work there is to be had within it. If we double the amount of drivers, our workload is cut in half. That would be the only concern I had. As far as needing that second income to make ends meet — I don’t do this because I have to, I do this because I want to. There are some people that do this because they have to, because they can’t make ends meet. I’m not one of those people and can’t really speak for those people.
Everybody loves it. Everybody think it’s hilarious and that it’s spot on. It went fairly viral in the Flex community. If I had to take a guess, I’d say it’s probably been viewed about 5,000 times, which is a pretty big chunk of the Flexers that are on social media. Everyone was just laughing and having a good time and, like I said, that’s what this community is, that’s what it’s really all about. As far as Flex goes, everyone’s just super friendly. I put it out just make people smile when they can’t catch a block or anything else. At least we can find some humor in it.
What It’s Like Working as an Amazon Flex Delivery Driver
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