Amazon’s Latest Delivery Test Taps Into Gig Economy

The service, which is presently live in Seattle, initially focuses on hiring couriers for Amazon’s one-hour delivery service Amazon Prime Now.

While the company now relies on local stores and fulfillment center workers for shipment, Flex marks a different direction for the company as it starts to hand off a few of the shipping load to locals who might have a couple hours and a vehicle on hand.

Amazon Flex is set to eventually launch in a number of major markets in the United States, specifically major Amazon Prime Now markets, such as New York, Dallas, Chicago, Miami, Baltimore, Austin, Indianapolis, Portland, and Atlanta.

Drivers can choose any available 2-, 4- or 8-hour block of delivery time on a daily basis or schedule up to 12 hours a day in advance, and can work as much or as little as they prefer.

The so-called “gig” economy, however, is not without its own headaches. It’s not as flexible as being an Uber driver, but the benefits are there.

Amazon said it plans to extend Flex to nine other cities soon, and may add non-Prime Now packages to the mix in the future. The company was actually a trendsetter in the field, with its Mechanical Turk service allowing people to earn a small amount of money for completing simple tasks which are easy for people but hard for computers. We don’t know how many drivers Amazon is after, the delivery distance and package size they’d be handling and other factors that would determine how much a driver is paid per hour.