Hi everyone, I have been driving for Amazon Flex for one year now and decided to give a quick and easy review of my experiences and what I have learned.
The top things I enjoyed
The first is flexibility; nothing beats a job where you control your time schedule. You can set your weeks to shift as you want it. For instance, I decided to work the night before Christmas, and that really worked out well. The second reason is bonus pay, just to work the holiday season they pay $30 per hour, so a four-hour block brings in $120, which is really great. Holiday driving isn't for everyone, some families prefer to spend more time together over the holidays, but I find that since this is a flexible job, I get to be with my family whenever I want, so raking in the extra bucks working over holidays gives me more time to spend with my family during slow and low-income seasons. So that's reasons numbers one and two working interactively. Reason number three has definitely got to be, being your own boss. You don't have anyone breathing down your neck, checking your performance and demanding more. You just make the deliveries as fast as you can to earn as much as possible in the least amount of time it takes to deliver a block.
The top things I disliked
I guess that first thing on the top of my list of dislikes was warehouse disorganization, you go there to pick up your block of packages and on a number of occasions you have to wait in line behind other cars for 15 to 20minutes, since they haven't received their route yet and you wait while our packages sit on the racks. Another factor of disorganization is the number of packages does not match the number of deliveries on your sheet. After you scan in all the packages you usually end up with missing items; you get frustrated, mention it to the staff who are quite complacent about the whole thing. The second dislike is the company's feedback. It is impersonal, just an e-mail whenever a customer was dissatisfied, or delivery was late. They don't bother to make any kind of personal contact, just an automated e-mail message in an automated software system. This usually arises with multiple deliveries to apartment buildings. When you arrive with seven packages, I find it quicker and easier to deliver them all to the building's supervisor, and they sign for all the packages, rather than trying to locate every apartment and deliver personalized, which can take a long time. Also, most apartment building offices prefer you drop off with them, then having a stranger traipse about the building complex, it's part of a security protocol. Another issue arising from this are building offices that send you to a special package delivery room and bore you with irrelevant building policies. It is not really in line with Amazon's delivery policy, but it does make sure you complete a block quickly, and in many cases, the receiver is not at home, so you save a lot of time delivering to one building official.
Amazon Updates
Occasionally I get an e-mail or in-app notification stating that a new opportunity will be coming my way, and I never know what that means, but I am excited to find out if it's a better way to earn more money. The latest one was introducing Amazon Restaurant deliveries, which I guess competes with DoorDash and UberEats, I haven't figured out how this will work, and don't have all the details, but it sounds kind of cool, especially receiving tips. I would sum up, that working for Flex has been eventful and interesting, adding new features and services is always great.