Amazon Flex helps people make money on their schedule

We successfully tried Amazon Flex for the first time today, picking up 9 drop offs which contained about 50 bags or parcels that barely fit in my Prius. Note: We tried another location to deliver regular boxes at another scheduled offer time and they didn't have any for us. Because we were there, and checked in on time they paid us the $60 for doing nothing basically. Sweet!

This second time, it was an Amazon Fresh warehouse that was about 20 minutes from my house. There are a lot of different spots in the South Bay Area where I live but they are all equidistant and far from my house. It's more profitable and efficient the closer you live to the parcel pickup spot.

When we got there, we had to self check in at a kiosk and scan the back of my drivers license. Then my name came up on a monitor with a number that corresponded to a rolling rack filled with parcels. For Amazon fresh it's mostly brown paper bags, some heavier than others and some random lose items like toilet paper, water and giant bag of dog food. The packages are in some semblance of order but I still needed to group them by a unique three digit string like "MKZ". Make sure your car is pretty empty and you have a decent amount of space. I have a hatchback prius where I folded the seats down but half the trunk space is taken up by the batter. It makes sense to me now to have a system. You can put the packages in groups and then put the last deliveries deeper in your car and the first deliveries in your route by the back of the trunk.

The other thing I wasn't head over heels with is the scanner in the app, it's nice that there's a flashlight icon that allows you to scan the barcode on each package that you know you have all your parcels loaded into your car when you get there as well as scanning each package when you get to the customers address to make sure they have everything in their order. It doesn't pick up the QR code right away and takes a little finegalling (is that a word?) to get it to scan properly. But when you have to do this 100 times it gets a little annoying.

I chose to go with my partner because he can lift 50 lbs with ease and because sometimes it's just more fun and less stressful to go with someone that can drive while you talk or someone that can scan while they put stuff at the front door. As a woman, I don't always feel safe going to random peoples houses in the middle of the night. Nothing bad has ever happened to me, but I mostly only see men doing this kind of work.

All in all, I made $40 base including up to $32 of tips that take $24 hours to see what you've made. In total we spent a little over 2 hours driving to the warehouse and 9 different deliveries and then driving back home. It's nice that all of the packages are within a certain "district" which isn't too far from where you live.

The app takes you into a series of well planned steps so there's not too much onus on the driver to have to make too many decisions. All in all, this app and gig economy work has it's perks. Because it's Amazon I feel like there's more stability, there's actual customer support, there's tons of infrastructure. I would definitely do this again.

Tips:

1. Often times the waiting around, getting your packages, scanning and getting them into your car takes the bulk of time and the actual driving and delivering is pretty easy and streamlined

2. The closer the pickup/warehouse is to your house, the better off and more efficient you are. The dropoffs always happen to be in a zone where it's pretty close to where you live.

3. DON'T FORGET TO BRING YOUR DRIVERS LICENSE. I made that mistake. You won't be able to drive.

4. I like driving at night, it's calm with no traffic, easier to double park just harder to see at night if you don't know where you're going

If you want to sign up for Amazon Flex, it's an extremely viable alternative. Good luck with this new world of work we're in!