I used to spend about 30-45 minutes every day when I was doing heavy MS. When you spend that much time at the post office, you will eventually talk about your lives and everything; I mean for a good time there, I talked to them more than I did my coworkers or friends. Anyhow, of course when that play died down, I stopped seeing them. Well a few weeks ago, I had to ship some stuff out, and so I got to talking to one of them some more.
One of them was going to retire this year. He had worked at the PO for over 30 years I believe and was waiting for the next bump up in pension. I jokingly asked him if he’d be bored in retirement. He said, “Nah, I’m gonna go drive for Amazon.” I was shocked and stunned; we had joked about him driving for Uber in his retirement, but he says Amazon is better. That’s when he explained the Amazon process to me.
According to him, in the app, you can ACCEPTS bids on 4 hour driving “tasks.” So you can open the app and see 4 different options – you can drive to drop off packages for a set price of $60 or you can do Amazon fresh (groceries) for $70 (I’m making up numbers) or Amazon Prime Now for say $50. If no drivers accept a task, the prices will go up until someone eventually accepts. He says that although they pay you in a 4 hour block, if you complete it in 2 hours, then you keep the whole amount. He likes to do the early morning tasks so he has no traffic, which is genius. I think he said the earliest task starts at 4am and maybe the last one is at midnight, so it’s close to 24 hours. Another protip he said was that he liked doing the grocery runs instead of package dropoffs because people had a tendency to tip on grocery dropoffs whereas you got no tip for package dropoffs. I believe he said he was averaging around $30-$40/hour by doing this (mostly because he was completing his runs in half the time.) I’m sure Amazon will eventually increase the number of boxes he has to drop off in the future, but for the time being, it’s good side money for him.
I’ve always thought about what I’d do if I retired early and this sounded like a fun way to kill 2-4 hours a day for some supplemental income.