Amazon is asking its own employees to quit their jobs to start a business delivering Amazon packages.
The offer comes as Amazon desires to ramp up its shipping time from two days to one for its Prime members.
The company believes the new incentive will get more packages delivered to shoppers’ doorsteps faster.
Those who are accepted into the programs will be given $10,000 in startup costs for employees who decide to leave their jobs.
Those who do participate will also be able to lease blue vans with the Amazon smile logo stamped on the side.
The company additionally says it will pay them three months’ worth of their salary.
The offer is now open to almost all part-time and full-time Amazon employees — including warehouse workers who both pack and ship orders.
It should be noted however that Whole Foods employees are not eligible to receive these new incentives.
Amazon started the new employee incentive a year ago — which allows anyone to launch an independent Amazon delivery business, providing $10,000 in reimbursements to military veterans.
The expansion is part one of the company’s plan to gain more control over its deliveries rather than depend on UPS, the post office and other carriers.
Additionally, it gives Amazon a way to grow its delivery network without spending the money needed to purchase vehicles or hire workers according to Barb Ivanov, director of University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab.
The lab is a research lab that primarily focuses on logistics as well as supply chain transportation.
“The wage problem won’t be Amazon’s problem,” says Ivanov.
John Felton, Amazon’s vice president of global delivery services, says over 200 Amazon delivery businesses have been created since it launched the program last June.
One is run by freight broker, Milton Collier, who started his business in Atlanta around eight months ago.
It has since grown to 120 employees with a collection of 50 vans that can handle up to 200 delivery stops in a day.
It has been preparing for one-day shipping by hiring additional bodies.
“We’re ready,” says Collier.
But Beth Davis-Sramek, a supply chain management professor at Auburn University, says Amazon has quite a ways to go before it poses a threat to both UPS and FedEx.
That being said, those carriers have over thousands of truck and hundreds of planes to get packages where they need to go.
But they are doing more than solely delivering boxes to doorsteps — they are additionally transporting packages between warehouses and businesses.
“UPS and FedEx will be just fine,” says Davis-Sramek.
Amazon has additionally broke ground on a new $1.5 billion airport so it has greater control over their shipping.
The company has additionally launched “Branded Stores for Amazon Sellers” to allow smaller merchants to create branded storefronts with Adobe.
Techcrunch shared:
“The timing of the news is interesting on two fronts. On Adobe’s end, it follows on from an announcement made yesterday, where Adobe (which is holding its Imagine event this week in Vegas) noted that Magento was getting integrations with Amazon and Google. Merchants now can use the Magento platform to manage inventory, pricing and other details on Amazon listings. Today’s news is another sign of how Adobe may indeed have a lot of tools for merchants to fuel its new Commerce Cloud effort (launched in March), but it lacks the scale of transactions and merchant customers that Amazon has.”
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