Amazon encourages employees to begin delivery business

E-commerce giant Amazon wants its employees to quit their jobs and begin their own delivery business. Seems like the giant has realized it is an expensive proposition due to which it is now encouraging the employees. In June 2-18, Amazon had announced that the US employees could apply to start their own small businesses while delivering the Prime Packages in Amazon branded vans and uniforms.

The company has hoped that this can fill the huge need for people to bring packages from the local Amazon sorting centres to the customers who ordered them. Amazon said that about tens of thousands of its employees expressed interest in the program. But the company added on May 13, 2019 that many of its workers could not afford the start-up money that they needed to get the business started.

This was when the company announced that it would give the employees up to $10,000 f the start up money that they will need along with three months of their existing Amazon Pay as a way of getting the capital that they needed to get in to the service. Dave Clarke, the senior vice president of Worldwide operations at Amazon said, “We received overwhelming interest from tens of thousands of individuals who applied to be part of the Delivery Service Partner program, including many employees. We’ve heard from associates that they want to participate in the program but struggled with the transition.”

The e-commerce giant has been trying the gear up an independent delivery service to help handle packages that are now going to companies like the UPS and FedEx and the Postal Service. Amazon has said that it has started the delivery service and there have been more than 200 independent contractors who signed up to handle the deliveries between them and have hired thousands of local drivers to deliver the packages. This year the company is planning to add hundreds more delivery contractors including the former employees who take up the company on its offer.

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