Amazon offers to help employees start the delivery business
NEW YORK (AP) – Amazon, which racers to deliver packages faster, turns to its own staff with a suggestion: Finish your job and we help you start a business that delivers Amazon packages.
The offer, announced Monday, comes as Amazon seeks to increase its shipping time from two days to one for its Prime members. The company sees the new incentive as a way to get more packages delivered to customers' doorsteps faster.
Amazon says it will cover up to $ 10,000 in start-up costs for employees accepted into the program and leaving their jobs. Those participating will be able to rent blue vans with the Amazon smile logo stamped on the page. The company says it will also pay them three months' salary.
The offer is open to most part-time employees and full-time employees in Amazon, including warehouse workers packing and shipping orders. Whole food employees are not entitled to receive the new incentives.
Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. refused to say how many employees it expects to address on the offer.
The new employee's incentive is part of a program Amazon started a year ago that let anyone apply to launch an independent Amazon delivery business and gave $ 10,000 to refunds to military veterans.
The extension is part of the company's plan to gain more control over its deliveries than relying on the UPS, post office and other carriers. It also gives Amazon a way to expand its delivery network without spending the money needed to buy cars or hire workers, says Barb Ivanov, director of the University of Washington's Urban Freight Lab, a research laboratory focused on logistics and supply chain transportation. [19659008] "The pay problem won't be the Amazon problem," Ivanov says.
Overall, more than 200 Amazon delivery companies have been created since the launch program in June last year, said John Felton, Amazon's vice president of global delivery services.
One of them is run by Milton Collier, a freight broker who started his business in Atlanta eight months ago. Since then, it has grown to 120 employees with a fleet of 50 vans that can handle up to 200 delivery stops in a day.
"We're ready," says Collier.
But Amazon is still a long way and poses a threat to UPS and FedEx, says Beth Davis-Sramek, a supply chain management professor at Auburn University. These carriers have thousands of trucks and hundreds of aircraft to get packages where they need to go. And they do more than just deliver boxes to the doorstep, she says; They also transport packages between stores and companies.
"UPS and FedEx will be fine," says Davis-Sramek.
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Contact Joseph Pisani at http://twitter.com/josephpisani [19659016]
