Amazon To Help Employees Start Their Own Delivery Service Business By Paying $10,000, Three Months Salary

Amazon in an effort to improve its delivery services is now encouraging its employees to start their business and has also agreed to fund them till they can sustain themselves.

The company on Monday (13 May) announced that in order to bring down its Prime delivery timings to one day it is expanding its Delivery Service Partner Program, reports Tech Crunch.

The Delivery Service Program which currently encourages existing Amazon employees to start their own packaging company now includes an incentive of $10,000. The program was first announced last year and included access to Amazon’s delivery technology along with hands-on training. It also includes services like vehicle leasing and insurance.

The program will also have three months pay equivalent to the last gross salary of the employee as funding to help sustain the costs and get their businesses off the ground. Since the launch of the program in June 2018 as many as 200 small businesses have joined the program and have hired thousands.

It is estimated that delivery partners could earn as much as $300,000 in annual profit by growing their fleet to 40 vehicles and the company is expecting hundreds of small business owners to come forward and join the program and in turn, hire tens of thousands of drivers across the US.

The move comes at a time when Amazon is looking to automate its boxing units replacing thousands of employee with machines. The Partner Delivery program can absorb some of these employees who may be laid off.

The company is also committed to rely less on USPS, UPS and FedEx services and build its own delivery system as part of its plans to spend $800 million to make one-day shipping the Prime default.