In what may be an attempt to deliver goods ordered from Amazon even quicker than before, the online marketplace company may be looking to hire normal people to deliver packages. Amazon already offers a few speedier options to receive your packages a bit more advanced than through a normal shipment schedule, but that’s not stopping them from looking to show innovative new ideas. For instance, it wasn’t very long ago that Amazon revealed the Prime Air service that is currently in development. With Amazon Prime Air, packages would be delivered to your home through a drone. Now through a couple sources of The Wall Street Journal, Amazon may start to hire normal average Joes to pick up packages and deliver them to locations near their area.
Known as “On My Way” internally within Amazon, this service would allow Amazon packages to be delivered at retail stores though none of which has been named. From there, a consumer can see that the package has arrived and rather than picking it up from the retail location, it can be assigned to one of the contractors working for Amazon as a delivery option. Once assigned, the person would receive an alert to pick up the package and deliver it to the specified address.
There’s certainly a few gray areas right off the bat. We don’t know just how much this service would pay someone to deliver the package. According to The Wall Street Journal sources, Amazon is currently debating on using real currency or Amazon credits. Additionally, it doesn’t state who exactly can join the service. Meaning, if you’re making several purchases through Amazon, it could mean self-deliveries to rack up some extra cash flow. Though there’s always the big one, what would happen if the item delivered was damaged or even gone missing.
Because news of Amazon’s latest service came from sources through The Wall Street Journal, we’ll have to take these details as a grain of salt. There’s a good chance that Amazon may never bring the service out into the market. However, we’re interested in seeing if Amazon delivers the service and how well it can hold up against similar services like Postmates and TaskRabbit.