Side hustles have long been an interest of mine. For me, there is an appeal to doing something totally different than my 9-5 job. There are a lot of them out there, and you can read a lot of things and watch a lot of videos on whether they are worth it or not. What’s frustrating to me sometimes is the lack of detail in the analysis about whether a side hustle is worth it or not. So, in my typical overly analytical fashion, I’ll provide TOO much detail on my findings driving a week’s worth of shifts for Amazon Flex.

The sign-up process for Flex was straightforward. You download the app, create an account (or sign into your existing Amazon account) and off you go on the short application process. After that, you have to wait a few days for your background check to be complete before you can sign up for your first shift delivering packages. Three or so days after I applied, I got an email that I was approved and ready to hit the road.

I hear there are other variations of things you can deliver for Flex, but in Missoula, Montana there is a new warehouse, and delivering packages from that warehouse is the only gig in town (as far as I know). This write-up focuses purely on the parcel delivery component.

There are “Offers” that are listed in your app each day. The Offers range in time from 3 to 4 1/2 hours. I have not seen any longer or shorter than that. The shifts generally start no earlier than 11AM. So for example, on an average day when I open the app, I’ll see 3 to 7 Offers listed with the shift time (11AM-2PM is pretty standard, for example). The Offers start out pretty low. Most commonly I’ll see 3-hour shifts being offered in the morning for $52.50, which works out to $17.50/hr. gross pay (wayyy more on that later). The entire Offers page is set up and run by a computer on the backend, from what I can tell. Amazon is the biggest and best logistics company in the world (I’m sure someone will correct me on that with a company like Alibaba, oh well), and if they know one thing, they know efficiency and automation. The computer creates the shifts and manages the Offer prices throughout the day.

I can’t speak to the backend of what all is happening here, I can only speculate – which I am happy to do. After the Offers sit for a while, you begin to receive notifications from the Flex app with the message “Increased Rates Available: Accept these blocks before they’re gone”. Nothing like a good old dopamine hit from a smartphone app to make people jump back into the app to take a peek. The Offers creep up very incrementally and slowly. That 3-hour shift for $52.50 jumps to $54.00, then $56.00, then maybe $60.00 for the same shift as it gets closer and closer to the shift start time.

Some shifts either don’t get filled at all by drivers, or there are a lot of shifts or both. The computer continues to make adjustments to the Offer price until a driver checks their app and “bites” on the newly offered price. The amount of work you are doing is the same for these shifts as the price goes up, so your gross hourly pay goes up a small amount each time an Offer makes one of these jumps. Once you find an offer for a shift time and dollar amount that you can’t pass up, you tap the shift and schedule it for yourself. The wage to be paid for that block is locked in.

You want to leave your house or wherever you are before your shift in time to make it to the warehouse with a few minutes to spare. If you are more than five minutes late for the shift, you technically miss the shift and can get sent home empty-handed. I had this happen once but the warehouse worker was kind enough to override the system and let me do the shift anyway.

I’ve read that a lot of Amazon warehouses have the Flex drivers drive into the building itself. In Missoula, there is a carport that is covered outside where you drive up and load up your vehicle with packages.

A quick side note on this side hustle and future work: the whole experience is very dystopian and fairly depressing, to be honest. Your entire interaction with Amazon for everything as an independent contractor of theirs is impersonal and indifferent. The warehouse itself is massive and looks like a giant slab of gray concrete: lifeless, emotionless, brutally utilitarian. The warehouse workers shoo you into your parking spot along with a handful of over a dozen other cars and drivers to the package loading area. All your packages get scanned and are just a barcode. You, as the driver, also get scanned in – you are on the same level as the packages themselves. People worship the success of big businesses like Amazon for their efficiency, their delivery speed, and their convenience. But if this experience was anything, it was a look behind the curtain into the belly of the beast to see that there are humans behind every package that gets delivered. People like you and I who sort these packages, load them into their own personal vehicles, put miles and wear on their vehicles, and face some level of inconvenience at best, and danger at worst to deliver your Amazon orders. Just something to keep in mind.

Whew! I’ll try to lift us out of that depressing monologue. At the loading dock, you are assigned a cart with all of the packages you will deliver on your shift. There are usually one to three large mesh totes that hold 15-20 packages each, all destined for the same general neighborhood or area. I put the contents of each tote together in my car to make finding packages at each destination a bit easier. There are usually a few larger miscellaneous boxes for delivery in addition to these large totes that get loaded as well. I drove my 2012 Chevrolet Volt – a small to mid-sized sedan – to deliver for all five of the shifts that I worked. The longer shifts tend to have more packages, obviously, and the shorter ones have fewer.

Once your car is loaded up, you get dismissed and begin driving to your first delivery location. The Amazon Flex app has maps built into it, although they are vastly inferior to Google Maps in my experience. I’ve heard you can use Google Maps instead, I just have not looked into that process yet. Living in Montana, everything is spread out. We have a ton of space and few people per square mile living here. The initial drive to my first delivery ranged from 3 minutes to almost 45 minutes.

Once at a delivery location, you park, indicate you’ve parked on the Flex app, get out of the car, and look at the delivery info to see which packages must be delivered to that location. Sometimes it is a tiny envelope, other times five packages to the same address. I’ll speak more on how to make Flex more lucrative later, but I will mention that moving quickly and with intention has a lot of benefits. I don’t waste time during stops. Locate the package(s) as fast as you can, deliver them, snap your picture of them on the porch, and move on. Efficiency is the name of the game.

Flex does have a potential upside of exercise. I have an Apple Watch and I closed my exercise ring on almost every shift. If you move with a purpose you can get a decent workout in. You are in and out of the car from 35 to 60+ times. Lots of up and down, in and out, and carrying boxes.

Another upside at least in my area is that you get to explore neighborhoods and communities you wouldn’t get to see up close otherwise if you did not live there. If you are familiar with the Missoula area, I’ve delivered to Frenchtown, Alberton, Arlee, and Big Flat areas – a very wide swath. Western Montana is a beautiful place, and if you like to drive, there is a lot of windshield time to be had.

The miles have downsides, however. One often overlooked expense of doing any sort of delivery or ride-sharing hustle is the miles put on a vehicle. Cars depreciate in value over time as miles are put on the odometer and wear and tear set into various components of the vehicle. Oil needs to be changed, gas needs to be filled, tires need to be replaced and so do any other vehicle parts that inevitably wear out over time. Does Amazon pay for these things? Of course they don’t. You do! This is a calculation not to be missed when considering the value of a side hustle.

I’m sure that other cities have smaller delivery areas than we have here in Missoula, so this part may or may not apply to you. During my five shifts, my shortest trip (measured from home to the warehouse 14 miles away for pickup, through all my deliveries, and back home) was 44.6 miles. My longest shift covered 118.8 miles!! Each shift averaged 75.5 miles. That’s a lot of driving! I extended my math further and if I were to drive five shifts each week for all 52 weeks of the year, I’d amass almost 18,850 miles on my vehicle. That is a very fast way to depreciate a car.

To look into this issue closely we will run through two scenarios. The first is my situation: a 2012 Chevrolet Volt with 93,000 miles. The current private party value today for this car is $6,395. If I put 19,000 miles on it driving Flex for a year, at 112,000 miles my car would be worth $5,925. This is a one-year depreciation of $470 or 7.34%.

We sold a 2022 Ford Maverick a while back. That car is worth $30,803 today with 25,000 miles on it. If we add 19,000 miles to it the value dips to $28,176. This is a depreciation of $2,627 or 8.53%.

The point of this first exercise is to think about and calculate the loss in value your vehicle will experience doing a gig like Flex. The depreciation of your vehicle is a real expense. This also does not include the repairs, tires, oil changes, and other maintenance required to keep your vehicle road-worthy.

I could write an entire book chapter on what my Dad and Grandad called the “compression zone” of vehicles, but I will spare you the boredom. In summary, the compression zone for used vehicles is where you purchase a good, reliable, used vehicle with relatively low miles and lots of life left, but after it has experienced a great deal of depreciation. All of the cars we have had recently (I like to buy and sell used cars, it’s a problem) all fall in what I consider the compression zone: 2012 Chevrolet Volt with 93,000 miles (purchased for $7,000). 2009 Subaru Forester with 132,000 miles (purchased for $7,000 as well). Finally, our 2009 GMC Yukon with 204,000 miles (also, purchased for $7,000). Buy a car new, and in the first few years you hemorrhage value from the car before you eventually resell it (or worse, trade it in). Buy a car too cheap or unreliable (stop eyeing that Honda Accord with 320,000 miles for $2,000, you will likely regret it) and you pay the price in repairs and unreliability. What is my point with all of this analysis? If you do choose to work a gig like Flex, you want to consider what car you are driving, what it costs to keep it on the road, and what kind of depreciation it will experience.

Now, the part you have been waiting for – how much did I make?

During five shifts, I worked a total of 18.03 hours. I made $408.50. I also made $100 total in bonuses ($20 for my first shift, $80 to complete 4 shifts in a week, which I accomplished). These bonuses brought my earnings to $508.50. When you divide that out, I made $28.20/hr. gross. Much better than I expected! When I factored in the gas expense, it lowered my hourly pay to $26.35/hr.

Takeaways

-Being close to the warehouse makes a big difference. If I didn’t have to drive across town to get to and from my local warehouse, my earnings could have been over $30/hr. before expenses.

-Driving an efficient car matters. I’ve seen people deliver in Ford F-150s before. If I had done that in my scenario, I would have made approximately $3 LESS per hour.

-Driving a vehicle in the compression zone matters. Depreciation is real and must be considered for Flex. Your vehicle will experience wear and tear while delivering packages.

-You make more per hour the more you hustle. I didn’t sit around and move slowly between deliveries. If you sort packages quickly, hustle to and from the door, and don’t waste time you will make more per hour.

-Wait until Offers go up in value. Don’t accept the “base rate” offered at the beginning of the day. It is a waiting game.

-Capitalize on bonuses when you can. Without bonuses, I would have made about $5.50 LESS per hour.

-Be safe and take care of yourself. Delivering packages can be enjoyable, but there are dogs, cars, and people that may not be friendly. No package is worth your well-being.

Is Amazon Flex worth it?

If you hustle, have a car that won’t quickly depreciate, and don’t try to do it full-time, then yes, I think it is a good side gig. The pay rate if you do it right is significantly higher than other gigs that I have tried. It is somewhat unique in that you DO have some control over your calculated hourly wage by how fast you move.

Do the math for your situation and consider the total cost of delivering packages, not just the upfront income that you make. When working a gig, don’t try to sidestep the basic equation of PAY minus EXPENSES (including taxes!) equals your take-home pay. If you do the proper math, and the wage is acceptable, give it a try!