66 MONEY.COM MARCH^2019
MAKING THE MOST
OF (AND FROM) FLEX
HE TECHNICAL TERMfor what Flex
does is “last-mile delivery,” the
final leg of the e-commerce
process where an item travels
from a facility to your home, says Beth
Davis-Sramek, an associate professor of
supply-chain management at Auburn
University in Alabama.
Last-mile delivery services are becoming
increasingly necessary as e-commerce
expands: Customers bought over 180 million
items on Amazon between Thanksgiving and
Cyber Monday last year.
UPS and the postal service “just don’t
have the capacity to make all of those
deliveries,” Davis-Sramek says. “This is a
great opportunity on all sides—it’s just going
to take some time to get the balance right.
Package delivery is not an easy business.
Talk to UPS drivers or FedEx drivers and
they’ll tell you that.”
For Amazon, this is an opportunity to
increase the amount of control it has over
deliveries. For people seeking side hustles, it
can be a chance to cash in—as long as they
know what they’re getting into.
“There’s got to be some accountability on
folks who choose to do this, because I think
they need to have a realistic understanding
of the risks involved,” Davis-Sramek says,
comparing driving for Flex to having a small
business. “You’ve gotta deal with competi-
tion. You are constrained by market forces.”
It’s unclear how many Flex drivers
Amazon has, but the service is available in
more than 50 cities.
Drivers are in a constant race against one
another to not only get blocks but also beat