Sources: Amazon is developing an app that pays ordinary people, rather than carriers, to deliver packages; no firm timetable for when the service would launch
Amazon Considers Paying People to Drop Off Packages — Web retailer mulls paying people to drop off packages amid push to cut shipping costs
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2015 report is the earliest move in what becomes Amazon's multi-year campaign to own its last mile. The idea of paying ordinary people to drop off packages anticipates a sequence the corpus then fills in: a business-facing service in Los Angeles (Shipping with Amazon), the Seller Flex trial on the West Coast (Seller Flex), and by 2019 an expanded Delivery Service Partner program paying employees $10K to start delivery businesses (Delivery Service Partner program) — each step substituting Amazon-controlled capacity for carrier capacity.
First-order effects
- FedEx and UPS face a potential new competitor whose marginal cost model — pay per-drop individuals rather than maintain a carrier network — is built specifically around cutting shipping costs, the same lever Amazon later pulls by waiving residential surcharges of $3.80+/parcel to win shippers' volume (forgoing residential surcharges).
- Ordinary people gain a new paid-gig channel, with no firm timetable meaning carriers get warning but not yet disruption.
Second-order effects
- Walmart's parallel experiment — paying its own employees to deliver online orders on their way home (Walmart's employee-delivery test) — shows the crowd-delivery logic spreading to Amazon's biggest retail rival, forcing both to treat flexible labor pools as core logistics infrastructure rather than a side bet.
- If Amazon internalizes more drops, it gains pricing leverage over the remaining carrier relationship: volume can be shifted toward whichever option is cheapest per parcel.
Third-order effects
- Retailers structurally disintermediate parcel carriers, converting last-mile delivery from an outsized industry (FedEx, UPS) into an extension of retail operations staffed by gig and part-time labor.
- Regulatory questions about worker classification and liability follow if the pattern holds, since 'ordinary people delivering packages' sits outside traditional carrier employment frameworks — though how regulators respond is genuinely unresolved.
The trend: Large retailers are progressively in-sourcing their last mile through flexible, per-task labor — first crowdsourced apps, then employee programs and partner fleets — shrinking the role of dedicated parcel carriers.