What I've learnt from being an Amazon Flex delivery driver for a month: Bird Lovegod

Once you are accepted as a delivery driver you use the app to choose your work slots.

They call these ‘blocks’, time slots of work, so today for example, I have a three hour block booked from 1pm to 4pm. It shows you how much you get paid; £43.50 for 3 hours, in this instance.

A typical three-hour daytime block might have around 35 parcels, delivered to around 25 addresses. The depot is super efficient, all the snags and frictions of parcel delivery have been ironed out.

I like the app, the process, and the flexibility of choosing when to work. Last Sunday I chose a single delivery to do, out near Hathersage. It doesn’t feel like work when it’s like that, more like a hobby you get paid for.

In contrast, last night I was driving around Rotherham in the rain at 9pm delivering parcels I’m pretty certain were not a matter of life and death to the recipients, and it very much felt like work, and work I was not getting paid enough for by a factor of ten.

Amazon are so good at logistics they really should do all of it, for everyone. I went for a training day with a different company, which I won’t name, but the chaos and obvious lack of efficiency and organisational structure was glaring.

The first thing I noticed was the smell of the depot, strong disinfectant. Maybe they are very hygiene conscious, although the state of the place suggested otherwise. I soon realised the smell was due to a four pack of Dettol that had broken on the floor, a failed delivery, that no one had thought to pick up and deal with. I honestly expect it to still be there at the time of writing. Their horrible app is equally bodged.

However there’s an unwanted side effect of Amazon's brilliance. They've shaped our priorities in shopping, and concerningly, in wider life.

Convenience is now the primary attribute we value. Convenience equates to lack of effort and ease of acquisition. And I wonder how this commercial ideal has spread from our shopping habits into our collective psyche, our society, and our individual personalities.

We now value lack of effort as a virtue. We value lack of cost as a virtue. Surely this distorts our expectations of life, our valuing of life.

We’re more impressed with a 20 second viral video than a 500 year old tree, and this I think is an unintended bycatch of the Amazon drive to give customers the most convenient and cheapest shopping experience.

We don’t value the time taken to cook a meal, we don’t value the skills and difficulty of learning to paint, or play an instrument, or master anything. We are impressed instead when AI can create a simulacrum for our 10 seconds of amusement. And we call that progress. And I’m not sure it is. Not at all.

In a consumerist society, the ideals of consumerism bleed into society.

We expect everything to be easy, convenient, and cheap. And as with all things convenient and cheap, there is a hidden cost, to be paid later down the line. With interest. And that cost is, I think, a higher part of our humanity.

Bird Lovegod is a Christian commentator and business consultant