And here’s the downside of working for Amazon Flex…

Perhaps it’s different in the USA than in the UK. Having driven for the British Flex, I would never recommend anybody do so. There are other, similar models such as Yodel which will pay you by the package, not the hour, and that’s the crucial thing.

Because Amazon Flex has a wildly unrealistic concept of how long it takes to deliver a package. Typically, I found that, in a three-hour block, you were given about 40 to 48 packages, giving an average delivery time of about 3.5 minutes per address. (Put that into context, when I subsequently worked for DPD, they gave me on my first day 27 packages, and much-more realistic seven hours to deliver them in!)

In a dense urban area, this might be just about possible, assuming you could find readily available parking spots. In a congested European city centre such as Swansea, Wales, this may well be close to impossible; in which case, I sometimes had to resort to parking illegally, hoping I didn’t get a ticket, and making deliveries on foot.

Invariably, I found my packages contained numerous for rural areas (perhaps the contracted courier firms weren’t interested in these addresses — I don’t know, but the number of farmers ordering from Amazon seemed out of all proportion to their percentage of the general population). Although the Flex app included a locator, which generally worked fairly well, driving from one country address to the next could take a very considerable time.

When the locator didn’t work, usually taking you to some spot that bore no resemblance to the address, or because there was no good signal in that remote area, you were on your own. In the UK, most rural houses do not have conventional road names and house numbers. Instead, you’re in a village of several dozen houses, all of which are identified only by names, and you’re trying to figure out which one is called “Twin Oaks.” By no means can it be assumed that the house will be located near a couple of oak trees.

You can try phoning the addressee. They may or may not answer. In a rural village, the addressee may be sitting on a tractor in the middle of a flock of sheep. In this case, all you can do is ask directions from passers-by. In a village, there’s not likely to be many of those.

So the time block is a fantasy and, as you drive for mile after mile down country lanes, you’re burning through your profits. Given a large number of rural addresses — and on more than one occasion, that was my entire consignment — you might well make a loss.

Losses could be further compounded by the distance to your delivery area. Officially, Amazon Flex would never send you more than 45 minutes’ drive from your depot, which was not included in your time slot. If a correct estimate, this already represents 90 minutes-worth of fuel, which costs about $10 a gallon in the UK.

However, I never understood how this time was measured. I was regularly required to drive from Newport, Wales, to Gloucester, England, an up-hill-down-dale, winding road that cannot possibly be driven in less than an hour. And realistically, you’ll have consumed at least an hour of your payment just in the fuel to get there and back.

Not that any of this was an excuse, so far as Amazon Flex was concerned. If all your packages took substantially more than your time block to deliver, you could request they augment your payment. Their response was entirely arbitrary. Sometimes they would. Sometimes they would reply that they didn’t expect any money back when you completed a block early, and expected the same flexibility from you. In the seven months that I delivered for Amazon Flex, I finished early once, by half an hour.

It couldn’t be sustained, and wasn’t. I was getting increasingly fed up with Amazon, having full-scale yelling matches with the depot managers. Plainly, the irritation was mutual. One evening, I downloaded the latest update to the app, and awoke the next morning to find all my reserved blocks had been cancelled. Assuming this was a glitch caused by the download, I sent feedback to Amazon Flex.

A couple of hours later I received the notification that my app had been terminated, and would no longer work for me. Boom! No warning, no “up your standards or else;” it came completely out of the blue. One day my services were required; the next, they weren’t.

I was told I could appeal. I didn’t bother.

So I was surprised to received a response to my feedback the next day. Amazon Flex had carefully considered my appeal, it told me, but had decided that, in view of all the evidence, it would be better to stand by their original decision.