SEATTLE, WA – Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) will build an incubator to facilitate the development of trucking companies that will drive exclusively for Amazon.
The behemoth is to start recruiting hundreds who are planning to start trucking companies with the goal of them driving only for Amazon. This will effectively ensure the capacities of Amazon’s delivery network are secured by growing them in-house.
The program itself will be launched to recruit people to start their own trucking companies and haul freight exclusively for Amazon. This was reported in an IT publication on Friday.
Brittain Ladd, who is an e-commerce consultant who was an executive at Amazon, stated on Friday that he learned about the initiative last year and that it will be “fully operational” by the end of Q2.
It can all be traced back to 2018 when Amazon began recruiting Delivery Service Providers (DSP). DSP was to include independent intermediaries whose job was to recruit drivers for Amazon. The goal was to enable these intermediaries to recruit drivers en-masse by motivating them with big earnings potential.
However, since the DSP initiative, Amazon’s delivery volumes have grown exponentially, and are expected to grow even further. This fact combined with drivers retiring and not many fresh people taking their place leaves Amazon at a crossroads – whether to contract out the operation or handle everything themselves.
Another former Amazon executive said that the incubator is a more long-term plan than a plan for the present. The idea is to create a “consortium” of companies which will include the companies from the incubator.
This consortium would work under a collaborative model, meaning anyone will pull any trailer, and truckers will drive any truck, ensuring a continuous operation keeping the trucks going within available driving hours.
