Is it just us, or did the holidays sneak up on us like meth-rattled raccoons? So while we envisioned wafting around the department store, picking out carefully considered gifts while humming holiday music, it’s now come down to cruising online sites for presents to come straight to the house. That means the delivery drivers are more appreciated than ever before. Tips or gift cards are always welcome in person, and for Amazon drivers, there was a special holiday tipping promotion that you probably saw on social media. We were encouraged to go to Amazon and put “thank my driver” in the search box, allowing us to automatically tip the driver of our most recent delivery $5—and Amazon itself would pay. But was that a myth? Some people are saying that the website lets you thank your driver, but it seems more like a nice notification rather than the cold hard cash they’d probably prefer.
No, it wasn’t a myth. There was a limited-time program that gave drivers the thank you plus the $5 tip; it’s just that it only lasted until 2 million tips were given (quick math: that’s $10 million Amazon spent this year on the promotion). This is actually Amazon’s third holiday season of doing this; the program started in 2022. This year, the promotion began on December 4 and took six days to reach 2 million tips, so if you were logging on yesterday like we were, that’s why you were unable to give the cash tip like your friends were—although the thank you was still delivered.
Amazon encourages us to keep thanking the drivers in this way since the 1,000 most thanked drivers per day in December get $100, while the seven most thanked drivers per week in December get an extra $10,00. The seven most thanked drivers for the entire promotion period of December 4 through 31 will receive $25,000 plus another $25,000 donated to the charity of their choice. The thank yous are registered through the company’s app and website and through Alexa.