They were running a good deal on Pampers, so I got that. It was a subscribe and save, but I’m not clear if the deeper discount is just this month or for the life of the subscription (or something in between). Either way is fine because I was already subscribed, so worst case scenario, it just goes back to my previous price. I looked around at other items, but there wasn’t anything that piqued my interest.
But if we stop buying stuff, that means kopek and friends will have no work to do, which rapidly turns into having no job.
Lately, most of my orders are coming out of the new DC in Tracy, CA, or same-day orders coming from Vegas, so kopek isn’t even seeing my stuff. 
That 20 volt DeWalt combo was really tempting, but my battle scarred 18 volt drill still works.
I just can’t understand the thought or thoughtless process that went into picking what to offer today. Some of it seemed fairly random.
Its the best mixer ever!!! Yes, its easy to use. If you can find one that’s fifty years old, its even better than the ones they sell now.
I’ve had mine for 30 years. My mothers’ is 50 years old. Both are still going strong. Although my mothers had the old ceramic bowls and they did need to be replaced when they broke - after 30 years.
And mine gets a lot of use. Cookies, cakes. Sometimes bread (although I like to knead by hand).
OK; I’ll forgive you both. This time. 
Actually this “birthday” sale doesn’t help our job security all that much. They bring in a bunch of temps for a couple weeks rather than totally pull the hour/work cap off of us and the quality of the work some of them do is horrible to say the least. A package dropped on the wrong pallet means a multi-day delay in you getting your package and an extra $15 or more charge to the company from the USPS. And since we have all these extra bodies for 2 weeks when we only need them for maybe 3 or 4 days ----- our hours got cut to the 18 minimum in a lot of cases.
And as bad of a disaster our “in house deliveries” are the extra volume has that wing in complete chaos. For our real peak season we can prepare and train and at least the temps know they have a couple months and a possible permanent job. And they let us go 60 hours if we wish for better than a month which really helps the paychecks. For this mini-peak none of that comes into play. Its just a pain in the arse.
We are told (and I tend to sometimes believe) that its basically stuff they feel is gathering dust in the warehouses and fulfillment centers and/or things that they themselves can get horribly sweet deals on. That makes sense but as an employee I have my doubts that we do anything simply because it makes sense. So much of what we do is “software generated and control” I suspect some computer program/algorithm of buying trends comes into play in major ways.
The purpose of the sale is twofold: To get new Prime subscribers and to sell their devices (tablets, FireTV stuff, etc.). Hence why the rest of the sale is mostly “meh”, as the other thread notes so well.
Tried to get something, deal didn’t add to my cart properly. Removed it, couldn’t re-add it. Then the site went down.
Jesus, Amazon, get your act together.
We bought a butt-load of stuff. All of it was stuff we were going to buy anyway, but waited till yesterday to see if we could save a buck or two. I don’t think we did. But we were going to buy it all anyway.
My laptop thingy went tits up, so I decided to get a new one. (I’m posting from the old XP runnin’ tower jobby right now)
And this time I’m getting the external backup drive.
Sorry, guy. I succumbed to the lure of consumerism and bought…a couple of SD memory cards. Total weight – about that of a well-toned hummingbird. Remember, lift with your back, not your knees. Or something like that.
If I could have re-added that Kindle to my cart, I would have bought over $200 of stuff. Since I couldn’t, I just left the cart and didn’t buy anything.
Got a $33 Kindle - my 4-year-old iPad has been cranky lately, and this will be much smaller and lighter. Those of you who got the Instant Pot won’t be sorry - we use ours constantly.
I didn’t get the $10 off I was supposed to get by ordering through Alexa. It was probably, because the $10 off had already been applied to an initial order that I canceled. I left feedback saying that I hadn’t gotten the promotion (not even submitting a complaint or message) and got an email later that day saying $10 had been applied to my Amazon account.
I am guessing that along with hiring more workers for their warehouse, they also hired on a group of extras for their “Sorry, Our Bad” department. Erm, customer service.
I bought some toilet paper using Alexa. I usually get 12 rolls for $7.99 in the store. This was 12 rolls for $5, the very brand/type I use, so I was pumped (Alexa had its own special deals on like 10 things). I tried to order multiple at once and it only let me order one. Then I tried to order a second single order of it, and it was no longer $5. It was whatever price that was on the Web.
I went to the web to buy some more - worked out to like $6.30 instead of $5, still an ok deal but then I realized that what I buy for $7.99 is 12 BIG rolls (which they advertise as "the equivalent of 24 rolls) and this was 12 normal-sized rolls. Basically half of what I get at the store for $7.99.
Glad I was blocked from spending the rest of my paycheck on scam toilet paper deals.
[QUOTE=kopek]
Our volume today was 97,000. Tomorrow we have been warned to expect 150,000 to 180,000. Thursday maybe another 150,000 and Friday still in the six figures.
[/QUOTE]
CNBC had a clip that says Amazon sold 90,000 TVs, more than two million toys and over a million pair of shoes yesterday. :eek:
How closely did Amazon coordinate this with Dynamex, UPS and USPS, or do the extra packages just disappear as a minor blip into the daily normal volume for the carriers once it’s all scattered across the country?
How many semis would it take to haul a million pair of shoes? The funny thing is this is almost a Fermi problem, but in reality, Amazon knows exactly how many filled trucks left their docks.
First part ---- we got over 45 of the big TVs 60 inch and larger) just during my shift; our SC got maybe better than a hundred total. The really big sellers were some sort of tableware set and an automated litter box. About 1/4 of a 54 foot trailer were pretty much just those.
Second – to the best of my knowledge, especially at our SC, we just use USPS and our own Amazon operated service that abbreviates with an A and then a M and then a Z and an L and totally sucks (Yes - management actually searches for posts like this so we bust up the searches when talking. I know people who have been fired over stuff like this.). I believe some stuff goes out FedEx and maybe a small amount UPS directly from the FCs but with 46 SCs opened and running in the last year and a half not nearly as much as before. We (our building) cover everything east of central Ohio to around State College PA and from Buffalo down into northern W VA and MD. Remember – we’re just talking Prime and two-day shipping. Over that area, even if we had doubled our volume, it wouldn’t have been all that much of a burden for the USPS to handle.
The real shock to the USPS may be in a few years when the contract is up. I have a feeling Big A is going to have its own nationwide fleet service by then and Uncle Sugar is going to lose 80% of our volume. That could be interesting.
Third – in theory. In practice its another thing. We should know just how many packages and what kind are in each trailer but its never right. A couple months back a late arriving truck was supposed to have 6,000+ packages in it so management asked volunteers to stay late to process it. Just before it got in that was corrected down to 600+ packages. When it actually arrived it was more like 85 and all oversized that we basically just sorted from that truck to other trucks filled with pallets for that area/post offices. Some days we are told we’re doing 70k and end up with 90k or more. Other days that 70k ends up 50k. As good as their software and experience for the customer, from our side it SUCKS and everything is basically best guess and experience.
Don’t get me wrong; I love my job and the people I work with and for. But there are times when I understand why it was named after a mysterious jungle.
Hey, a slightly OT question if you don’t mind…
How often does it happen that product boxes in the Amazon warehouse get the wrong inventory/bar code label on them?
I ordered a Nikon-mount camera lens and Amazon shipped a Canon-mount lens instead. I ordered a replacement and got another Canon-mount lens. Looking closely at the Canon lens box, I noticed the Amazon inventory/bar code label said “For Nikon”. I ended up having to order from another supplier because customer service could not guarantee the same thing wouldn’t happen again.
I’m the SC (shipping center) and not FC or stocking/warehouse supply side of the operation but ------- cheap part-time labor would be my best guess. I know some people in a warehouse of ours where goods are broken into lots/groups, labeled and sent to the FCs from there; they turn over about 90% of their employees every six months. Some of the FCs I am told are even worse. Someone on his first day or his last week really doesn’t care very much and things are not checked as well as they should be IMHO. So stuff like that happens. Even worse to me are at the FCs where sometimes workers on their way out the door load extra units into some box - small things like memory cards or the like. You think customer service would be happy as Hades to have some honest customer contact them and offer to send back the overage. No way, Jose! Again, I’m a peasant associate and plan on remaining pretty much just that; if I was leadership I would have worry lines and not sleep as well.
Again, like I said about the trailers ----- <Cool Hand Luke voice> what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Sounds like I’ve had the wrong terminology. I always thought the place where the goods were stored and boxed up,for shipping was a distribution center. Shipping center makes sense at least, but what’s an FC?
Had a quick chat with my UPS driver. He said almost every box he’s touched today had Amazon tape and it was almost Christmas-level volumes.
There are places where we UPS for speed. At least for now.
We have multiple layers/facilities. We have warehouses where huge amounts of things are shipped to from the makers. These warehouses break them down into smaller lots and send them to the Fulfillment Centers (FCs). Think of the FC as a huge-assed store (larger than anything you have ever seen) where someone does your shopping for you. When you order, a picker goes out and selects the things you wanted and puts them into a cart. The box then gets sealed up and loaded into a trailer to a Sortation Center (where I work). It comes out of the truck and we sort it to a pallet for your local post office or into bags for our own in-house delivery service. What FC fills your order is sometimes based on where you live but not always. We now get boxes of boxes flown in to Pittsburgh from other FCs around the country that have been called on to fill orders from here based on what products you have and what they have on hand. But most of our stuff comes from the FC in Kentucky.
That is the Readers Digest Condensed version of a much more complicated process. What you order, the stuff itself, may actually pass through as many as 20-25 physical hands from the warehouse to the FC to the SC the USPS nearest you or UPS/FedEx. At a cost of about $2. And in two days (remember again – I am talking Prime) Efficient it is ---- but you can see why errors are at least claimed almost impossible to correct. Things move almost too fast and with too many people involved to really backtrack and make corrections. I think they should be able to, and so do a lot of other people. But its explained over and over that it just can’t be done.
And odd thing this year – we did 144k on Wednesday, 113k on Thursday. We were told to expect about the same today — we actually got 138k and both days over the weekend are projected to be big as well. Last year everything tapered off after the Big Day and that is not happening this year. The big sellers I saw today were big-assed mixers and Instant Pot. Now usually I don’t pay any attention to the boxes; I just want to get done and home. But you make this heavy box and label it Instant Pot and I have to look a little close. We are the Anything-basically-type-of-place after all, right? Actually its some fancy automated pressure cooker. How dull.
Well to be fair, you know and I know it can certainly be fixed. But why fix it to greater expense than whatever financial hit it costs now? I would always choose the cheaper option.