Sweet! I just happened to login on Prime Day and picked one up on a whim. I had a cheapie $30 stovetop pressure cooker which I threw out a few months ago due to its gasket being less than reliable and it not properly locking to allow the pressure to build up and I’ve been meaning to replace it. I was all excited to use it yesterday, because Amazon promised me it was “on its way by 8 p.m.” but my beef shank ossu bucco had to be thrown in the Dutch oven in the end, because the pressure cooker never showed. But it did come today. Can’t wait. Pressure cookers are a godsend for soups, stocks, and stews. I really haven’t explored much beyond that, so if you or anyone else has any other suggestions, let me know. And this will be the first electric pressure cooker I’ve used.
So the FC picks and packs my order, and it and a few thousand others are hauled to an SC for sorting and transfer to the actual delivery company. Never would have guessed, but it resembles the centralized intelligence vs brainless outpost scheme that FedEx used to run where all of the local depots just huck everything to Memphis for sorting, even if it’s only going across the street.
Sounds like a lot of touching and chances for mix ups, but it apparently works out fine and is cost effective.
I use it for bean and legume dishes more than anything else - it’s awesome to be able to cook dried chickpeas in 45 minutes! It’s also great for what are sometimes long-cooking rice dishes like plov; 85% of the flavor in about 1/3 of the time. It makes plov a feasible weeknight dinner.
And steel-cut oatmeal in 6 minutes from when it comes up to pressure? Sign me up!
We’re going past the OP so I may stop the discussion here.
When the first SCs were opened in October/Nov of 2014 (we were #6 in the country) it was sort of patterned after FedEx and some of our managers came from there. Its better - not nearly as centralized; more centralized by small state-sized areas. But it does work and its fascinating to see from the inside.
Now our own in-house delivery thing --------- that’s another story. The fails and delays there can be almost epic. The drivers are well paid but all are again basically contract workers and part time temps. Some have literally quit mid-route and locked their keys in the van calling the location (or not) into their manager. It has been up for about a month and of the first 60 drivers only like 3 are left. I don’t know why but it just eats humans alive. And the seriously bad part is the customer has no way to opt out of that service for the usual USPS thing. Some algorithm designates your order for that system and you are stuck even after your two day delivery has been wandering the city for 5 or 6 days. It is driving the serious shoppers nuts.
Ah, but this is interesting stuff! I haven’t seen Amazon vehicles around as much as I did when the service was newer in my area. Twice, I found packages in my lobby that were for across the street. My front door is addressed 6575 on one side, 6577 on the other, and the packages were for 6576. Now, anyone who’s not an idiot, knows Chicago’s address system is simple, and odd addresses are on one side of the street, with evens on the other. How the local delivery drivers kept messing that up, well, well paid they may be, but basic smarts, not so much.
FYI: In the future, when you go looking for more info/help on your new device, you bought a “Fire Tablet” (5th generation), not a “Kindle”. No Kindle was on sale for that price on Prime Day, the Fire Tablet was. And a Kindle is not a replacement for an iPad.
Whatever. It’s a perfectly fine replacement for what I use the iPad for, which is mostly email, Facebook, and reading the NYT.
Kopek, can you please hurry up and ship my new running shoes? Thanks. 
I’m the OP writer and I’m obsessed with Amazon as a business, so please feel free to continue chit-chatting about everything Amazon related 
Offers of huge bribes or quantities of blow and hookers? Wait ---- that’s Congress. I sometimes confuse just which I’m with. 
OK – if its interesting I’ll give it a shot here and there as we meander along.
Pardon me snipping it as I did but -------- there’s the problem. I hate to keep saying it this way but sometimes ---------
Our stuff is set up so it is almost idiot proof but we keep finding such a high level of idiot that things happen that just shouldn’t. I know the steps drivers have to go through to confirm they are at the right address; it is much like the steps we have to follow to assure putting the boxes on the right pallet or bag to get to the right area in the first place. If you follow the steps you really cannot fail. But people try to reinvent the wheel and find their own shortcuts (humans are just like that after all) and things go wrong. And going wrong is not grounds for dismissal with us.
Yeah – I hear those horror stories of people being fired left and right from The Jungle for the slightest mistakes. Maybe there are places in the system where that happens. But I know 14 different facilities well enough to say that at them you almost have to fire yourself by just not showing up or always leaving early. So the gene pool gets a little shallow now and then.
I don’t think he’s criticizing your choice for replacement for the iPad, but was trying to be helpful. It’s that you got a Fire Tablet, not a Kindle (which is just a book reader and doesn’t have email, Facebook, and web capabilities) so if you have questions about it and need to look it up in the future, you know what to look for. ETA: Although, apparently, it at least was known as the Kindle Fire at one point.
Looking it up, it was Kindle Fire for the first two gens, and Fire for the last one (since 2015). At any rate, I didn’t read it as snark that you found the Fire to be an adequate replacement for the iPad, but I could be wrong.
That would be a double misreading. A simple misreading, for example, would be someone thinking that I thought a Kindle was a replacement for an iPad. (The opposite of what I said.)
But in any case, the sole point was that I suspected (based on the info in the post) that you got a 5th gen Fire Tablet.
It helps a lot when searching on-line help and such to use the right term. It’s best to learn from day one what the right term for your new gadget is.
(Another example of mis-naming from the Amazon devices world are people confusing the Amazon Fire TV with the Fire TV Stick. Very different features between the two. I’m also starting to see people calling the new Amazon Prime exclusive phones “Fire Phones”, which are discontinued.)
When I bought one for my husband when they first came out, it was called the Kindle Fire. IF and when I need tech support or accessories for the thing, I will be more precise about my terminology.