I read of folks in this thread ordering multiple times per week and it makes me scratch my head. We submit an order or two per month (more on the once per month) to try to minimize deliveries, but also because we don’t buy much crap. We don’t order groceries through any online service so maybe that is what people are doing? I know as an individual, my wife and I can’t do much to change the state of things, but it seems like a lot of folks just DGAF.
I cancelled too. Let’s see if I regret it.
I only have until the 3rd of October.
Sometimes it’s not so much people DGAF as much as it is that it doesn’t matter. I don’t order multiple times a week but if I did, it probably wouldn’t cause a single additional truck to come down my block - there’s a UPS truck every day and a Prime van every day whether I order or not. Either someone else on my block is getting a delivery or someone around the corner or someone on the next block.
Some of our Amazon orders also get dropped off by USPS.
That’s a good point. Those brown trucks are around every day it seems.
I don’t mind the Amazon or UPS trucks. But I have to imagine the Amazon deliveries done in regular cars is tremendously inefficient. Well, it’s probably not inefficient - Amazon has perfected the supply chain - but it’s certainly wasteful because of our insistence on immediate delivery.
I don’t order a lot online & almost nothing from Amazon. Even the then-$99 was more than I would pay them in shipping in a year so it wasn’t a good deal to get prime. Then Covid hit & they deprioritized both non-groceries & non-prime customers. If you’re going to doubly put me at the bottom of the barrel I’ll take my business elsewhere TYVM.
The thing is when I want that $8 item, I want it (relatively) now, not in a couple of months from now. Therefore, Amazon becomes my last place to get something from because otherwise I feel like a sucker paying shipping to them. On the rare times I get something from them, I have someone else, with prime, buy it for me. Of course, whenever I get a Amazon GC I give it to her so I still probably come out behind.
I actually cost Bezos money one year; I didn’t order anything from them & used the bathroom in Whole Foods once (it was the only place open early in the morning), so I cost him, what ½¢ in water?
There’s also the problem of Amazon competing with itself. They have a general interest in billing and shipping items as fast as reasonably practical whether you’re a Prime member or not. I ordered some stuff late last Sunday night with free shipping and it arrived Tuesday afternoon. Like millions of other Amazon customers, I don’t have Prime and likely never will. Amazon’s incessant advertising about being able to deliver many items by next day, or guaranteed in two days, makes their capabilities clear. And all of it is delivered the same way with their own service, so if they significantly delay shipment to ordinary non-Prime customers opting for free shipping, it will be glaringly obvious and will piss off millions of regular customers.
Yep, almost everything I order is delivered to an Amazon locker, so trucks are already making daily stops there.
When I got Amazon Prime, I was frequently buying from them. I even had standing orders for stuff I needed.
But this is less and less true now. My concern now is primarily due to some language when I signed up that made it seem like I might not be able to get Prime Access again if I need it.
However, I just read about pausing Amazon Prime, which I may try after I actually (for once) get a few things at the beginning of the month (when my money comes in).
The resolution was that it arrived the next day, but it wasn’t here yet when I checked at 4:30 pm, and Amazon said expected delivery was between 5:15 and 7:30. Then I forgot about it. Checked again at 10pm and it was here. So it did make it in one day, but almost certainly not less than 24 hours. Still very impressive.
I’m surprised people are reporting amazon delivery times getting worse than they used to be. I thought they were opening new warehouses all over the place. My deliveries are pretty much universally faster - I get next day delivery options more than half the time, and barring that, 2 days. People are pointing out you get free shipping even without prime with $25 or $35 orders, and that’s true, but isn’t that generally significantly slower?
On the other topic, I’ve basically become completely intolerant to ads. I have a free hulu account with my spotify subscription (it was a promo they ran years ago) but it’s the ad-supported hulu, so I just won’t watch it anywhere that I can’t block its ads. I’m undecided as to whether I’ll pay the extra $3 or just stop using amazon streaming.
Our delivery times were almost always 5-7 days out and we were shocked when something showed up in 2-3 days (very rare). We haven’t yet ordered without Prime (we only ordered once a month or so) but I don’t see that the deliveries could take too much longer. BTW, we are in an area that has a $35 minimum order to get free shipping.
I have been getting one and two day shipping as normal and did so through the pandemic for the most part. I don’t know what my minimum is but I’ll find out in five weeks.
Deliveries are regularly a day late for me this year. The warehouse is 2.5 miles from my house, and it’s right next door to UPS. Since they started delivering their own packages, they open a delivery center a half-mile closer than that.
I actually wonder if it’s due to Prime. There’s no recourse for late delivery for Prime members, while it’s grounds for a refund on shipping costs for non-Prime customers, maybe making those orders priority. The rest of my family doesn’t have Prime and their packages consistently arrive early afternoon. Pretty much everything I get shows up after 6 p.m…
Yeah, we are getting things amazingly fast.
What pisses me off is that I pay for a YouTube sub so I dont get ads, but now some of the more popular channels are doing a “our sponsor is…” ad right in the middle.
I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole trying to find out if my zip code is $25 or $35 for free shipping. It turns out that the only way for me to know is to load up a cart once I don’t have Prime anymore.
Anyway, since I have had Prime for years I didn’t know that the amount for free shipping has changed a lot. From an article that I read.
Amazon’s minimum spend for free shipping has fluctuated significantly in the past. The company bumped the requirement from $25 to $35 in 2013 and ultimately went all the way up to $49 in 2016.
Later, it pulled back, lowering the minimum spend to $35 again before finally returning to $25 in 2017 to better compete with Walmart+.
I hate that too. But at least the people I follow tend to make it a little more interesting.
It’s unfortunately the nature of online ads. Those sponsorships pay more.
Fortunately, there’s an extension called SponsorBlock that uses crowdsourced data to mark and skip sponsor ads. It’s even integrated into some Android apps.
I’m just waiting for something similar for podcasts. Those automatically inserted ads suck.
Yeah Legal Eagle does.