It’s long been the case that if you send something 2 or 3 day delivery it sometimes gets there sooner than scheduled. I can only conclude that after the truck or plane has all the 1-day items aboard the loaders just move to the next stack down and keep loading, because there’s no reason to send a truck or plane only partly filled.
Amazon is amazing, I’ve been a prime member for years until recently but I am deff. thinking of signing back up. Although they are soon increasing their annual prices to $120. This can still be a justifable purchase but it makes one think on it a bit longer. And to be honest, their 2 day shipping hasn’t really been 2 days lately.
That’s just the packing tape and boxes they use. Sometimes they all have “ECHO!” tape (prompting one Doper to think he was getting an Echo for Christmas that he didn’t want, but turns out it was just the packing tape) or more recently they had something related to video games I think.
The Prime packaging is advertising, to keep Amazon Prime in everyone’s minds and on everyone’s lips.
Its our form of not-so-subliminal advertising; every piece of tape and box we use has something that says Prime on it. Your package could even have been packed and shipped right along with Prime members packages. It comes down to what is the most cost-effective at the time; the exact moment your order was received and where you are. I am not Prime either (even we have to pay and I won’t) but most everything I get comes right through our center and usually in 2 days.
And … the bad ones that we hate are the boxes designed to promote something we’re really pushing. A couple Peaks back it was “Minions”.
We hated those. Try finding the label fast on one of those damn things.
This year is was the ones painted/printed to look like footballs.
Those were easier to spot the label on but when you are in the back of a 53’ trailer, tired, overworked, and someone hands you something where a camera can’t see that looks like something you should kick ----------- the temptation was too much for some of my coworkers.
Wall Street Journal published an article today about Amazon customers getting banned for too many returns and paid favorable reviews. The specifics of the woman mentioned in the article are clear, but someone else was banned for returning too many smartphones.
A while back there was a poster (I think on these forums) that was banned for returning several monitors because of a few (3-4?) dead pixels. Also, I seem to recall hearing of people being banned from Costco for too many returns.
I usually don’t return items just because I don’t want them, unless they’re fairly expensive, say >$50 and I’ve refused a few orders this year because Amazon shipped before I could cancel the order.
That said, I love Amazon and would be completely lost if I was banned! 
Oh, BTW consider getting an Amazon Store Card. I’ve had one for years and the 5% cashback credit has gotten me lots of free goodies.
We’re about a month into a dispute with Amazon over return shipping on a defective musical instrument my wife bought for me for my birthday. It’s a solid body uke, and the electronics were bad - distortion from both the output jack and the headphone jack. A to Z said I had to send it back with signature required when the seller refused to provide a return label.
A week after it was delivered back to the seller, we were refunded for the item, but not the 22 bucks for return shipping (which was considerably more than the original shipping.) About a week after we asked Amazon about the return shipping, they emailed asking for us to send more information about how we shipped it back, saying we needed to reply within three days or they would mark the matter closed. We sent the info the same day. It’s been two weeks and three emails (from us) later, but they still haven’t responded. We don’t know where to go from here.
Sorry to hear of your troblems with Amazon.
Has your contact been on the phone? I was surprised that you can actually talk with a person there. It took some clicking, but I was eventually able to talk with a human. And he was very helpful to get the problem fixed.
Saw this today:
Banned From Amazon: The Shoppers Who Make Too Many Returns
and I thought of this thread. Just something to think about as we extol the glorious and forgiving return policies of Amazon…
Returning is a very rare thing for me, on Amazon or brick&mortar. For example, I hate buying shoes. I do not try them on in the store. I know my size. If I buy a pair of shoes that are a little too small, a little too big, a little too narrow, whatever, I just wear them until they wear out.
I’m that person that always orders canned soft drinks via Amazon. And they’ve been real good to me when I have a shipment arrive with a can that broke open, they will send me a new case. And I think I am good to them, because the cans are often a little bit malformed. And I don’t complain as long as I can open them.
But a lot of this comes back to why I love Amazon, Because I love this canned soft drink product and it’s fairly unique, an UNSWEETENED caffeinated seltzer. It was always hard to find and when I found it I had to buy individual cans to stock up. Now ,thanks to Amazon, I can get it by the case whenever I want.
I’ve been using their grocery service, the prices are good and I can get most everything I like from them, even stuff that is harder to find and that can be “hit or miss” in my grocery store - like certain frozen and prepared food items. It’s given me back the time I spent grocery shopping and I’m less likely to make impulse purchases - although I’m not going to give Amazon TOO much credit for the last one because they do try to get me to buy extra items.
And the 5% back store card is a great deal, especially since I use Amazon for groceries.
I had my first Amazon return a couple weeks ago and it went well. The video card in my box started overheating when the fan on it quit. I went to the local Fry’s Electronics and their shelves had been picked pretty clean. I need a low profile card and there were none, never mind a better grade card than the one I was replacing, so, onto Amazon and I found a variety of cards. One at $230 looked pretty good so I checked the description and the answered questions, one of which said it was low profile. When the card arrived a couple days later, I opened the outer box and could tell looking at the card still in the anti-static bag it was not low profile* so back to the site I went and initiated a return. I checked the info again, and it turned out the questions pertained to the entire line of video cards offered by the manufacturer, not just the one I’d been looking at.
I sealed the box up, lined through all the barcodes on it that got it to me, took it to the UPS store and paid the dollar for them to print up the shipping label and kissed it good-bye. By the time I got back home the refund had been issued; apparently “ship the return to us” counts when it has crossed the counter at UPS, not when it arrives. Immediately bought another card for a few buck more with an “LP” at the end of the model number, and that one fit fine.
- The connector plate in the pics was double-wide for some reason so it looked like a single-wide, low profile to me.
This is a recurring problem. You hit a page where there are 5 different versions of the product and the Q&A section is for all of them with usually no way to tell which version they are talking about.
Sometimes they aren’t even for different versions but for fairly dissimilar products the seller put on the same page.