Amazon Prime’s 2-Day Delivery Promise Dies
Having a baby in 2018, as my wife and I just gave birth, means becoming an Amazon household. We are not proud of this. We know that Amazon treats its employees terribly . We know the company extorted billions of taxpayer dollars from our hometown of New York in exchange for turning our neighbors into abhorrent employees. But babies need a lot of things, and they need it quickly. Diapers on demand is a very tempting prospect. So we bought diapers from Amazon. And then they didn’t come when Amazon said they were coming.
One of the foundations of the Amazon brand is its guaranteed two-day “free” delivery to Prime subscribers. The company taught America to rely on this instant gratification. Sometimes that confidence seems bland or condescending, like when we’re angry that a pair of Bluetooth headphones came in for three whole days. You can go for an extra day without headphones. A newborn usually cannot get through an extra day without diapers.
We asked our friends where they get diapers. Amazon, they said. Great. On the third day, the customer service could not even tell when our diapers would be delivered and if they would be shipped. Of course, this was not an emergency. We live three blocks from Walgreens – bad company too! – So, I dropped by, bought a pack, the problem is solved. I am lucky. But in the end I realized that the two-day delivery was a fiction.
This is fiction because overworked employees and delivery contractors like UPS cannot fulfill all orders on time. Instead of losing their most powerful client, they lie about whether the packages were delivered .
But this is also a fiction, because Prime no longer means two-day delivery. As Fast Company describes , Prime delivery times are often quoted as three or even five days. There is no easy way on the site to filter out two-day Prime delivery. (You can filter for Prime Free Shipping, but that includes items that take longer to arrive. You can filter for 2-Day Shipping, but that includes third-party items with additional shipping charges.) And because Amazon allows third-party sellers to clutter up results pages , you need to comb through the results.
You can try an online competitor, but you won’t succeed. Wal-Mart’s Jet.com allows you to filter for two-day shipping, but as of December 20, “two-day delivery” meant December 26. And this is in the event that the goods were not delayed further.
All this is not the worst test in the world! It’s just a huge departure from the fast, hassle-free experience Amazon promised. The promise helped Amazon strengthen bookstores, threaten Wal-Mart, rob cities, evade taxes, bully suppliers, and make its owner the richest man in the world. We let Amazon suck the world dry because we could get anything in return for free for a few days.
And now this is not there either. Amazon used an old predatory pricing trick on us, got us hooked on unacceptable shipping rates, and then cut shipping once it pushed its competitors on the margins. So it’s time to have a drink and buy something from a real store – before they buy it too .