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Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

I think Amazon will figure out that hot food needs to be delivered fast and will generally get prioritised over delivering a TV.

> For myself, I usually prefer to just go and pick up myself; that's almost always the fastest option.

Most people don't care about getting the absolute fastest option, or if they do, they will still compromise for convenience.

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I guess I don't have that much faith in Amazon's ability to prioritize the customer over themselves (i.e., prioritize routing for the least amount of driving, regardless of what is being delivered).

Really? To me, Amazon is one of the most customer-centric companies out there today.

That's literally the mission statement of the company.

Overall mission statements have low correlation with behavior. Enron's motto was "Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence."

No, it's different at Amazon. I worked for Amazon for five years and not a day went by without me overhearing "how does this help our customers?" I've never seen anything like Amazon's company culture since, it's truly dogmatically geared towards customer experience.

Agreed. The company is much more likely to do what's best for the company at the expense of the delivery people or the restaurants, based on their track record.[1]

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/story/13248764/1/amazons-got-its-s...

But making sure the customer is satisfied, with hot food, is in Amazon's interest otherwise the customer won't order again or will ask for their money back.

In your mind if Amazon was optimising for their convenience alone they'd just pocket your money and not bother to ever deliver anything? Because that would the most convenient option for them.

> In your mind if Amazon was optimising for their convenience alone they'd just pocket your money and not bother to ever deliver anything?

That's called fraud and isn't generally considered a business model so much as a criminal enterprise

Delivering cold pizzas because you prioritized a product delivery is not a business model either, and yet we are discussing it seriously as if that's what Amazon will do.

Have you ever done business with Amazon? You do realize the food delivery isn't being done from a warehouse with pizzas on the shelf right?

Your assumption runs contrary to the core idea of Amazon. Customer experience is the absolute most important thing.

>Amazon's ability to prioritize the customer over themselves

Can you give some examples of times when Amazon HASN'T put the desires of the vast majority of customers first?

There are many examples. Here is an obvious one - when Amazon stopped selling Apple TVs to punish Apple. Hard to see how this is good for consumers.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/10/01/amazon_blocks...

If it convinced any Amazon customers to buy a Roku instead of an AppleTV, then it was most definitely good for the customer [rimshot].

A counter-argument is that fewer options helps consumers actually choose something that's good enough rather than debating and hand-wringing over their choice. Costco is pretty good at this.

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