Amazon will launch its own delivery service to compete with FedEx, UPS
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> Amazon may be a one stop shop for home goods, electronics, furniture, clothing and more, but in order to actually get items to your home, the e-commerce giant has to depend on delivery services like FedEx and UPS
No, amazon already has its own logistics company that operates in many locations. The news is that it is now going to offer this to as a service to ship other companies' packages.
From the linked WSJ article:
> Dubbed “Shipping with Amazon,” or SWA, the new service will entail the tech giant picking up packages from businesses and shipping them to consumers, according to people familiar with the matter.
> Dubbed “Shipping with Amazon” (SWA), the service will pick up packages from businesses and deliver them to customers.
> Sources claims that Amazon will begin rolling out the service in Los Angeles within the next few weeks in Los Angeles with third-party sellers that do business through Amazon.com.
Seems like the same news.
I've also had these individuals basically solicit me for a tip, recounting how they're underpaid, etc.
I really don't like this move to try to uber-ify package delivery. UPS/FedEx have their bad moments, but at least I don't have to worry that the employees are under too much duress to deliver, or are on the edge of unreasonably compensated.
These are antecdotal, but if Amazon wants to catch up to a company like UPS, they have a ton of ground to make up. Delivering packages is really hard work, believe it or not, and underpaying someone to do it isn't going to bring about the results you're after, guaranteed.
Good luck to those whose delivery location can't be easily located in the real world using <map app of the day>.
Shame that the company that uses the system seems really protective of the idea and might try to sue if someone were to come up with their own similar implementation. It's one of the places I believe that the profit motive actually gets in the way of innovation (the idea itself is simple enough that you could probably engineer a system to use it in a few weeks).
However, although it has been around since 2014, I've never seen any practical use.
When I order from Amazon and see that they're going to try to ship it on their own, I just groan. It's going to be painful for sure.
I get amazon packages every day or two for my startup. I don't ever remember any pain.
I also wonder, in the drivers' defense, if the delivery schedule is unrealistic. I can better understand lobbing a box on the lawn if you're 10 deliveries behind.
Amazon would do well to paint their logo on the van, but maybe it isn't their van.
Branding matters.
Most of my deliveries have been in cars uber-like.
> "Soft" expenses such as uniforms
They do wear an unlabeled orange vest here. Maybe that is just for safety when crossing roads but it lets me know who they are.
- Delivery dates constantly getting pushed back 1-3 days (why even have prime?).
- Delivery notifications for packages that were never delivered, and not even attempted to be. Someone is almost always home and we have a security camera on all approaches to the house, they don’t even try.
- Completely lost packages.
- Our stuff getting delivered to the neighbors, and vice versa.
Amazon’s delivery has been an unmitigated disaster in our neighborhood.
https://harpers.org/archive/2015/03/the-spy-who-fired-me/?si...
They probably don't have many better options either given they were doing deliveries for UPS and FedEx. The employees responding to that environment will either accidentally or intentionally in spite do stuff like that. I've seen quite a few of those companies. You also get to experience more spite the less the company or customers care about them. The jobs that require slaving away for nothing under assholes are the most consistent in generating that effect.
These days I just have my packages kept at UPS and go pick them up.
I'm going to finally watch "The Wire" and a few other of their streaming offers that have been on my todo list, and then consider not renewing. (And... I'm wondering how onerous the process of effectively disconnecting them from my credit card will be.)
This reminds me a lot of Amazon marketplace, where they took the core service (Amazon e-commerce) and opened it up to others without holding inventory. They can use other people’s orders to gain even more scale and drive costs down lower in the distribution network, commoditizing the complement layer (delivery, in this case UPS and FedEx).
This is a pretty accurate general description of the delivery industry per se, not Amazon specific.
Ah yes, the calling card of people that think systematic exploitation of workers in a global economy where only the top few are gaining wealth is fine because "free market rules" matter in a world full of regulatory capture and industries with too high of a barrier to entry to foster true competition.
The article is literally about true competition being attempted in a high-moat business.
Amazon isn't offering to deliver Walmart packages for a price.
"...the new service will entail the online retail giant picking up packages from businesses and shipping them to consumers."""
Of course what Amazon will pay their delivery personnel will match the quality of Amazon service, such as it is, anyway.
Now it's true that they worked them to the bone, but they were paid well. Being a UPS driver also comes with a lot of perks. My driver had several lady friends on his route. Most of the business he picked up from loved him and we got lots of Christmas presents.
Not sure if their compensation has kept up with inflation but it wasn't a bad job at all.
Not sure how increasing competition in any space creates a monopoly.
Note that Amazon has a distinct and proven track record of utilising its monopoly position to squeeze competing and complementary firms in other spaces. Notably with Hachette.
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-amazon-and-...
According to the Legal Defense Foundation, right-to-work laws prohibit union security agreements, or agreements between employers and labor unions, that govern the extent to which an established union can require employees' membership, payment of union dues, or fees as a condition of employment, either before or after hiring. Right-to-work laws do not aim to provide general guarantee of employment to people seeking work, but rather are a government regulation of the contractual agreements between employers and labor unions that prevents them from excluding non-union workers,[2] or requiring employees to pay a fee to unions that have negotiated the labor contract all the employees work under.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
As noted elsewhere in this subthread, UPS by contrast is unionized (or used to be or is in parts) and seems to offer a livable wage to its drivers.
Whereas the Gig Economy rationalization seems to be: "Show me the gun that was held to your head when you accepted this lousy job."
These concerns don't persuade me personally that Right to Work laws are bad. I'm just telling you they exist and probably have some validity.
I may have misunderstood what you meant though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
The doublespeak "Right to Work" sabotages collective bargaining, disempowering Labor.
And exploiting desperate people can lead you down a dark path as a society... provided anyone in the US still gives a shit about empathy, morality and the value of life.
1. Enough people will say "screw Prime" and Amazon will start trying to figure out how to fix that.
2. The turnover for delivery employees will be so bad, that it will cost Amazon more than if they just paid them better and had better working conditions.
A driver could steal one package, but anything consistent would be quickly detected and dealt with harshly (eg, predict when a sting will be most effective and coordinate with police, etc).
Prime gives you free next day delivery, including outside of business hours and weekends, and sometimes free same day depending on their logistics. Overall, buying from Amazon and having them deliver it is a better than average experience.
As a side note, I will also apologize if you've ever used Yodel, since a small part of my development efforts went towards their early logistics systems.
This last Christmas season, everything shipped from Amazon via UPS / FedEx arrived on time as expected. Everything Amazon shipped via their AMZN Logistics / USPS was late, 50% arrived after Christmas even when ordered on December 14.
We've stopped shopping at Amazon in favor of other vendors who let you pick your shipping service. Their customer service just keeps collecting information, but it's not getting any better.
> If SWA is cheaper than FedEx or UPS, you can bet that customers will opt for Amazon’s service instead.
You get what you pay for... I'll avoid Amazon until I can pick my own RELIABLE carrier. UPS & FedEx have shown they are reliable.
That's a thing? I've had tons of large packages delivered via USPS and have never had them hold something for being too big. Are you in an apt complex that doesn't have a package pickup area?
It may be worth noting that I spend roughly one order of magnitude more than their average prime customer annually (work equipment).
Emailing jeff@ tends to get you directly to the best and brightest of Amazons support team, so it's a good option too (albeit a bit slower).
[1]: https://www.recode.net/2016/6/1/11826718/jeff-bezos-amazon-f...
Doesn't work for Amazon Logistics. I tried a couple times a few months ago, and my ticket kept getting denied. Deprioitizing AMZL_US appears to be an entirely different business process than other carriers, as the rep I spoke to didn't know how to do it at first.
They might not deny your request if you claim your home is a prison, but didn't try that route.
Pure genius. I think I could believable get away with saying my house is a 1/2 way house for people getting out of prison. And there are stresses on the delivery driver that should only fall on a full time professional.
IIRC, the three deprioritization justifications the rep had were:
1. Prison, 2. Military Base, 3. Three failed deliveries over the last 6 months.
I assume it's just a prison policy thing. I know no one besides USPS can deliver to AFO/FPO address (which are military I think), so maybe the same's true for prisons.
I bet this is Amazon's issue due to their gig-employment model. If they're employing randos from the internet, it's unlikely that any military base has approved any of them as drivers.
The more I read the comments the more I realize the complaints about delivery services really hit "corner cases" insanely fast. Like I would be livid if a driver didn't just leave a package at my door/driveway. I got it delivered because I don't want to deal with the hassle - if it gets stolen that's simply a cost of doing business. But I have friends who would be just as livid in the opposite direction.
I never would have considered someone cares about a delivery person walking over their lawn to drop a package off.
I think we're going to see more and more of these pain points as we migrate from "dedicated delivery guy you become friends with who knows all the idiosyncrasies of his customers" to "random dude in a Prius who had a couple hours to spare". And I'm completely convinced the latter is coming to the major delivery companies if they want to stay competitive - Fedex Ground is only a hop skip and a jump away from that already.
I imagine what's old will become new again as we re-invent the wheel for a solved problem of 100's of years. The mailbox. We'll simply see a standardized set of shipping lockers be available for both home install and shared use. I imagine within 15 years delivery services will refuse to deliver to anything but such a device. Much like how we saw the evolution of mail service in the US - went from "bob's farm in Springville, MA" to basic numbers, to streets, to zip codes, to requiring standardized mailboxes if you are to get delivery.
That will be a sad day.
Remember, the last mile cost for you is basically the cost from their last hop to you + the carrying your package to all the other stops. If the delivery guy is going to visit several houses on your street that's basically a few hundred feet on average.
Actually feel bad for delivery guys who have to go to every single adress when its much more efficient to collect stuff at a central point. And how many people are not at home during delivery hours?
Then I moved to another apartment in another town and I preferred USPS because they had keys to leave the package in basically a PO box in the entryway that was meant for packages. UPS left it at the leasing office which meant I had to walk a few blocks to get it and a few blocks back. FedEx would somehow get into the building and leave it sitting in front of my door, which is super not cool with an iPhone-sized package that says "T-Mobile" on the side.
Now that I have a house and I work from home, I prefer USPS because they come at 9am, whereas FedEx comes around noon and UPS isn't here until after 5pm. Even though USPS "tramples" my lawn, they're going to do that anyway to deliver mail, and I'd rather get my package earlier. Plus UPS and FedEx knock on the door which makes my dogs bark when I might be on a call with a client.
But even then, my postman would sometimes walk through my gate into my backyard and leave packages at the back door (I guess to keep them from being stolen?), which stopped pretty quick when he walked through the closed gate and came face to face with my very surprised and scared dogs. Don't ignore a "beware of dog" sign just because you didn't see the dog before you opened the gate. Luckily he just got cornered and not bitten.
Delivering packages with high customer satisfaction is not as easy as it sounds.
I never would have considered that anyone in the US would fail to recognize the social conventions about the difference between landscaping and walkways and the acceptable uses of each. In places where people have lawns in the first place, they tend to prefer that people not noticeably walk on them (many don't care about the walking so much as any visible sign after the fact.)
But lawns are largely decorative, which is why people with lawns also tend to have more durable (e.g., concrete) walkways connecting the front entrance of the home to the sidewalk (if present) or curb.
If they're wearing boots, or you have xeriscape, they can damage the irrigation system just an inch or two under the surface.
I have great experiences with USPS, UPS, and Fedex. Amazon Logistics has been terrible, and I suspect it's because of its GPS-driven gig-economy implementation.
That's what it takes. IIRC, they'll only consider deprioritizing AMZL if you've had 3 misdeliveries (by their reckoning) in the last 6 months. I haven't had the time to basically go to war with them to get them to stop, I just shifted my shopping habits instead.
Has that changed in recent years?
To be fair, Amazon is fair at handling Customer Service complaints. I ordered a package with a scheduled 2 hour delivery window ({Fresh, Now}) and it came 2 hours late. The package needed a signature so I was at the delivery site for a total of six hours. My $100-$150 package expense was credited to my account after a short call to customer service.
Isn't the answer obvious? Make the Amazon Logistics team compete on an even footing with UPS, USPS, and FedEx. If the retail team has process for one of its customers to blackball UPS because it had a bad experience with it, then they should have the same process to blackball Amazon Logistics. (I'm 'should' here to mean that would comport with the SOA style business structure, not to make an ultimate judgment on whether it is a good model for a business overall.)
I know, but the other carriers are already good, and I'm not super interested in being the guinea pig to train Amazon's. They're just brain-dead in so many different ways:
1) I'm not a dispatcher, I don't want to give directions to a driver or talk him to my address. That's Amazon's job.
2) I'm not Amazon's cartographer either, and it was super annoying to have to talk a phone rep through dropping a map pin on my place.
3) Every other carrier seems to be able to read the sign with delivery instructions at my door, why not Amazon? They ignore it so often I got tired of calling and complaining about that.
4) They should leave door-notes when there's a problem like every other carrier.
A lot of the stuff they need to improve on is simple stuff they could have easily learned by looking at the customer experience of their competitors, so I'm not really willing to cut them much slack. Especially since they force their carrier on me rather than giving me options.
Agreed, and specifically it's the yield they expect from their drivers. AMZL expects nearly double the deliveries from its drivers than UPS does. UPS has been doing this for decades across the globe, I would bet they've squeezed just about every last bit of efficiency out of their routes and process... so AMZL's expectations are outrageous, which leads to packages thrown from cars, packages found in ditches, etc. The drivers can't possibly complete their deliveries. The drivers are unhappy, the customers are unhappy and soon Amazon will be unhappy if they don't figure this out.
Yeah, AMZL's awfulness opened my eyes to how uncompetitive Amazon's prices have become. The one-two punch of that broke my Amazon-first shopping habit.
It takes a little more time now, but I do a quick google price search before buying anything on amazon. Sometimes, if it's only a small difference, then it's worth the frictionless experience of buying through amazon, but as I create accounts on more and more sites, the frictional difference is becoming marginal.
It stinks a bit of modern employers desires to ignore the fact that their employees are human beings. I expect any day now to hear of a big company tearing out all the bathrooms in their offices and cancelling lunch hours because it will 'improve efficiency.' If you don't want to deal with the basic truths of human employees, then you don't belong in business, period.
I'm in Canada, so it may be US only. I do know you can force them to use Canada Post if you enter a PO Box.
Also, amazon's delivery service has been excellent here, chiefly because they don't require signatures. Using any other courier means it often goes to some depot in the suburbs, which is a terrible policy for urban Montreal.
You would assume the weight of the customers monitor would tell any reasonable delivery driver not to drop the package 6 feet, regardless of what the box says.
On the subject of delivery notifications, I had a parcel "delivered to a receptionist" last week, despite it being a residential house (because my sister opened the door).
On the other hand, I ordered something from bestbuy with their normal free shipping and it showed up on my doorstep literally the day after.
We've been Prime customers for years, but we're getting incredibly frustrated that we're paying for an annual subscription and being promised two day shipping - but consistently missing.
At this point, I'm starting to look back to smaller sites that offer more traditional 4-7 day shipping. They might still be slower than Amazon (which is about a 3.5 day average for us), but at least they're never missing their delivery window.
It's getting to the point I'm about to cancel - they are late more often than not, and customer service responses are really poor.
IMHO prime is worth it even if I have to spend a few minutes on chat to get it extended by 50%. What is truly frustrating is their "guarantee" that isn't a guarantee.
This lack of transparency and continual missing of their promises erodes my trust in them. Most of the time it's fine - whatever - I don't need those AA batteries on a Sunday....
But the fact that they guaranteed that they would be there, didn't tell me they'd be late, and didn't proactively offer anything to back up their guarantee is super shady. Either don't guarantee a date, or proactively offer recourse when you don't meet your own self-imposed guarantees.
This is a lot less true than it used to be. I had to buy a few things from other sites recently (not carried on Amazon, or the sort of thing that attracts counterfeits or such shenanigans) and was surprised to discover how much other places have caught up in the shipping game.
Even a small-volume niche-market foreign company like B&W shipped me a pair of headphones with free two-day shipping recently.
Avoiding Amazon has actually been easier than I expected and if anything I’ve found purchasing more convenient overall.
I have had $10 and $5 credits given to me when this happens and I encourage everyone else to. Amazon needs to support the benefits they grant customers for prime.
What's especially annoying is that you have to pro-actively reach out to them. This isn't customer-obsessed.
Login and grab orders that are shipped. Compare delivery date (x). See if it changes or matches the estimate at time of order(y). If I package is deemed late create a message containing x and y and order number. Open chat support paste message. Might have to throw some additional canned responses but it seems pretty easy.
I'll help test. :)
Paribus contacts customer service to Amazon on your behalf for missed packages. Literally they open a ticket with amazon and complain.[0]
[0]: https://paribus.co/support/topics/purchases-and-claims/274
It's been a long while since they missed a prime delivery date for me, but the couple of times they did, they credited my account automatically without my involvement (other than reading their email notification). Maybe I just got lucky?
Item bought on Monday, with expected -delivery- Wednesday. Late Monday status said "Package has left seller facility and is in transit to carrier".
It's Friday morning now, no package, and status is still "in transit to carrier".
I argued that "Shipped" means the carrier has it. Not that it may or may not be sitting in a corner of a truck for the last week forgotten or unnoticed.
1. Buyer places order, order goes into pending for anywhere from minutes to days
2. While order is pending, units of inventory are moved to another fulfillment center
3. Once the units arrive, are received and checked-in, the order goes live
4. The customer receives their order two days later
I suspect this happens 1. for items less often purchased which have little historical data to rely on, and 2. items which have been freshly received and haven't yet been distributed across the US.
I am a very small time Amazon 3p seller, so I might be able to answer some questions you have about Amazon or FBA.
They started charging my items to other credit cards associated with my account (added in the past to make one-off purchases for relatives or friends.) To prevent this happening again, I deleted every card from my account except my one current personal card.
Despite that, a few weeks later they charged a random subset of my holiday shopping to my mothers credit card. Now, we have an excellent relationship, but you can imagine even the best of relationships has a wtf moment when a thousand dollars of spending randomly appears on their account without so much as a by-your-leave.
I called amazon to complain, and their response was just, “well, you got the items you ordered, didn’t you?”
They were contemptuously baffled as to why this was at all a problem.
I yelled at them until they refunded my prime membership and closed my account.
My only bugbear is that the I seem to always be one of the last stops for the guy who does our area so deliveries are always around 7 pm.
But one time, I got a "delivered" notification but couldn't find it, and none of my neighbors brought it in. I finally found it after digging into the "delivered" order information and finding a picture they sent of my package behind a bush, up against the wall of my building, completely hidden. I thought it might just be a one-off thing, but I honestly wish they would always do this, so long as they tell me where it is. I'd rather have to play hide-and-seek than have to be home all day to get a delivery.
This was quite helpful couple of times when the package arrived ahead of time and i was not available to sign the package. and this can be set even after the package is shipped.
FedEx, USPS, UPS - they all manage to get into my building and deliver my packages. Sometimes they even go all the way up to my door.
I've asked Amazon to stop trying to send packages via their couriers, because they don't even seem to bother trying to get in before giving up and leaving.
I don't know if it's a laziness thing or if they're under some sort of horrible time crunch to deliver every single one of these packages (not sure if they get a bonus for more packages delivered or something), but Amazon couriers REALLY suck.
Contract workers with unreasonable expectations dictated by management.
I'm sure some of them are, but—for the most part—I think Amazon and their subcontractors have absurd expectations about their drivers' performance, as described in this lawsuit:
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/12/21/25647480/deliver...
I've noticed now, though, it's spread to much more suburban areas where they're way worse. Delivering to an apartment complex in LA with a slightly-hidden package area seems much easier for them than delivering to a bunch of individual suburban houses - packages tossed out the car, photographed laying their on the sidewalk - and I wasn't surprised based on the delivery photos they took when the packages to my parents got stolen. :|
Now I just don't order things from them for my parents. Works for me, ordering to large buildings for work or home, but not to send to addresses I'm not familiar with. So there goes all my gift-buying business.
They're still fast, for me, at least, though. If that goes away...
Another part of my personal mitigation has been that I order less from regular Amazon though, now, and more from Prime Now. Same day in a two hour window for $5 ("suggested tip"), and seems like it's not prone to the same stock intermingling stuff because they don't have third party sellers on Prime Now and they don't have the same inventory.
The Amazon delivery guys are way worse. I never know when something is coming, even if it says out for delivery I might not get it for days. Every time I need something for a trip that I buy 3 business days early, with 2 day prime shipping, I don't get it before I have to leave.
I gave up trying to complain, you could review the seller, but not the delivery service. Hopefully they have changed that. I used to only shop on Amazon for pretty much everything. Now I decide if I should get it from a local store instead. When I need something that is time sensitive, I definitely get it from a brick and mortar store.
The worst is that while UPS will leave the packages on my doorstep (and knock on the door), the off-brand Amazon delivery guys tend to leave the package in front of my garage door because it is closer. One of these days I'm going to drive over something expensive by accident.
Bad delivery people are like some kind of spatial plague. Your neighborhood might be so afflicted, or it might have good people, with the occasional hiccup due to a substitute delivery worker.
Sometimes, it's the USPS that has the bozos, but UPS is good. Sometimes, it's also UPS.
This is now changing. Right now amazon has hundreds of MBA Product Managers crunching data to determine how much they can screw up in certain areas with little to no impact on customer happiness or churn (on a macro level.)
Amazon so far actually delivers the package... when they don't contract it out to DHL.
So it arrives on the day it was originally expected. Difference is, now I'm irritated because I've had to change my plans several times.
I’d imagine they are thinking that bad shipping is better than no shipping and try to improve from there.
Personally I would prefer the option of Amazon allowing me to pick the carrier I want to use rather than simply go with lowest cost. In most cases I value reliability over lower cost.
The Amazon delivery drivers always harass you as well, phoning multiple times and totally perplexed you have a job and can't be home to pick something up demanding a time for redelivery on the spot which means I have to stop what I'm doing and screw around with my schedule. Either let me enter precise time windows for delivery, get pickup spots or let me choose the shipping company which is the easiest, I don't care about the extra $5 if it means I'm not spending half my Saturday in traffic to get a book.
Since it was an expensive package I chose to pick it up from a Walgreens near my office.
Amazon's shipping is faster, but Newegg/FedEx shipping was a much better experience. It told me who was shipping the package up front and let me choose from several delivery options via that carrier.
I bought a part for my bike that on first attempt went to the wrong intermediate routing center. They marked it as undeliverable instead of just rerouting it. I had to get a refund and was promised a $25 credit to my next purchase. That didn’t happen.
I ordered the same item again. It was lost in transit. Got refund with no credit.
It took the third try to get my item. I selected same day delivery on the previous two but not the third.
I live in San Francisco and the item was in their Fremont fullfillment center. So....?
Mentioning because I both thought I hadn’t been credited with it (first time of chasing Amazon I actually hadn’t it turned out...) and then was miffed I could only use it on a subset of items.
Is this true? Retail shipping is not nearly that competitive, at least from a very naive consumer standpoint looking in.
Amazon can ship stuff at 20-30% of the cost I would pay as a small business to UPS. Using UPS.
Seems like there is a ton of margin there to be captured.
If Amazon is shipping things cheaper, it's because they are using it as a loss leader. You don't really think it costs them $0 to ship things, do you?
No, I'm specifically talking about actual dollars paid to UPS. I run (ran) a small business, and we shipped about a pallet or two (overall) a week. Amazon's leaked UPS rates a few years back were about 30% of our already heavily discounted (from what a retail customer would pay) rates. Where did the $0 shipping comment come from?
You also can commit to a spend with Fedex/UPS of relatively small amounts (4 figures/mo) and get an immediate and painless 25-40% off immediately.
Like I said there is a lot of margin there, at least in certain segments of the business. I'm just not sure how much or where exactly the costs are (there may be very legitimate reasons why serving Amazon costs less than half of serving me) to know if there is a retail cost play.
There is no way Amazon doesn't fire all these Gig operators and replace them with Drones. I live in Las Vegas where we have the most industry friendly drone laws in the country and have already received a test delivery.
It's a nightmare for them because it will ultimately take business away from every carrier, and more sellers will ultimately want to use Amazon's service over time. The margins in shipping are already razor-thin, and Amazon would easily be able to take the loss to choke other competitors out.
We used to get our items shipped promptly and they would arrive slowly but surely in about a week. You would see progress at e.g. ups/usps.
Now they sit on your order for a week then send it and it arrives in two weeks. If you call and complain they will two-day ship it. Much less progress is visible as well, leaving you to wonder the whole time and bother support.
How can that make any financial sense? How can sitting on it for a week make sense? They still have to deliver all the packages, now they’re a week behind.
Have done business with them for ~20 years and considering another merchant where treated with respect.
Seems just as likely the reverse will happen.
Another example, this time a slightly more bulk item, is ramen noodles [0]. They are around 20 cents a noodle in local stores, while amazon lists them around 50 cents per noodle (even in large 36 packs)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Maruchan-chicken-noodle-soup-pack/dp/...
For electronics, for example, I find that Newegg provides much better service and lightning fast shipping at compatible prices.
Also "stores" deliver too (target.com, walmart.com, bestbuy.com, etc).
During the holidays, they and retailers sold it for $250. After the holidays, I watched slowly as the price started rising each week. Retailers jumped back up to $300, but Amazon was at $270, then $290, and now strangely $320.
On the plus side you get a picture of the package at your door (or whatever) so you know they left it.
But it doesn’t integrate well with my delivery tracking app. They don’t know to drop packages at the package desk at my apartment complex instead of leaving them on my doorstep to be stolen.
Interesting to see them go more vertical though.
It may be a mix right now for all I know.
I think I saw one person who said he/she hadn't had any specifically bad experiences with AMZL, but that most of his/her deliveries are UPS anyway.
The phrase "piss-poor" comes to mind.
Personally I've found them so-so, and certainly not great. I frequently get calls from drivers that are lost that can't find my new-ish street and need some help. It's certainly fine that the first one gets lost, but when the second one gets lost it's apparent that the organization isn't building up any knowledge about hard-to-find customers. This is a moat they could build, but they're not interested.
My only issue is that I'll see random cars driving slowly through my neighborhood (probably looking for the right house number to deliver to), which usually triggers me to think of suspicious activity.
It's been a nice feature for me, until one driver put the package on my front porch, but then too, a photo from their car of my entire house as the delivery confirmation photo.
I haven't had this problem since AMZL started taking pictures, but I also haven't tried Same Day delivery as much. I'll have to give it another shot to see what happens.
It often results in delivery delays as well, FedEx and UPS deliveries for Amazon orders are rarely late.
Maybe it’s due to more drivers and trucks, but so far I’m not a fan of Amazons delivery and would pay more not to use it.
Nothing is worse than finding out a package was shipped with OnTrac though.
With self-pickups it easy. Once I know the package has been delivered I'll just do a little bit of planning to get it on my way next time I'm out.
Deliveries are hard. That's why all logistics and delivery companies are famous for giving bad service because it's nearly impossible to repeatedly do well on such an unforgiving line of work. And this is from companies that have decades of experience to organise deliveries. I'm not holding my breath with Amazon's own deliveries.
The obvious solution is to have lockers at homes, i.e., a secured box on your property that only delivery people to whom you've given a code can open. You can even introduce this concurrently with smart locks, so people who feel comfortable with it can just give the delivery guy a one-time code that opens the front door.
I know this has been experimented with, and I'm sure their are challenges, bit I've never been able to understand how it hasn't been worth solving.
It's not uncommon to see this around dense housing. I've seen apartments where each unit has a small mail box, and there are (say) a dozen larger lockers off to the side. When USPS needs to deliver a package, they put it in one of the lockers, and then put the key to that locker in the recipient's mail box.
I suppose the system assumes that none of your neighbors clone those keys, but it seems at least a step in the right direction.
Not me. I hate their Prime Now drivers and pretty often get things delivered to the wrong house, or not show up at all when my Amazon things are delivered through them. I don't think they will be able to replicate UPS's strong delivery service and employee benefits, and also don't think the savings will be passed to the consumer.
All in all, I think everyone except Amazon loses in this deal.
It might be a little inconvenient to not have your stuff delivered to your door, but the inconvenience is trumped by the peace of mind.
Though personally, I'm lucky that my daily commute passes right by a locker, so there's no inconvenience.
The response I got from UPS was pathetic and passive aggressive: my driver will no longer even try to get up my driveway.
I suspect Amazon gets a lot of similar complaints with similarly unsatisfactory outcomes.
They're also good about keeping projects under single org trees - senior engineers act as executors of the VP's will, bypassing slow human management chains. If a team slips on their roadmap, the senior engineer can immediately intervene to provide unblocking advice (possibly looping in other experts) and coordinating scheduling changes with dependent teams... that shadow technical hierarchy is very powerful. It's let some VPs / directors reorg every couple months to shift out bad people managers, knowing tactical implementation isn't being interrupted.
Knowledge management... I've heard Google is much better. Amazon's infrastructure is well documented, but bleeding-edge projects can be hit-or-miss. Their forte is strong separation of responsibilities... which usually means tribal knowledge.
edit:
I say "engineering" because I am one... but it's not just engineering. Amazon management focuses on hiring smart people they can trust to operate autonomously. That means less bureaucratic red tape, flat(ish) management chains, and effective direct communication. Talking "through" management, escalation, is a seen as a last-resort.
And once it's time for scaling, Amazon is great at that. And of course, if it's possible, create new building blocks for the next startups.
But also, a big part of Amazon is risk management. Building platforms(like FBA), that leaves the risky stuff(like importing) to others. And using the data from that platform to reduce risks for it's own startups.
1. Thus began the tale of the company that did too many things...
2. Ah, just like they turned their own cloud expertise into AWS, they're turning their logistics into its own offering, brilliant!
From their perspective, seems a bit necessary.
The quality of delivery services went downhill in the last years. :/