Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry
subscriptioninsider.com
subscriptioninsider.com
> "As part of our commitment to delivering the best possible customer experience, we have decided to transfer Amazon Pantry selection to the main Amazon.com store so customers can get everyday household products faster, without an extra subscription or purchase requirement"
Not exactly. The products for sale are still for sale on the site, yes.
But the "pantry" product including a volume-based flat rate shipping. You entered products until you were told that your box was filled and then they shipped it to you flat rate. I used to fill it with kitty litter, dog food, cans of stuff and other heavy products.
Now kitty litter is covered by prime free shipping so why pay extra for pantry?
This is really common on Amazon, even for things that aren't heavy/large. Amazon used to be a place that gave you some of the best prices on things, but that hasn't been true for a long time.
Oftentimes I would have been overpaying 20-50%, especially on small, <=$15 items.
It seems like something for $11 is a good deal, until you can get 3 on eBay for $8.
I wouldn't want to be the delivery guy who has to bring that to your door...
Once that product moved to normal Amazon, it transitioned to the standard jobbers and hucksters... you’d buy a can of coffee whose best by date was 30 days out.
I think this segment is really being replaced by Whole Foods, it is somewhat constrained by the more limited selection of Whole Foods vs normal grocery.
Also, I think Amazon is getting a run for its money with Target and to a lesser extent Walmart. The target drive-up service in particular is best in class. Every mom is hooked to it, and you see people waiting for drive up orders ordering more in the car.
The overall point is that both companies have to some extent enveloped every US population center and have figured out how to use their real estate in a competitive way.
I called out Target because they seem to have gone from 0-60 quickly in my region. Walmart seems to roll out features slower, but is more comprehensive in what they offer.
I used it because there was stuff on there that was (and is) significantly cheaper via Pantry than straight Prime.
And as long as you ordered $35+ worth of stuff from Pantry, shipping was free without that additional Pantry subscription.
Now that Pantry is gone (although they decimated the list of available products on Pantry in the months before shutting it down completely), most of the stuff I used to buy from Pantry is at least 50% more expensive with Prime.
I'm going to be using Amazon for stuff like that a lot less now, because they're no longer competitive with my local grocery store.
And don't even get me started with Amazon Fresh either. Their selection really sucks too, and while their prices are roughly competitive with the local grocery store, the lack of selection just kills it for me.
I'd also point out that FreshDirect[0] is much better than Amazon Fresh in terms of selection as well.
And if your experience was anything like mine the few times I used it before I felt too guilty, the delivery folks looooved you for it. (To be fair, I did have a third floor walkup.)
So they had to ship your order from a warehouse, and the only way to do that profitably on low-margin grocery items was to batch them up into a large order in a box of uniform dimensions.
The fact that they no longer need to do this speaks to how far Amazon's logistics have come over the last 7 years.
Would also suggest watching pretty much everything else on the channel.
When they launched pantry here a couple years ago suddenly stuff I was _already_ buying regularly on Amazon (pasta, tomato paste, olive oil) I was blocked from buying unless I signed up for pantry and filled a box.
That said, I do miss the "Buy 6 items in this category for $6 off" discounts, especially the few times that there were items for less than a dollar in that category. A couple years back I scored absurd amount of Spaghetti Os this way, paying effectively negative money. The only downside is I ended up with a lot of Spaghetti Os :'(
Experiences like this have taught me to be careful about over optimizing. If I want one of something, and can't use (or don't want to use) more than one, it doesn't matter if buying two (or more) costs less than buying one; I should just buy one.
Bulk-buying mentality is so prevalent in the US, it can sometimes be hard to avoid, and I think US urban planning has a lot to do with it as well - e.g. in many cities I've lived in the US, it would take longer to walk to my car than to walk to a grocery store when I was living outside the US, so you get trained to focus on economizing trips.
My wife and I both favor bulk shopping for a majority of our household goods, and when we pondered why, it came down to our families having done the same and followed that thread to our grand/great-grand parents that lived through the great depression.
Having bulk food/household goods means that at any point, if income halts for any reason, we still have X number of meals/tp rolls/litter changes before we enter the danger zone. That was reassuring when we were living paycheck to paycheck.
I do agree on urban planning being a part of it as well. It's a 15min drive to my closest grocery store, and 10 minutes of that is driving out of my neighborhood. Walking to the store is nearly impractical, and generally not safe due to the lack of sidewalks for a fair stretch of the main road.
I have friends that "need" big SUVs if only for their Costco/Sam's Club trips. Whose homes by square foot would be palatial mansions and palaces to royalty of many previous generations, but are cookie-cutter one of hundreds in over-vast neighborhoods full of them, with rooms dedicated to bulk goods storage. It's a fascinating world.
Downside? :-) !!!
Yes, yes, welcome to the supply chain.
1. Amazon.com
2. Amazon Prime Pantry
3. Amazon Fresh
4. Whole Foods via Amazon Prime Now
5. Amazon items via Amazon Prime Now*
*I never figured out what exactly this was. Was it just Amazon.com listing reproduced in the Prime Now app? Was it Amazon Fresh and/or Prime Pantry items? Was it some other set of items?
I very much miss prime now restaurants though. It was the best, no extra fees or anything other than a tip.
I did once try something that iirc was Pantry. I searched for Pantry items, they mixed in a bunch of stuff that wasn't Pantry but wasn't obvious about that, and after I filled my shopping cart with various items they wanted to charge me lots of extra shipping. So I backed out and didn't bother with it anymore.
Since there are no shoppers going into the physical stores, amazon fresh can actually keep track of what they have.
AFAIK when you order whole foods, someone goes to the store and picks it up for you. They don't have nearly as accurate inventory tracking as Amazon Fresh/Prime Now do. If you order things from Prime Now, they will arrive guaranteed. (well, 90% guaranteed)
With Whole Foods online, your personal shopper is competing with in-store customers.
On a slightly related note, I've given up on Walmart for groceries. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was among the best. Now it's terrible. My last order, almost 80% of the items I wanted were either suddenly unavailable and removed from my cart at checkout, not available for delivery, or not delivered at all because they ran out just before delivery.
Two times before that, Walmart just forgot my order and left it behind. The first time it happened, my 6pm delivery was delivered at 8am the next morning, once customer service could get in touch with someone in the store. The second time, someone must have noticed it sitting there, because my 5pm delivery got delivered at 1am!
Honestly, just typing all that made me very confused.
At the end of the day, I don't care from who (as long as they're reputable) or how, just get me my product, in this price range, this many times per period.
*: I still use Subscribe and Safe for the 15% discount - a nice discount if 5 subscriptions are due in the same month.
I have used Subscribe and Save for the better part of a decade, and I think there were maybe 2 times that my subscriptions lined up this way. I've tried delaying all non-essential subscriptions to get to the magic number, but in my family it almost never happens.
The limited selection and lack of a price benefit meant it wasn't worth the hassle of another order.
This would integrate well with new New Deal style programs where people are helped to migrate to jobs that enrich society and those working; and possibly recapture the former community areas as nature reserves or other non-housing lands.
Many people with the means to do so also like to leave the city to move to small town America. There's really nothing wrong with either of these life experiences. People's needs are varied, both by person, and by the stage of their life. Living in an economic hotspot is more important to some people than it is to others.
A market based solution isn't going to repair a fault like a place doesn't want to economically exist on the map. That's a spot for market regulation to exist and limit suffering.
Serious question: do you have any friends or family who choose to live in rural areas?
There are a lot of people who enjoy the peace and quiet, wide open spaces, and tight community that is unique to life outside of urban areas. Some people like the lack of noise, air, and light pollution more than they like instacart.
There are people on this forum who live in rural areas and participate in the economy quite well, and have a higher standard of living than 98% of the world.
Although, even the idea that people are poorer in rural areas might not be correct. According to the 2015 ACS, poverty rates were higher in urban areas. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...
Might not be fair to the ants tho. Also given that most of the viruses are spread via city center, centralizing everything like that might not be a viable long term solution for the survival of the human species.
What you have to consider is that there are risk/reward trade offs that are involved in creating economic centers, and most of our history the city has been the place where more people died than were born.
Better not to force it so the norms around this will evolve naturally as people select into the Schelling point naturally.
I for one welcome our new borg hivemind overlords promulgated on back of the concepts of a breakaway society.
Did that sound like a threat? After all, I didn't provide any reason why it might be good, and you don't want to do it.
Pretty sure this is spam.
I get the feeling this was a common occurrence, because the interest in it amongst my friends vanished almost as quickly as it started.
Every time I tried to use it I couldn't find enough stuff to fill the box with. The bulky stuff (like canned sodas) were more expensive than costco, and I can only eat so many boxes of Cheez-its and Belvita bars
Is this separate from Amazon Prime?
> Prime Pantry launched in 2014 and, similar to Amazon Fresh,
Was Amazon Fresh the precursor to Prime Pantry?
>In an email to Bloomberg, an Amazon spokesperson explained the company’s rationale for discontinuing Prime Pantry,
Why is this author parroting a Bloomberg article? Hasn't bloomberg already reported on this?
Is it just me or is Amazon bloated with so many deals and 15% off here 10 % off there? It seems annoying.
Around here, we have Amazon, Amazon Pantry, Amazon Now and Amazon Fresh and they all sell more or less the same things.
I mean I know there must be a difference but it sure isn’t obvious to me.