> Almost everything is next-day delivery,
Could it be that you live next to one of their warehouses?
On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
Could it be that you live next to one of their warehouses?
On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm not a prime member and I frequently get orders delivered before the estimated delivery date. On the other hand I also see instances where amazon takes suspiciously long to ship something. A charitable explanation might be that their logistics capacity (eg. planes or vans) is limited, so if you're not a prime member you get deprioritized.
I avoid using Amazon, so as you can imagine, I don’t have a prime membership. It doesn’t seem to matter.
I did think it was pretty funny that the same tweezers CVS sells for $7 a piece in midtown Manhattan costs 5/$1 on Aliexpress. Only difference is the CVS tweezers are available immediately whereas I had to wait 20 days to receive the ones from Aliexpress - though I more or less have a lifetime supply now. :)
But B2B is weird. If I need my employer to ship me something that I’ll use next month, I am hard pressed to get them to ship slower than 2nd day air.
Maybe you didn't see the Footnote:
Footnotes
[1] "Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not." https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
I buy screws there all the time. It isn't like it is $10 a screw! It's like a nickel or less.
Sounds like a conflict of interest if they literally start transit then delay at some point. Like maybe retailers shouldn't be able to own shipping
Unless it’s USPS. Then nothing makes sense.
I've seen both Fedex and UPS do it, but in some places it seemed like one or the other.
I don't see it all that much anymore though. Definitely post-covid but tbh it's really been years since I've seen it. I can't tell how much of that is vs me moving away from a rural home (might be more likely to attempt "batching" deliveries in rural areas due to distance) vs an actual change in behavior here.
It may also be the shift to JIT logistics too - you have to have a big warehouse or something to hold them. Even if it's sitting in a trailer somewhere, you still have to have a big lot to hold them. These are costs that are probably not justified for the return of "lol make customers more amicable to pay more for better shipping", the conversion there is ~0% for the most part. The 5-day window is nice for the courier if they need it of course, holiday is madness in the mail business (and payments, retail, etc) from what I know, but if your throughput is significantly lower than your mail volume then you've got problems, so you need to be able to ship it through in 2-3 days on average anyway, and if you can do that... why pay for someplace to hold onto it when we can JIT it right onto a truck?
Today it seems like if your shipping drops off for a couple days it's usually lost. I had one package stop tracking and then bounce 100 miles in the wrong direction, another where it stopped tracking and then showed up with box damage, etc, but haven't seen it just hang out like the old days.
Amazon, too, will play games with shipping windows... on a thunderbolt hub, they set a delivery date like two weeks out, sold and shipped by amazon. Like a week later I see a ship notice, cool it'll be here soon right? Lol nope, shipped UPS Surepost, so they got their week out of it.
I’ve had countless packages “stuck” in Troutdale for days before suddenly continuing on to Seattle.
I wonder if they are applying ML to the distribution batching and coming up with probabilities to each route's batching efficiency. With enough detailed delivery transaction data, they could identify the probability of it being worth holding the package in the warehouse or trailer to batch it, versus sending it on its way.
If you split the fulfillment off from the retailing, the fulfillment will still have a queue.
Should the government mandate first in first out or something, no ability to pay for priority?
you delay for up to a week, this lets you build efficient shipping batches.
I.E., With USPS you can pretty much assume that you are going to get a letter next-day if it comes from your state