In my top 10 American city, Amazon delivers multiple slots same day, guaranteed no-extra-cost 2 day shipping, and offers a variety of 5-7 options that include digital rewards, local pickup, etc.
No competitor is in the same ballpark. Nearly every other e-commerce site I use, from small to large businesses, take 2 days to process the order and ship the dang thing and 4-6 more to arrive. Amazon ships in a matter of hours, and will even pay a driver uber-style to run it to your house immediately, for $3 extra. It's completely routine for me to shop from a small to medium business for my gardening hobby or photography hobby and wait 7-14 days for order processing and another 7-14 days for shipping. I waited 28 days for some camera filters, filters I chose to buy from the company instead of Amazon, even though they sold the same ones through Amazon on 2 day shipping. I waited 28 days!
Even for returns, Amazon operates return centers in all of my local Whole Foods, and they don't require boxing or labels. Every other e-commerce site I use makes me jump through hoops, find a printer, print a label, find a box, and then find the some random low-cost shipment center just to do a return. With Amazon, I show up with an unboxed product, they can my phone, and I'm out.
I recognize the level of harm Amazon does to society in a variety of ways, from their hostility to workers rights, their abusive use of contractors to reduce liability, their abuse of single use plastics and other pollutants, but on the topic of delivery speeds and customer experience, they are so far beyond any competitor that it's not even a comparison. Amazon has invented a style of e-commerce convenience that no competitor can rival at all.
In real life, I can’t even remember the last time it took longer than 2 days to deliver something to me, and I’ve never heard of any of my friends, coworkers, or acquaintances complain about it. Everyone I know still loves Amazon because of how fast it is. There’s a weird disconnect here for some reason.
I live about two hours from a major AMZN distribution hub, people I know who live an hour away work there. AMZN is always 5 days.
My hunch is that the criterion for fast shipping is close to “do you have a Cheesecake Factory in your town?”. If you’re in a large city with competitive shopping, AMZN wants to compete, if you live in a place which gets less attention from major retailers, AMZN goes with the herd.
It is no wonder why AMZN has premium service to NYC (Wouldn’t want Jim Cramer to say that AMZN is the slowest shipper) and Washington DC (If your congressman gets fast shipping he thinks his constituents do too) and Los Angeles (otherwise slow shipping from AMZN would be a running gag on all the sitcoms)
Even my friend who lives in rural nowhere is one of those people who in the past has raved to me about how they order everything from Amazon because it’s even faster than going to the store. Parts of my family live about 3 hours from the closest big city and they still love Amazon as well.
There’s definitely got to be a geographic proximity factor to it and I’m definitely not saying your anecdote is invalid, but I find it very interesting that I’ve literally _never_ heard anyone in real life complain about Amazon shipping times, while I see it frequently on HN, to the point where if you only read HN you might think it was the majority viewpoint.
> I remember when they put "frustration free packaging" on the agenda in a time when that was never talked about.
But this isn't accurate at all; evil packaging was a topic of discussion before Amazon came out with "frustration free packaging". I remember buying something at Fry's and, knowing I would barely be able to open it, asking at checkout if they could open it for me. And they refused!
Here you can see some packaging criticism published several years before Amazon's effort: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/09/30/those-goddamn-...
From the commentary:
> When you buy a peripheral anymore, you might as well just get a jigsaw before you leave the mall. We don't lock up our prisoners this well. Why our gamepads and so forth must be hermetically sealed is beyond me - have they done something wrong? Is it for their own protection? If they don't want me to have the controller, and that's fine, maybe a better plan would be to keep it out of the store in the first place.
> Or, and this is a theory with some factual weight, perhaps the people that make these products stoke such a furnace of contempt for the consumer that good sense never enters the equation.
* If you know exactly what name brand thing you want to buy Amazon is the best buying / return experience, usually the cheapest way to acquire it, and the fastest delivery.
* If you don't know exactly what you want it's a pretty good search engine on top of AliExpress. As soon as you see two of the same pictures you can get it for at least half the price buying direct.
I don't know about this. I've certainly seen a few cases where it was true, but the shipping cost always brought it back up to Amazon price levels, or the shipping time was so long that I was happier paying a bit more to get it sooner.
Maybe I'm just buying the wrong things...
Obviously your mileage may vary depending on your location but this is echoed by many I know who live in major cities. There are no other options that can compete with that shipping time in my city.
For me, most Amazon deliveries take 2-3 days and most often delivered with the US mail but lately I am seeing more Amazon vans (or unlabled white rental vans) so it may be changing.