Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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That’s because HN readers are geographically diverse.

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)

My friends and coworkers are geographically diverse as well. My original comment still stands.

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.

See

https://www.reddit.com/r/memphis/comments/zkmi7e/amazon_prim...

Even that thread is strange to me. There’s some people saying it takes 5-7 days to get delivery to Raleigh, while there’s also multiple people disagreeing saying they get 1-2 day delivery to east Memphis (less than 10 miles away).

That’s exactly what people are reporting. It’s hard to suss out exactly what is different about these areas but there’s no doubt that some people get much better service from Amazon than others.

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