I've bought from Amazon when I had a Prime subscription and when I didn't. With Prime, the goods were always shipped within a day. Without Prime, they let it sit on the shelf for 5 or 6 days before even shipping it.
Compare that to other companies like Best Buy, newegg, walmart, or even no name ebay sellers where products are always promptly shipped without need for any "subscription" nonsense.
With Amazon, it sits on the shelf for 5 days before it ships and then takes another 5 days to arrive.
With something like walmart, it ships immediately and then takes another 5 days to arrive.
Amazon's in-transit time isn't any faster than other merchants. They all use UPS or Fedex, so no difference there. The only difference is that Amazon takes 5 days to ship while other websites take 1.
Except that there are alternatives to Amazon, hence my use of the word "choice". I'm not saying Amazon doesn't keep its promise. I'm saying when Amazon is compared to its competitors it falls short.
> A super saver shipping promise is 5-7 business days
Actually it's 5-8 business days (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&...) and usually Amazon milks it to its limit. 8 business days equal 10 to 12 real days.
Compare that to merchants that ship immediately. It usually takes 3-5 days to arrive at my home. That's a lot faster than Amazon's 10-12 days.
It isn't free - the cost of the shipping is baked in the product prices. Walmart's threshold is $45 for no additional charge, shipping to one of their stores is no additional charge, and below the threshold shipping is usually 97c.
In any event this isn't about "can you pay more for faster shipping" which is the case virtually everywhere, but that it seems like Amazon is holding back on their lowest tier before the actual shipping which none of their competitors seem to do.
There is an obvious benefit to them in Prime upsells. Actual logistical reasons seem at odds with the story about huge spending on warehouses.
WSJ actually just published an article on how Amazon is frequently underpriced by other sellers: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142412788732342380457902...
There's no one seller that is consistently the lowest price. But Amazon is consistently the slowest in shipping.
Newegg offers a different, more proactive approach that might sit better - you can pay $2.99 for rush processing to get them to get stuff out to you quickly, otherwise it might take a day to ship.
If the higher priority orders are very lumpy then it does make far more sense to process them first and have variability in the response time for the super saver orders.
Without some sort of crowdsourcing effort we can't tell what everyone's actual experience is. The anecdotal data so far is delays in Amazon's lowest tier happen that don't exist at their competitors. The story is about them spending more on warehouses, so something doesn't add up.
From everything I've heard, they're an aggressively frugal company, so I would guess that they don't have the packing capacity to handle their peak days of the week, but they do have enough to handle the total week's load. Their competitors are probably overprovisioned to improve their consistency, but that leads to higher prices.