Comment by pGuitar
3 years ago
> 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.
3 years ago
> 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.
>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.
At my college town around 2013, any prime delivery would always take a day longer than it was supposed to. Saturday delivery wasn't common there at the time so you had to get your order in by Wednesday morning at the latest otherwise you'd be waiting until Monday.
Whatever was going on in 2013 is likely not really relevant to how Amazon is operating in 2022. This stuff change drastically.
2013? That’s almost a decade ago.
I’m absolutely sure that there is an amazon FIFO for orders that sometimes get delayed days in shipping in order not to build up an unnecessary queue that wouldn’t get emptied for pickup. Probably has a lot to do with them running their own logistics.
Likewise, Amazon almost always delivers to me before their estimate and the estimate is very standard. No one else I order from is doing better.
I avoid using Amazon, so as you can imagine, I don’t have a prime membership. It doesn’t seem to matter.
Prime is a nasty scam. If you compare the final pricing on the same item in a Prime and non-Prime account you'll see what I mean.
I don't have access to a non-Prime Amazon account. What are some examples of what you see?
Compared to Amazon, MMC has a very small number of SKUs, inventory that never goes stale, and prices that are only affordable in the context of B2B transactions. It’s not a comparable service.
And also zero counterfeit products that will burn down your house.
I am increasingly wary of buying things that might be in this category from Amazon.
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DigiKey eliminated everything except next day air for small packages some years ago because it was too expensive to have two different SKUs for shipping small orders in their system. B2B is weird.
Next day delivery is so common for B2B that many times it's the only way to order. I won a free DMM from Keysight and while it took a month for it to be actually shipped, they shipped it next day from Malaysia to the US when it finally did. Like you guys made me wait weeks for it, I could have waited another week for snail mail.
I made a small order from Digi-Key last month and they offered UPS ground, FedEx ground and USPS. I don’t think I’ve ever not been offered budget shipping from them.
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.
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Huh? I order from Digikey all the time and usually I get my packages FedEx because it's the same price as USPS. When USPS is cheaper, I select that because I'm in the same state so it typically gets here the next day anyway.
Perhaps. But all the more reason for Amazon to streamline it's UI and UX. Instead it's consistently a textbook case of TMI. If you're not paying close attention you're likely to miss something.
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
People complain about the prices, but it isn't like only businesses can afford them.
I buy screws there all the time. It isn't like it is $10 a screw! It's like a nickel or less.
No, they have next day shipping to the whole US.
In other words, standard shipping is always next day?
Exactly
> On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
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
Plenty of dedicated shipping companies do exactly the same thing (if you don't pay for next day then they'll deliberately delay it so it takes 5 days or whatever you paid for), it's got nothing to do with being owned by a retailer or not.
I can’t imagine a company wasting money on this. Distro facility space is money. Especially these days with all networks stressed. They may delay to optimize a route with more stops, or prioritize guaranteed shipping dates. But being punitive doesn’t make financial sense.
Unless it’s USPS. Then nothing makes sense.
this definitely used to be a thing until like... early 2010s. Back then I completely recall watching tracking for some items and they'd accept it and run it a couple hops and then... it'd just sit for 3 days or whatever. Fedex said it was gonna be 5 business days? Then don't expect to see it in less than 5 business days.
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.
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They don't delay the shipping, they stick the entire order at a chosen point in their queue.
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?
I am no logistics engineer but I always figured it was a batching operation.
you delay for up to a week, this lets you build efficient shipping batches.
It’s nuts. I’ve had mcmaster packages come from far enough away overnight that there were hardly enough minutes for UPS to drive it this far. But definitely not flown judging by the terminals it went through.
Our office is near their head office/distribution facility. If we order before noon, most stuff shows up same day.
I'm ~12 miles from one, and they are as fast as amazon
I would consider 12 miles to be right next to it from a shipping perspective...
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