Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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The one place where Walmart has Amazon crushed is a physical presence which drastically affects shipping.

Instead of having to buy Prime to get 2 day free shipping, I can just shop at Walmart and anything I buy gets delivered to a local Walmart 5 minutes away for free so I can pick it up. Most of the time it's 2-3 days (sometimes same day if they have it locally).

This bypasses the $25-35 minimum price rule for free shipping on Amazon which almost always takes 7-10 days and a huge chunk of items aren't eligible for this.

Before Amazon started screwing around with shipping times and prices I used to shop there a lot for common items but nowadays I use them as a last resort.

Even if you don't have a local Walmart they also offer free shipping on totals above $35 and often times their non-free shipping is reasonable.

For example $5 to have it shipped to your doorstep in 2 days instead of a local free pickup. Walmart can pull this off because they don't have a hidden agenda to push something like Prime on you.

On Amazon that same item will likely be $7-8 in shipping and takes 4-7 days to get there without Prime.

I find it weird to say-

I'm excited to see what Walmart does in the next decade...

but seriously, Amazon has gotten big enough to be 'bad' to customers and get away with it. The moment I saw an item was Prime only, I realized I needed to shop at the competitors.

I bought a book on Amazon. I don't have Prime, so it took most of a week before the third party seller even shipped it. It never arrived, and the order status only said "left shipper facility". After staying in this limbo for several days past the arrival date, I was credited with a refund.

I bought the book again, this time fulfilling through Amazon. They quoted an arrival date of a week in the future. When that day arrived, the package had not arrived and it turned out that the date was changed to the shipping date. I still had to wait the better part of the week for the book to actually arrive.

I did a search and found that I could have bought the book directly from the author (self-published), and would have arrived in three or four days.

While waiting for the book to arrive the second time, I decided I had another book I wanted to read. I had it loaded up on Amazon... then checked B&N, who had the book in stock. I cancelled the Amazon order, and drove 10 minutes to buy the second book.

So much for the convenience of Amazon...

I share experiences in a similar vein: a book being cancelled and refunded for being 'undeliverable', a CPU (one of the most important components in a full computer build, rendering it useless) ending up at the wrong facility, new items being sold out until weeks after their release date (Sony WH1000MX3 right now, at least in the UK) while available in other online stores, an item not being what was advertised (Dove soap from a different country with worse ingredients), and worse, them not disclosing this (I happened to check the page myself before picking it up and it had a warning about this). All of this happened in the last month. I cancelled all but the book (which I'm again waiting for now) and got stuff elsewhere with a much better experience. I absolutely do appreciate Amazon when it works, I just wish it wasn't so unreliable.

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