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I 100% agree with this.

In a matter of 4 days, Amazon went from next day shipping to 1+ month "estimated" delivery timeframes. This was the final straw for me to finally commit to finding items from non-Amazon sources. So far everything I've ordered has come in a reasonable timeframe. Possibly, taking one day longer, but not 15x longer.

I ordered an air conditioner that showed up 2 days later with free shipping. Yet, Amazon failed to ship a PS4 controller for 3+ weeks (ended up cancelling and doing Best Buy pick-up 10 minutes after I ordered).

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Oh yea. I almost forgot about the thermometer that my wife order on March 28th. Today is April 23rd and we still have not received it. Estimated delivery is May 7th.

Maybe Amazon doesn't consider that an "essential" item, but I certainly wouldn't place it on the list of "useless" items.

I was in the same situation with a thermometer. I even had to buy one on eBay, and it was junk. I’m not endorsing this but I ended up getting one of these since it would be delivered in a few days https://ihealthlabs.com/product/PT3

My mom ended up shipping us her spare one. Thankfully.

As an interesting anecdote, the non-prime thermometer I ordered yesterday already shipped. But of course, I actually paid shipping for it, which probably put me near the front of the queue.

My prime orders got badly delayed though.

Was it from a third-party seller? If they're not using FBA, they shipped it from their own warehouse.

I've noticed the opposite in the UK - saying they'll take up to a week to deliver, and then the item turning up the next day, or the day after.

I can second that for Canada; I've ordered at least 4-5 non-essential items in the last month and only one took more than 3-4 days to arrive.

tldr.. get a PRIME account

I'm in Canada.. you're right BUT you need a prime account. I ordered some stuff and it was due to come in a month (non prime account).. and after 1.5 weeks it didn't ship. I canceled it and used a family members Prime account (still the delivery date was ~1 month away).. I got the stuff within 3 days.

Have a Canadian prime account. Some items ship next day, others take over a month. I suspect locally-stocked deliveries are fine, it’s listings at further remote warehouses that are taking longer, maybe? Normally everything arrives within a day like clockwork at my location, especially during the holidays.

Also, despite delays, Amazon still delivers. Staples just cancelled my orders.

My Canadian prime account seems to be having no effect. Home cooking appliances not showing up.

Tomorrow I'm cancelling them and cancelling prime renewal. We started using Walmart and curbside delivery and its great.

I feel like covid will stress test existing "curbside pickup" systems and force them to become robust. Where before employees weren't well trained or didn't care, now they're well practiced.

Walmart, Homeless Despot, Zehrs, and Canadian Tire curbside have all been well oiled machines this month.

Early on in the COVID crisis, Amazon was giving long delivery estimates and then delivering quickly anyway. That has since changed to their estimates matching reality.

Same experience here (SF Bay), some items with moderate delays are on time (3-7 days), items with very long lead times (15-30 days) end up coming much faster. Still happy to not have to go to the store.

Same, Seattle, CPU, RAM and MB I ordered came a day early (last week). Was surprised, it was a day before the scheduled arrival I got when order was placed. Maybe just lucky.

Can confirm. Order something pretty unessential, delivered in 3 days.

Same in Australia. I've been amazed at how well Amazon has been sticking to quick deliveries even here. We don't get same day (or even next day, as I'm rural) but I haven't had anything take more than 3 working days, which is the same as pre-COVID, despite ordering 10x what I usually do.

Same in Seattle. They give me a delayed estimate but usually I've been getting my packages days earlier.

same in Australia.

I have a friend at Amazon and they say absenteeism among employees is through the roof. They can neither hire nor keep the employees they do have.

That would fall under the "they can't afford to deliver the orders they have" bucket if they can't find anyone that wants to do the proposed work. If true, Amazon is selling a service that isn't robust or flexible enough for such a season. Will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

> Will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

Long term is probably a combination of autonomous robots, self-driving vehicles, and delivery drones. The current crisis might even accelerate its development and deployment.

Yea well those strategies keep on always able to be done "next year".

> If true, Amazon is selling a service that isn't robust or flexible enough for such a season.

Nobody in that area is robust enough for a once in a century pandemic.

Does anyone know how Alibaba and the like have fared in China?

I live in Shanghai. There were two or three weeks after Lunar New Year where deliveries were delayed or more expensive or both for everything and grocery delivery slots were scarce for a month. Things are back to normal with all deliveries now.

But since this was the Lunar New Year, I'm guessing that Ali Baba was already on a war footing?

Companies that have the ability to price according to the strain on their system, like FedEx and UPS, are presumably far more robust in this scenario. Here's the rub: Amazon Prime is a contract for services at a certain annual price between the customer and Amazon. Amazon cannot easily just ask for more if their end of the deal ends up more costly to deliver than forecasted.

> Amazon cannot easily just ask for more if their end of the deal ends up more costly to deliver than forecasted.

Under the circumstances there’s probably no legal obstacle to them doing so. A pandemic looks, walks and quacks like force majeure.

Legal, perhaps not. Economic, possibly. I wouldn't be surprised if a change in price acted as a shock to get people to cancel their membership.

The PR is probably more important than the legal in this case.

But they can easily take longer to deliver, and are, negating any need to change pricing.

They can just not deliver the service. Amazon Prime doesn't guarantee that any item you want will come in two days.

> Amazon Prime doesn't guarantee that any item you want will come in two days.

So you're saying their deal is "pay us $120/year but we make no commitment to provide anything in exchange?"

It’s sadly not uncommon for businesses to promise various services and then unilaterally change their minds. While I’m sure that there are some exceptions, most TOS have a ton of “we reserve the right to change our minds whenever for whatever reason, without warning”

Now that’s kind of different from the PR fallout. Amazon is risking a mass walkout of their customers over this; it just depends on whether or not customers see this as a reasonable response to a crazy circumstance, or a greedy move on Amazon’s part to maintain profitability over their commitments to customers.

> It’s sadly not uncommon for businesses to promise various services and then unilaterally change their minds. While I’m sure that there are some exceptions, most TOS have a ton of “we reserve the right to change our minds whenever for whatever reason, without warning”

I was under the impression that one party cannot unilaterally modify the terms of a contract without offering consideration to the other party, and the consideration can't be "we will continue to perform according to the terms of the contract".

Thats what they are doing, and I, the customer, am no longer getting the value I signed up for.

For a "customer obsession strategy," this one should hurt their bottom line, either with cancellation of prime subscriptions or lost sales. I am not saying amazon should be penalized or taken to court. This is just the biggest vulnerability I have seen out of the Amazon machine, and I think its very interesting.

It's a tangent, but at the All Hands where Jeff introduced Prime, he made it very clear that it was actually a money loser for the company at that point. He did it anyhow because it satisfied both the customer obsession and the long term growth principles Amazon has followed from the start.

Because of this, I very much doubt that Amazon will mind losing money on Prime member shipping during this pandemic. I wouldn't be shocked if some of the current management made noises in that direction and that was part of what got Jeff to take the reins again.

Losing money on the two-day shipping in order to make money on the volume of sales is just like saying “we will lose money on leasing planes but make it up on the product sale”. That announcement was certainly divergent e-commerce strategy at the time, but Amazon intends to cover its basis on the overall transaction.

In today’s plight, it’s the sheer scale of money Amazon might lose fulfilling its backlog of orders, and potentially why its delaying shipping with the “essential items” reasoning, that’s of particular interest.

This is still far smaller than other pandemics in the last 100 years. The 1957 "Asian flu" had around 1–4 million dead. AIDS is sitting around 770,000 dead per year and the total is vastly higher etc.

What makes things different about COVID-19 is how people are responding to it in the hope of saving vast numbers of lives.

> This is still far smaller than other pandemics in the last 100 years. > What makes things different..

We are still in the early days of this pandemic. The history of COVID-19 is still being written. No one knows how long we're in for or what the final death count will be.

After the meat shortage starts we'll all come out of this with a BMI of 20. It won't be because those remaining all lost weight.

Given R0 is around 4 and mortality rate is some single digit percentage, left unchecked this pandemic is bigger than those.

The only recourse we have to reduce R is stay the hell away from each other. No business really plans on that.

How well did Internet stores deliver during them?

AIDS isn't really a relevant comparison to COVID-19

It’s entirely possible that they’ve literally bottomed out on the labor pool in some areas, what with the increase of risk to drivers and increased robustness in the social safety net.

It’s kind of hard to plan around the “what if we can’t get more workers” scenario.

Unemployment compensation is high, so the incentive to show up to work has decreased.

They can solve this problem by paying more, although wage increases are hard to turn back time on. Maybe they should consider "hazard pay" during the pandemic.

In Florida unemployment is a max of 235 dollars for a max of 12 weeks. Nobody is going on unemployment for a raise here.

+600 from the feds per week. In most states, it is higher.

In normal times, true. However unemployment insurance has been significantly boosted by the CARES act during the pandemic

Even with the CARES act, Amazon employees can't just quit their jobs and choose to collect unemployment instead. People who quit their jobs aren't eligible for unemployment.

There are a few exceptions under the CARES act if you can't work because of something directly related to COVID, e.g., if you're a parent who has to take care of children because schools are closed. Being afraid you might catch the coronavirus at work is not a valid reason and would not make you eligible for unemployment payments.

Parents with kids in school sounds like a large chunk of the workforce, no?

Perhaps, but I don't know anything about the makeup of Amazon's distribution workforce.

Even among parents, I doubt that all of them would leap at the "opportunity" to quit their job just so they can take home slightly more money for a period of four months (which is all the CARES act covers). Surely most people must realize jobs are going to be extremely scarce four months from now, so if you have a job right now you probably should think very hard before throwing it away.

> Amazon employees can't just quit their jobs and choose to collect unemployment instead

You're right, they can't.

However, the 26 million Americans who have been laid off from other jobs have negative incentive to sign up for a new job with Amazon because the benefits are tied to staying unemployed. That exacerbates the problem for Amazon.

Except it's now $835 a week, or over $40k a year. You'd have to pay me a lot to get me back to work if I had that option.

You just cited the gross income, not what you get after taxes. You still get taxed on that AND you don't have benefits like health insurance - COBRA for continuing health care is expensive as is the alternative, although slightly less so, of paying for health care through an the ACA health care exchanges 100 percent out of your own pocket. For health care all that extra money will more than exceed health insurance for a family of 4. The extra money ends at the end of July.

Again, that is gross income NOT net income. That number is pre-tax income, unemployment is taxed just like income at a job. You can choose when filing to defer paying those taxes until when you file, but you do still need to pay them when you file for taxes come April for the previous year. So when you file you'll end up owing money and have to pay the income taxes you never paid. You're definitely still not coming out ahead.

So again, the additional 600 as part of the CARES act ends at the end of July. And you have to have to wait one week where you're unemployed - receiving no income - to be able to file. So you also lose one week of earnings no matter what. I don't think most people are coming out ahead on this by far.. it seems maybe a very small majority might briefly come out ahead but they seriously risk it all being canceled out if they're unemployed still past July.

If you make $40k for a family of 4, your ACA premiums will be much lower than that.

If you earn $30K/yr you pay very very little taxes, possibly negative

You can't collect unemployment if you just decide to stop showing up for work. Unless Amazon formally lays you off (and Amazon hasn't laid off anybody) or you fall into one of the very specific categories of COVID-related exceptions, you're eligible for $0 in unemployment.

You might if you can demonstrate that the employer had a hazardous work environment. Given reports of conditions in some Amazon centers, a person could probably make a strong case, especially if they are someone or know someone who falls into a vulnerable category.

During a pandemic like this, you can definitely quit over fears of the virus and for the purpose of social distancing and be eligible for unemployment. I know a number of people who did.

People who quit/get fired/don’t show don’t get unemployment.

Although isn't it easy to get fired? Just work a bit too slowly?

Start agitating for a union

Speaking from experience in California - if you are fired but not for misconduct, you may still collect unemployment.

There’s certainly a fine line between being bad at your job and actual misconduct, so if someone were so inclined they could probably just be a bad worker long enough to get fired without any specific alleged misconduct. Personally, I’d just quit if that pathway were on my mind, but I understand how people could decided to do this.

Or maybe they could solve this problem by permanently sharing more of their obscene profits with their workers, fully recognizing how essential their sacrifices and contributions (regardless of any 'hazard') are to those profits. If we're not learning that right now, we're rather missing the point of it.

Seems they aren't treating them well enough or paying them enough.

One more little note: I can't think of any other stores that have had to make a similar claim of 'focusing on the essentials.' At the other end of the spectrum, my local Costco has been fantastically stocked at all times except for the few super-demand items like toilet paper and soap.

Chewy has been delaying delivery (they usually are two day deliveries). I've noticed some items take longer than others, and it seems to be on a priority basis (a poop rake set took longer than prescription medication, for example; like 2 weeks vs 2 days)

And Amazon hasn't just said "yeah, your stuff might get delayed", they've actively asked large affiliates to cut referral traffic by 50-70%.

You are conflating bulk warehousing with delivery. Also, Costco isn't in the same league of complexity as Amazon catalog logistics

My anecdote is the opposite.

The desk in my home office overlooks the street, so I've gotten used to counting the delivery trucks during the day. (FedEx truck? Time for more coffee!)

We used to get one Prime van a day up my street. Now we get between five and eight a day.

My wife has ordered some very frivolous things from Amazon lately, including a cat tree, a cat scratching post, and an actual tree. All arrived early.

Sorry to hear that things are rough in your neighborhood. But I don't think that's enough data to point to some kind of conspiracy.

If you see no value in your Prime Membership why not cancel? I canceled mine over the fact that I have to screen what I buy because it could be counterfeit.

same

Around where I live (suburbs in Oregon/USA), the Amazon delivery vans have been making passes multiple times a day for the past few weeks.

Same here (Chapel Hill, NC) - I routinely get multiple Prime deliveries per day. And I see Prime vans running around everywhere.

Just to check, are you looking for the Amazon logo on the delivery vans? Because I've seen tons of deliveries for various services arrive in plain white Sprinters. You don't know whose van it is unless you can see the logo on the package. Some of them even seem to be subcontractors who work for multiple services, ie, Amazon and DHL packages arriving in the same truck.

Can confirm, I got a Prime delivery from a guy driving a white Budget Rent-a-car van two weeks ago. Have to say I was very thankful.

I've noticed the reverse - non-essential items are still delayed by weeks, but quasi-essentials (e.g., food, food storage items) are often faster than expected, and there are noticeably more Amazon trucks around than even at the holidays.

Getting a delivery from Amazon/Whole Foods has gone from difficult (get up at 2AM and have a 50% chance of finding a slot, and maybe a 2% chance during the day) in March to completely impossible since beginning of April - even the exceedingly rare event of "finding" a slot fails when trying to click through [Pay] and [Schedule] screens.

Funny, at least in my neighborhood in Seattle, I've been seeing those vans all over the place.

Has Amazon refunded everyone's Prime membership fees yet? At least partially? Or offered cancellations for people who don't use Prime digital services? That's an obvious first step to stop needlessly angering people.

I just did the math and cancelled prime. I realized that I didn't care to have items in within 2 days and I can still get free shipping if I batch my ordering a bit more.

Amazon is still delivering "non-essential" items, or else, what they consider "essential" is extremely broad. I use Amazon a lot - I've had energy drinks, candy, a radio wiring harness, fitness (Pilates) equipment, paper plates, pre-printed eBay thank you cards, a flood light, and more all delivered in the last few weeks, most of which arrived inside of the Prime window.