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Comment by rossjudson | Hacker News Reader

I've had a Prime membership forever, originating from when it actually meant something to have it.

Prime changed from being "We're going to have the package to you in two days" to "We'll get it to you in two days, if we feel like it and it's convenient and inexpensive for us to do so".

Repeatedly, lately, I've bought items based on delivery times only to receive updates a few hours later pushing the delivery times back by days. It's one thing to have an exceptional circumstance during delivery, and quite another to change the committed (was it really?) delivery time within a few hours of the purchase decision.

Yeah, COVID, I get it. But it's not just COVID.

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I see a number of reports regarding slow delivery times from Amazon.

My personal experience is the opposite: times were heavily impacted peak-COVID, but now are returning to the very fast times, and are often same-day (!) or next-day delivery.

The only times I see times being pushed back now is when they ship by UPS via a program where UPS takes it from Amazon and gives it to the USPS for last-mile. These can take 4-5 days.

But if Amazon's delivery drivers are handling it, which is most of the time for me, it's very fast.

This isn't meant to invalidate others' experiences. But I wonder what the difference is. My experience is in an urban area.

This has been my experience as well. Also, anything coming from the nearest distribution center always arrives on time, but anything else is a crapshoot.

We're the polar opposite from you: Amazon deliveries here never arrive in less than 3 days, before covid or after (rural New Mexico). The pandemic seems to have had essentially no impact on delivery times here. It was "sort of fast/sort of slow" (depending on your baseline) before and it's the same now.

Do they still refund your month's prime if you complain about this, or is Amazon at the point where it will happily tell the customer to pound sand?

I often go out of my way to avoid Amazon for my online purchases now.

The excuse I've seen is that Amazon points out that the shipping time was still 2 days, it just took them a week to start the shipping process. It seems like they're trying to minimize time in transit as opposed to trying to get the package to my doorstep ASAP

Not recently, they just blame covid.

Why keep paying for Prime, then? You can also blame COVID for why you are cancelling.

Personally I’m not. I’ll subscribe for a month and make all the orders I need then.

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