That's BS; we use the 2-day shipping and need nothing else, bundling everything like that should be illegal.
I used to be a huge fan of vertical integration, but like it less and less as I get older. What I've seen with vertical integration is that if one part of the company blows up, then all the other parts go away too. Meanwhile, a good standard lasts forever. I have used seemingly millions of proprietary chat apps over the years, but the one that has kept working for decades is plain old email. It always works. The PSTN is also great. I can call anyone in the world, no matter what service provider I have or what service provider they have. You just type the numbers and it works. Sure, there's spam. I think I can deal with the spam better than "sorry, we need to cut costs this quarter so X is gone".
Something else I was thinking about is the advantage for the company itself. Imagine you're a software engineer on AWS, but really want to work on Twitch. Easy, it's just an internal transfer! You show up at a new desk tomorrow with the same compensation and benefits as you had before. But if they were separate companies, you'd interview with Twitch, they'd call back and say "we loved you, when can you start" and then you get the chance to negotiate a higher salary. With internal transfers, you get "that's impossible, there is nothing we can do if you want more". Good for the shareholders, bad for software engineers.
At most BlubCo-type companies these days, an internal transfer often involves all the fun of the interview loop, while getting to skip all the hassle of negotiating a higher salary.
I wonder if some products just don't get marked as backordered and so it's a matter of Amazon needing to wait for stock to come in. Or they're just not guaranteeing 2-day delivery anymore.
They haven't been, in my experience. They used to throw you a free month (or more) when you complain it took a week, now they just kind of say you could return it if you want. Very late items sometimes do get a refund, but that's rare.
It’s annoying and makes Walmart just as good or better many times.
Amazon has become garbage anyway, I buy stuff at retail stores now. What all this really means is that the "disruption" from free money is over and new economy businesses are resorting to the same legacy business crap in order to try and make money.