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Comment by iamcalledrob | Hacker News Reader

Amazon (US) has really gone downhill in the past ~5 years.

I signed up for Prime a over decade ago because of the reliable 2 day shipping. It worked pretty much as described. It was great.

Shipping is no longer 2 days on most items - "Prime" shipping can now take 7 days. Amazon advertise same or next day shipping, but it's really only for big ticket, occasional purchase items. Most everyday purchases now take 3-7 days, the same as without prime. They show the prime badge, but if you log out you can see that non-prime members get the same shipping.

This feels really dishonest. Amazon pretend that you get huge shipping benefits from Prime, but it turns out you don't anymore.

For the first time, I've cancelled my prime renewal. What, exactly, am I paying for these days? Walmart offer next-day free shipping on the big ticket items too, without the membership.

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Maybe it varies by location because in Chicago it's extremely rare for things to take more than 2 days. In fact they've been stepping up next and same day delivery for a lot of items.

That being said, I'm actually moving in the opposite direction since that creates a lot of waste. Unless I really need the item quickly I use Prime Day delivery so it all comes in one box. If my whole family didn't share the account I wouldn't pay for Prime.

The theft problem doesn’t vary at all in Chicago. I’m in a North (west) Side neighborhood and receive about 83% of Amazon packages, with the rest being stolen or just not delivered. Compare this with a 100% success rate for items delivered by UPS, USPS, or FedEx.

I figure at some point I’ll fall below whatever metrics Amazon has internally, they’ll stop resending/refunding packages, and I’ll have to fight the same battle as in the article. If anything, OP unfortunately/correctly teaches that empathy, common sense, and treating level 1 workers as human have no place with Bezos…you have to assume the worst and treat everything as a cost/blame situation.

I live in a high-rise which has a mail room so maybe I'm insulated from whatever factors lead to that (porch piracy obviously, but something about Amazon specifically). I didn't realize it was that bad, only getting 83% is insane

Edit: though my family in Rogers Park and the suburbs have never complained about this issue so I'm not sure it's that common.

I live in Washington, DC. Two or three times a week on the neighborhood listserv there is an email asking whether anyone got the sender's package. Some of the problem is certainly theft, but I doubt all of it is.

No doubt there's some of this given the ridiculous photos I get through the "take a picture" feature that Amazon, DoorDash, and others believe substitutes for actually validating delivery happens.

I just don't give these tech companies any benefit of the doubt for the situation. My home is on a major street next to a door that has the street number displayed very prominently. As mentioned above, FedEx and others have 100% success rate. Amazon's delivery drivers just don't care, because Bezos has created a system where they are incentivized not to care.

I live in a single-family unit in Uptown and would be surprised if my rate is anywhere below 95%, I'd be shocked and demand a recount. I order several times a week, often several times a day (yeah, a lot of items I need are same-day delivery, most are next-day), and I recall two or three packages missing this year. And those were likely never delivered of to the wrong address, as they had no picture.

You're right, not sure why the doubt in the edit. Different [areas/data points/anecdotes] will no doubt yield different results. The suburbs are very different than the neighborhoods. I used to live the Loop high-rise life, felt the same way you did.

Though Amazon usually is no help in the last mile delivery there. Encountered numerous stories of high rise package rooms that have just been overwhelmed by Amazon/since COVID. If anything, most improvement/success stories I've heard have been from a startup in the space, Luxer.

That's not my experience at all.

Shipping is 1-2 days for nearly everything that is sold/shipped by Amazon, in my experience. Occasionally it's a day late.

The idea that most shipping takes 3-7 days isn't my experience at all. Maybe you live somewhere more inaccessible?

I always thought paying for Prime was about free shipping on small items anyways, not about faster speed.

To be fair, Amazon did have 2 day shipping to anywhere in the 48 states. That promise has now been removed.

If you’re in a metro area you’ll still have it.

Yeah, have to be in the service area of an Amazon warehouse. If you are, it's great.

I don't know - I lived <20 miles from an Amazon warehouse, but saw shipping suddenly become 7-day on Prime most of the time back in 2021. I'd already tried to disentangle myself from Amazon's ecosystem, but it was definitely the nail in the coffin for my Prime subscription.

Are you on the metro side, or the rural side?

I literally never experience this issue. Except for a couple of actually lost packages, my prime has had EVERY package come in 2 days or less except holidays. I live in a 250k town tho, so I am not sure if there is some level of size that plays into it. Perhaps I am the perfect size to have enough infrastructure to get reliable deliveries, but small enough that I don't have to worry about all that comes with a massive city.

Curious about where you live. How far are you from a major Amazon shipping hub? Here in the broader LA area, it is mostly all next day, and even same day shipping. It's all Amazon's in house delivery service too.

One of the biggest cities in the US.

The shipping ETA problem seems to be very hit-or-miss. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit sifting through pages of "prime" results trying to find something that can arrive sooner than 3-7 days out.

And then sometimes every search result shows same/next day--but you absolutely can't rely on it because the packages have a ~50% chance of "running late" and get assigned a new ETA of what the non-prime shipping would have been. For order after order.

We cancelled prime this year. I was surprised that shipping cost and timeframes haven’t changed. In fact, on many items it seems like it’s faster to not use prime.

We've had the same experience. Prime shipments were 5-7 days regardless of order size, now most items show up in 1-2 days.

Not sure the logic in that.

If you're getting FBA, it's just an optimization of throughput. If there's enough folks in your area with Prime, trucks are going around your neighborhood daily anyway, so it's better to send a full truck, even if it means things get there early, then to send a partially empty truck twice.

Are we in the game where an event happens randomly, and we’re trying to guess whether any of our actions, if not worshipping Bezos directly, might have an effect on delivery times?

There's a lot of existence that really feels like we just live in a hash code now. And its all malevolent for some reason. It feels like there's "supposed" to be something you did wrong, yet it's all malevolent hash randomness. Maybe all the focus on cryto money?

That, or we're being experimented on. "What will the mice do if we poke them this way? The ants really hate it when we shake them this way."

Amazon likely does not have separate Prime and Non-Prime lanes in their warehouses. It would be a redundancy and add additional complexity that would increase costs/reduce profits. Since customers never see the warehouse there really wouldn't be any benefit to doing this.

What’s dishonest is that they say the 2-day applies only after they ship the item, but they don’t count their “internal logistics” shipping in this time.

How do I know that? Amazin charges your card only when they actually pack and ship the item. But the tracking on UPS will not appear until 3-4 days later

Another annoying thing about Amazon is the subscribe and save. They see it as one way contract. Many times I have subscribed to a product only to get a notification when it’s fulfillment time that was saying that the product was out of stock and I should choose a replacement.

That’s not how it is supposed to work Amazon. I take up the obligation to buy a product monthly and you should take the obligation to make sure it’s available.

It ended up being death by a thousand cuts for me and Amazon. I barely use it anymore

It's very location dependent. Where I live most stuff beats the 2 day estimate and it's not unheard of to order something in the afternoon and have it at the front door when I get back from dinner.

Friends in other locations seem to have more of your experiences. I actually dread ordering from anyone but Amazon since the shipping is such a crapshoot for usually the same money.

What I dislike the most is how unreliable "Amazon Day Delivery" is.

Several times I've bought something that I don't need that week, so I chose Amazon Day delivery, which allows all of my packages get delivered during the same day the next week.

I expected those packages to arrive, e.g. buying something for a gathering I'm hosting that weekend, but they are often days late and don't arrive in time.

Amazon was great for a few years, but it looks like something happened. They still claim they are customer obsessed and "Day 1" thinkers, but anyone can see the delusion. I wonder if Jeff Bezos sees that Amazon has gotten worse; it seemed like he truly believed in the company until his departure a few years ago, but maybe it was always just about the money.

Hmm. My experience with prime shipping is exactly the opposite, but I think I must live near a distribution center.

In fact, just yesterday I ordered some vitamins for overnight delivery and they actually showed up in 3 hours, so sooner than promised.

That has happened on several occasions, and I can't recall every not getting something on time.

That's shipping.

But I do think Amazon has a serious problem with fake, incentivized reviews, and I have heard of, but not yet experienced (to my knowledge) counterfeit products.

I signed up for Prime when it was just shipping, and it was a great deal that made the platform sticky - I always looked there first. When they bundled in all the other Prime functionality and upped the price it left a very bad taste in the mouth.

And yet, here I am, years later, still with a Prime account. I really need to make more of an effort to get off Amazon.

Maybe after Christmas...

I suspect you live in an area of lower Amazon customer density? I regularly still buy and receive items sameb-day.

> Amazon advertise same or next day shipping

What's more is if you filter for "arrives tomorrow" you'll get a bunch of results, but there's no guarantee they will arrive tomorrow - you have to double and triple check at every step of the order flow.

Not ≈5 years. Three years and 9 months. Amazon's retail division was broken by Covid and will probably never fix itself.

I have no inside knowledge, but I suspect what happened is a bunch of crooks were hired during the massive hiring spree to keep up with Covid demand, and there wasn't capacity to investigate every fraud, theft, and scam. Internal fraud went from zero to prolific almost overnight. Prime also stopped being able to deliver in two days, and never recovered.

It's been three years, and it seems a permanent culture change at this point. The only CEOs I've seen recover a business from this sort of shitshow were Steve Jobs and Satya Nadella. Most businesses can't recover from this. I hope Amazon can, but realistically, I'm very sceptical.

On the upside, there's a huge opening for a competitor, if anyone wants to do a startup :)

I was despairing that those big internet companies were settled for 80 years, but I see that there might be movement.

However, it takes 25 years and unprecedented investment to build Amazon, warehouses, delivery schemes… Unless Amazon sells some of them with the automation, it’s extremely hard to enter the field.

I actually don't think so. A few points:

(1) We are in an era of massive investments, much more so than when Amazon started. The billion dollar plus fundraising round is increasingly common over time.

(2) An entrant does not need to operate the same as Amazon. The sharing economy provides a lot of alternative models. To give a fictitious example, connecting with existing rideshare vendors for delivery and a network of local stores for fulfilment could give a lot of the same product without the same investment. Ditto for existing logistics players like FedEx (who do a lot more than delivery).

(3) It's possible to start in different markets, and especially foreign markets. A company which could do this play easily might be something like Aliexpress which already has a leg in.

There are many more models possible too, but the point is that building Amazon today does not need to the same as building Amazon in the nineties. Even building the same Amazon would be cheaper today, since we can learn the lessons of the existing Amazon.

In Paris I get next day delivery on most items.

I live in rural new mexico. When we moved here 5 years ago, even the most available item shipped using Prime would take 3-5 days to arrive (and more typically 5). Over the last year, that has shifted to the point where some items arrive next day and nothing takes more than 2 days.

I would not generalize from my experience. I would suggest that you do not generalize from yours.

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