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Some Amazon Prime Deliveries May Take a Month As Demand Surges (arstechnica.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the cause-and-effect dept.
As the coronavirus has forced millions of families into lockdown, demand for Amazon's delivery service has surged. To help the company deal with rising demand, Amazon has prioritized several categories of essential items, including baby products, health items, and pet supplies. The results of that policy can now be seen on Amazon's website: numerous items now take weeks to ship. That's true even if you're a subscriber to Amazon Prime, which is supposed to provide two-day shipping. Ars Technica reports: An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Recode that these delivery dates weren't a technology glitch -- Amazon has chosen to de-prioritize these items in the face of surging demand for more time-sensitive items. "To serve our customers in need while also helping to ensure the safety of our associates, we've changed our logistics, transportation, supply chain, purchasing, and third-party seller processes to prioritize stocking and delivering items that are a higher priority for our customers," an Amazon spokesperson wrote.

At the same time, Amazon is taking steps to increase its shipping capacity. As we reported last week, the online retailer announced that it was seeking to hire 100,000 additional workers to help cope with rising demand and was raising its minimum pay from $15 to $17 per hour. On Saturday, Amazon announced it was boosting overtime pay for hourly workers. Through May 9, workers will get double their usual pay when they work more than 40 hours, up from the 1.5 times the company usually pays for overtime hours.
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Some Amazon Prime Deliveries May Take a Month As Demand Surges More

Some Amazon Prime Deliveries May Take a Month As Demand Surges

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  • There's gonna be someone who can deliver faster, take your time.

  • May not take as long as you think (Score:4, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday March 23, 2020 @07:41PM (#59864678)

    So I've had some recent orders from Amazon for things that are not crucial, for various household items.

    I noticed that prime shipping said it would take 4-6 days for all of the items I ordered - but some of them came in one day, some of them just two days and the last of them three days.

    So if the long time is making you doubt ordering you may want to try anyway, items may come much sooner than the estimate.

    The one item that seemed to be taking much longer was a pre-ordered Doom Eternal - that wasn't even going out before the original delivery date, so I ended up cancelling that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cirby ( 2599 )

      Yep - I've had things show up on my doorstep two days ahead of schedule this past week.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by daviee ( 137644 )

        Same here. It's not as quick as before but it's not one month delay (other than those better than nothing masks "n95 equivalent" masks from China).

        One thing though - how are the actual essential items shipping? I've been looking at TP, hand soap refills, flour, kids' tylenol for a while. They don't even have stock so I'm not exactly sure what is being optimized.

        Perhaps because they don't have much essential items available that can be shipped, thus the non-essentials are getting shipped faster?

        • I ordered a chair since I'm working from home and need something that doesn't make my legs fall asleep after fifteen minutes. That's currently delayed a month. It probably doesn't seem essential to them, but it's pretty essential to my butt and legs. Keeping my fingers and toes crossed it doesn't actually take that long.

  • Refunds? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 ) on Monday March 23, 2020 @08:06PM (#59864746)

    Amazon's swimming in money, so why not offer partial refunds of the Prime fee for the delays?

    • Because that wouldn't pay itself back in retention, or new Prime customers.
    • Why make it so complicated? Just cancel your monthly Prime fee. LOL, or did you get suckered into paying annual and canceling would mean no pro-rate?

    • That's along the lines of what I was thinking about. It's not that they are "prioritizing, exactly, "essential"[?sic?] items, but trying to draw attention away from the fact that they don't have enough employees to meed the increased demand of home-bound people wanting delivery for all sorts of things.

      This is underscored by amazon rushing to hire millions more to work in their delivery chain. While they are ramping up, will they be able to do so with many government orders to shelter-in-place.

      It seems one

  • will now be sent home at 39.5 hours...

  • Last week on Saturday I ordered an SSD hard drive and HTC Vive VR headset with 2-day delivery. I also ordered some anti-fungal creme for a small athlete foot infection. This was initially scheduled for delivery on March 31. As a a result, the creme got delivered today and the VR headset got pushed to the next Monday.

    So I guess it works.
  • https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com] --- Watch where you spend your money. Do not empower those who are not aligned with your best interests. You support Amazon, you are hurting you and your fellow citizens in the long run.

  • Up until today, Amazon was the one stable, reassuring security blanket we had left. Now online shelves are getting wiped out in desperation to beat the shortages, too.

    I wish Amazon at *least* had the decency to let us filter out anything more than {n} days away from results, so we could find the few needles in Amazon's haystack that are still available before the end of next fucking MONTH. Amazon is now officially useless for almost everything. Even if they actually HAVE something you need, you'll never fin

    • Nah, you are wrong. Amazon will stick around, stronger than ever.

    • Things don't really take a month to get delivered, they are just setting expectations so that you are happy when it only takes a week. It Could take a month though, you can certainly cancel your order if you find it in your stores or elsewhere. Things are getting delivered as fast as possible.

    • "I wish Amazon at *least* had the decency" You phrase this as if Amazon was somehow maliciously keeping this information to itself. They've worked for years to make sure shipping time wasn't an issue, so I would be very surprised if shipping estimates for items are even part of their database. They probably calculate estimates for a specific item only when you order it. I doubt they have ever written the code that would compute that on-the-fly calculation for every item that they show to you. Even if they p

      • If you have Prime, the search results vaguely distinguish between "soon" and "useless"... things available within a day or few show the "Prime" logo. Things with April 21+ dates just say "free shippinging"

        My argument is that they should give us an option to just omit those long-time items entirely from the item pages. I'm not going to order anything from them that I can't get within a few days anyway, and forcing me to slog through hundreds of pointless pages just to find the few items left with quick deliv

  • Any computer components and related tech won't arrive until at least April 21. If you ever imagined a world where there was no retail, and everything came from Amazon, well, this is it and it isn't good.

  • Meanwhile Amazon workers are testing positive for Covid19 inside their warehouses and shipping centers.
    The virus can last for many hours on cardboard if not a day.

    Wonder how many cases will spread like this.

    • The virus can last for many hours on cardboard if not a day.

      Wonder how many cases will spread like this.

      1) Under ideal conditions. Which are likely not present in their facility or on its transport to your home.
      2) If you're not already wiping down every single thing you buy and washing your hands afterwards, then your lack of diligence is the problem. Not amazon.

  • I can't recall once in recent times they've delivered in a day anyway...

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