Some Amazon Prime Deliveries May Take a Month As Demand Surges (arstechnica.com) 47
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.
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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My son has a birthday in 3 weeks. I ordered a present and some party supplies (stores like that are currently closed here), its going to take over a month to get the things I ordered. Essential no, not to me. My 5 year old son is going to be pretty unhappy when we postpone his birthday.
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Re: Stupid shit (Score:1)
Prime loto with an biding scale (Score:1)
Prime loto with an biding scale the higher you bit the better the chance of getting it faster.
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Its not really about being selfish, I was pointing out legitimate reasons to buy non-essential things right now. And I feel like I'm planning ahead, I didn't expect two-day shipping. We are into week two of the kids being inside, they miss their friends. We'd have to postpone a party whether the Amazon goods arrive or not.
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Maybe I should slap my son across the face just to make sure he feels the sting of a situation he doesn't really understand and can't control. I'll be sure to tell him that he is a spoiled and selfish asshole while I'm at it. Thanks for the tip, you must be parent of the year.
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So perhaps you should look at your situation a little bit differently and stop sounding so entitled?
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Shame on me for trying to comfort my son while he is on lock-down and missing out on regularly scheduled events.
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Don't sweat it. He'll forget about the disappointment quickly, especially if you don't build it up.
Odds are, he'll remember this as a weird time, if at all, whereas he wouldn't remember it at all if nothing odd had happened.
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Suddenly switching to home school for weeks/months is going to be memorable, even if he doesn't remember a lot of detail. He will get over it. I'd said he'd be unhappy, nothing crazy. We've been talking about having a small party and what to do for the last couple weeks and now have to hit the brakes for a bit, anyone would be disappointed. I'll be happy if we all stay healthy.
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My 5 year old son is going to be pretty unhappy when we postpone his birthday.
Frankly, the odds are pretty good you're going to be required to do that anyway.
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No problem (Score:2)
There's gonna be someone who can deliver faster, take your time.
May not take as long as you think (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Yep - I've had things show up on my doorstep two days ahead of schedule this past week.
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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?
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Refunds? (Score:4, Insightful)
Amazon's swimming in money, so why not offer partial refunds of the Prime fee for the delays?
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Credit for non-Prime Delivery w/Prime (Score:2)
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
Re: Take your time (Score:2)
All Amazon empolyees (Score:2)
will now be sent home at 39.5 hours...
But essential items get delivered faster! (Score:2)
So I guess it works.
Your money is not going to better US economy (Score:2)
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You support Amazon, you are hurting you and your fellow citizens in the long run.
Riiiiiiiigggghtttt.....
Great, virtual shelves are wiped out now, too. (Score:2)
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
Re: Great, virtual shelves are wiped out now, too. (Score:1)
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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.
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Re: Great, virtual shelves are wiped out now, too. (Score:2)
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
Can confirm (Score:2)
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.
Amazon workers testing positive inside warehouses (Score:1)
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.
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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.
That just sounds like my amazon prime to me... (Score:1)
I can't recall once in recent times they've delivered in a day anyway...