But even their shipping (with Prime too!) is getting slower and slower. Prime's selling point used to be free 2 day shipping. Shipping is still "free" but many items take 4 days (or more now).
You’re assuming that the product you ordered is at that warehouse. It probably isn’t. They can’t store all products at all locations. Even if that distribution center ends up being the shipment origination site, the product still probably had to move within the Amazon network. Some of those things will move within the Amazon network, some with external (trackable) carriers (UPS/FedEx). And some things has restrictions on the method of transport. If there is a lithium battery anywhere in the device, it travels by ground.
Also — if you’re in the US, today is a holiday and nothing will move. So today and yesterday had/has limited movement between distribution centers. And as we get closer to Christmas, the entire network will start to approach saturation.
There are many reasons why things don’t always ship as fast as you’d like them to.
Speaking of assumptions lets review yours for a moment.
1) I am not assuming the products are from different warehouses. I know this for a fact. Look at my other post and i stated one item is being shipped from a warehouse ~120 KM away. I will guess the rest is from the local warehouse? Once amazon updates the shipping details (probably friday AM) it will show me where it came from..
2) I'm in Canada and it is not a holiday here so it is unclear why "today and yesterday had/has limited movement between distribution centers."
3) Amazon Canada rarely uses other carriers anymore. I cant tell you when the last time anyone i know received something that didnt use their own in-house shipping service so you cant really blame "UPS/Fedex"
A few months ago I ordered a dongle from Amazon to attach a floppy drive to a modern computer via USB. For some reason this weird, niche little thing was eligible for Amazon Essentials same day delivery. Apparently every Amazon warehouse has a dusty box of these things in the corner that they're still trying to unload?
The issue isnt just stock levels, it is stock levels at a specific distribution hub.
As i posted i ordered a few items on tuesday and delivery will be friday.
One of the items tracking details shows me that it is being shipped from a city ~ 120KM away yet there is a massive 1,000,000 square foot hub within waking distance from me??
Tracking hasn't updated to show me where the rest of the stuff is being shipped from so i can speak to the entire order.
This gets to the CORE issue with amazon. Because i no longer have prime my stuff is almost intentionally held back to encourage me to get prime?
It will not surprise me at all to see that when shipping is finally updated the other items on my list come from the local hub.
Not all hubs hold all items and because of this your shipping times can fluctuate.
Anecdotal, but I haven't noticed this in the UK. Pretty much everything I order from Amazon still arrives within 24 hours, and I live in the countryside (albeit in the southeast so still not far from London.)
OTOH I still notice the problem that other people have mentioned - that practically everything on Amazon these days is the same repackaged Chinese dropshipped garbage. Which is one reason I shop on Amazon far less than I used to.
I've never managed to connect with America tales of the length of shipping. Almost (99%) everything I order from amazon arrives when it says, most of which is next day. I live in the country, but like most UK citizens fairly close to a major trunk road (10 miles or so).
Of course I'm sure things are different if you live on Mull or Fair Isle, but for the vast majority of us it seems reliable
The quality of what you get from amazon is of course somewhat different.
I live in the Seattle area, so Amazon shipping is pretty fast and accurate, but there have been a few times when things were shipped but they apparently just disappeared in transit. One time it was a car part and it got close enough that it was on a truck from the city 20 miles north of here, then it just dropped off the radar and they refunded my money.
Then every once in a while you get something that takes a month to deliver, comes in a package covered with customs stamps, and is roughly the size and shape of what was ordered but wrong. I ordered a titanium tube one time - think the dimensions of a reusable drinking straw - and after a month got a solid titanium rod. "Mail it back and we'll give you a refund." There's a bit of unfair asymmetry there, friend, since you're mailing stuff to the US all day and I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to send something to China, and I'm guessing it's going to cost far more than the thing I'm returning.
But I'm an addict and I don't see myself cancelling Prime any time soon.
The difference between the US and the UK is size and the sheer remoteness of some places, even small cities. Unless you've been there, it's hard to grasp.
I've driven around large parts of the western US and there's a LOT of empty space. I don't know how many shipping centers Amazon has in the UK, but I am about 99.999% sure that there's areas of the US larger than all of the British Isle that are served by a single warehouse and shipping center.
So the variability in the US is going to be very high. Some places that happen to be near a shipping center, or two, will have consistent on-time delivery. Other places that are distant from one, and may have a high mountain pass that's dicey in winter or closed because of wildfires in the summer between them and that single center, are going to have problems.
I took a week off work once and walked from one side of England to the other, it was awesome. That would get me almost to the neighboring city where I’m from in the western US.
There's a high degree of bias in who we hear from too, I think. Most European countries have a grand total of zero Amazon depots, so there are plenty of European countries where the delivery is not fast either, but I rarely see people from those countries talking about it for whatever reason. I'm guessing in large part because those countries also does not have a local Amazon site, so it feels less surprising because if you order from Amazon you're unambiguously ordering from abroad, with different expectations.
Sure, but given that the majority of people in America, especially the ones I see complaining about amazon, are going to be living within an hour or so of a major city -- San Francisco, Seatle, Austin, New York, LA, I'm not sure how the difficulties of delivering to Hyder, AK or Las Vegas, NM factor in.
I think what many people outside North America fail to grasp is the size of north America.
To give you an idea:
I live just outside Toronto (Ontario, Canada) and if i want to drive east to the next province (Quebec) it will take me 4 hours to cover the 450 KM. If i want to go to the next province to the west (Manitoba) It will take me 20 hours to cover the 2,000 KM. So to cut across Ontario you are looking at something like 2,450 KM
This is just my province of Ontario. The other provinces are not as large, but the country is vast when looking at Europe.
Using google maps, i can drive from the south (footbridge) to the north (ChargePlace,Scotland) and this ~ 1,200 KM?
In the case of my very simple order, one item is being shipped from 120KM away?
How often do you order something simple and one of the distribution hubs is 120KM away from you? There is a massive 1 million square foot hub a few blocks away but i guess it isnt big enough to hold what i wanted?
25 years ago, I lived in a city of Rijeka. You could start from Croatia; enter & drive through entire country of Slovenia; enter into Italy and go shopping into Trieste, two countries over - in 75km.
Now I'm in the Greater Toronto Area, and my best friend lives about the same distance, officially in the same city or metro.
There's just over two thousand kilometers between the capitals of two neighbouring provinces in Canada (Winnipeg & Toronto). Or you could go through dozen countries, with all of their states and provinces in Europe for same distance (e.g. Geneva to Istanbul or similar).
Distances are vastly different and people's attitude toward them as well - what is daily commute in GTA used to be a yearly vacation pilgrimage in my childhood :)
> what is daily commute in GTA used to be a yearly vacation pilgrimage in my childhood :)
This is something Europeans also overlook.
I use to commute to Toronto every day. 100KM return trip daily, 500KM a week...
I think Most Europeans would be surprised to know we have a train system which basically travels back and forth from Hamilton to Oshawa all day long.. 127KM one way. Basically the Width of England at the more narrow part and yet we consider this a "greater Toronto area" train system.
People in Toronto dont think about how there are countries which would fit in this distance, Europeans dont think about how a daily passenger train service would cross the country dozens and dozens of times each day.
100km return, or 30 miles each way, that's not far at all. I used to drive 50 miles/80km each way into London 4 days a week when I worked in an office. My wife still does a 100km return trip to work. I have colleagues that commute 7 days in 14 on a 250km round trip into West London.
Your 127km one way train is about the same as the new Reading-Shenfield Cross London service which runs 6 times an hour 18 hours a day (well will do from next year), and less than the 160km Bedford-Brighton Thameslink service. It's pretty much the "Greater London Area", although that term is of course steeped in politics. The Paris RER D line is 190km and runs 466 trains a day, and is a "greater Paris area" train system
The Greater Toronto Area has broadly the same population as the Frankfurt Rhine-Main area, but is only half the area.
The "Slovenia is only 75km wide" claim is meaningless. Greenwich, CT to Oakland NJ is 75km and crosses the entire state of New York, a state with 10 times the population of Slovenia.
Indeed talking about New Jersey and Slovenia, they're a similar size, but NJ has about 5 times the population of Slovenia.
If something works for Slovenia, why doesn't it work for New Jersey?
So why is Toronto so small compared with Europe?
It's not a Geography problem, the challenges of serving the tiny number of people that like in rural North Dakota are a cruch to hide America's other infrastructure failings.
> "Greater London Area", although that term is of course steeped in politics.
Is it? What's politicised about this term? "Greater London" and "Greater London area" have pretty clear definitions; I'm not aware of anything that's controversial about it.
Greater London has a clear area defined [0], but the boundaries themselves were politically set. Look at say Surbiton, you contiguous sets of houses, some in Greater London, some not in Greater London (Say Beechwood Close). In fact I think this [1] house the Greater London boundary runs down the party wall between the two sides of the same semi. Jay Forman has a 9 minute video on the subject [2]
The contiguous Greater London Built Up Area [3] extends well beyond the boundary of Greater London (Bracknell, Gravesend, Harlow), yet doesn't include parts of Greater London (New Addington for example)
The London Commuter Belt is somewhat woolly [4], but certainly includes places like Slough and Maidenhead, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, Harlow and Southend.
Significant numbers of people additionally commute on high frequency (4tph or more) trains from places like Oxford, Milton Keynes, Basingstoke, Ashford into Zone 1 45 minutes or less.
It's just the distances involved. Amazon UK can get everything from any warehouse in the UK to your local depot for last mile delivery overnight, if not faster.
In the US unless you air freight ($$$) it you cannot rely on getting stock from warehouse A (say in NY) to warehouse K (say near LA) overnight. This then means you have to keep a lot more "duplicate" inventory sitting around various places as you cannot just in time move it, which is also extremely expensive.
I imagine the reports of shipping delays in the US are caused by Amazon intentionally trying to reduce the amount of inventory on hand and/or using less air freight.
This is also happening in Europe now on an EU scale. Often something takes a couple days because it goes from Germany to Spain or something. They don't say that's the reason but you can tell from the stickers on the products. I guess they don't do this anymore for the UK though because of all the customs hassles since Brexit.
I've not noticed a major difference in the UK from before Brexit. Some products would come from elsewhere in Europe but most would be local then too. London alone has several Amazon depots, so lots of things are same day delivery here.
Maybe it's down to competition - for lots of products I'd go elsewhere if they didn't offer at least next day delivery.
>even their shipping (with Prime too!) is getting slower
Not only that. Try searching while in Incognito Mode and you'll see the same products, sold by Amazon.com, without Prime, for a few bucks cheaper than when you're logged in and seeing them with "free" Prime shipping.
Thanks for validating my assumption, I encountered this twice and thought I was taking crazy pills. I don't even shop on Amazon much, like once or twice a year...
This is heavily dependent on location. I receive almost everything in two days or less. It is extremely common to get things the next day or even the same day. I'm in the Chicago suburbs.
Where I live (a summerhouse in a small county seat in mountains) - Walmart, Bestbuy, Homedepot and others ship faster and usually for free even for small orders.
Walmart also provides all-paper packaging (they seem to have worked hard on developing it) - so you can burn / recycle packaging without say peeling off stuck plastic tape first.
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