Title: Amazon 2-day shipping: why packages sometimes arrive later - Vox
Headings: Amazon created the expectation of 2-day shipping. Now it needs to scale back.
Amazon created the expectation of 2-day shipping. Now it needs to scale back.
Free two-day shipping attracts customers. It also costs Amazon a lot of money.
Prime customers pay for — and expect — quick, free shipping. They aren’t always happy about Amazon’s cost-cutting efforts.
Amazon changed customer expectations regarding shipping. Now it’s changing them again.
Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?
Next Up In The Goods

Content: In this sense, Prime was constructed to be great for the consumer (so efficient) and great for businesses (mindless impulse shopping!). … It doesn’t help that we’ve seen a slow dilution of Prime itself over time, with the rise of Prime Pantry and Add-on Items. They force you to buy a minimum number of items to get the best deal, adding back the very psychic burden Prime had eliminated from the equation of online shopping in the first place. Wilson’s complaints about Prime suggest a bait-and-switch strategy. Amazon got 100 million people to become Prime users by guaranteeing frictionless service, but now that it’s gotten a sizable chunk of the market hooked on quick, free shipping, it may be trying to cut delivery costs by scaling back on the very thing that got customers interested in the first place. Put another way, Prime is built on the idea that shopping should be frictionless; Amazon has now introduced a degree of friction that wasn’t there before, and some customers aren’t happy about it. This is not just around holidays. # AmazonPrime no longer means what we've been brainwashed to think it means. IMO all the other "benefits" stuffed into Prime are meant to distract customers as the core but expensive shipping promise is deliberately eroded https://t.co/4nM3HX40AI
— Evan Sirof (@esirof) December 19, 2018
“I can’t help but feel the frustration around how the false sense of shopping confidence is blown when Amazon simply uses the PRIME lockup as a gimmick,” one reader wrote in response to Wilson’s article. “