What shocked me was that after I let my Prime membership expire and ordered something to be shipped, I got the usual 7-10 business day ETA on my package.

The package came the next day, and no extra cost to me. I've made two other orders since then, and they both arrived next day despite the order confirmation telling me 7-10 days.

I'm sure that there's some shipping infrastructure slack that allows them to do this, but I find it super strange now that I get prompted to pay an extra $10 for next-day shipping only to get it anyway.

I’ve never had Prime and often get fast service anyway like you describe. It’s not totally consistent, though. I assume their logistics are so good that they can usually fulfill an order quickly at no extra cost because they have it in a nearby warehouse, but sometimes you hit cases where the closest item is still on the other side of the country. In that case, Prime would get you fast shipping and the free, slow shipping won’t.

Meanwhile, I pay for prime and experience extremely unreliable shipping.

If you don't normalize for where you live I think it's an apples to oranges comparison.

That's pretty much our points. Shipping speed is mostly about factors other than Prime membership.

We already get 2 hour delivery in London with Amazon Prime Now

Yes, lots of countries have long had next-day and same-day delivery, next-day is just new to the US.

Prime Now has been around for quite some time in quite a few locales in the US. (est. 2014)

And one day delivery nationally with Prime.

Is that a new announcement? If I order before (I think) 8pm I'll almost definitely get the order next day. In the UK if that helps any, Midlands

New for the entire US (some areas/cities already had it). Not sure about this article, but another article about the announcement that I read mentions that the UK has already had free one day delivery for a while.

Ah gotcha. Yeah it'd make sense that the US has had a harder time rolling it out, being that the entirety of the UK can fit into many of the states!

I'm not used to us getting things before the US I guess :)

In the UK I find that most stuff can be ordered as late as 11pm for guaranteed next day delivery. Some cities get the same day delivery too(without using Prime Now).

I think they're extending that. The one day service has been available in some areas already depending on proximity to their distribution centers.

> Rather timely also since Amazon announced this week that it’s working on one day deliveries for Prime customers.

> And those in the know will tell you that same-day (even 2-4 hours!) deliveries are on the roadmap for Prime customers in major metro areas.

In Seattle we already have next day and same day shipping for a lot of merchandise. It drastically reduces the amount of time I spend in physical retailers.

> Not sure if you actually read this article.

Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html