The making of Amazon Prime, the internet's most devastating membership program

Re:The making of Amazon Prime, the internet's most devastati... by save_ferris on Friday May 03, 2019 @11:30AM (#19819280)

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.

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Re:The making of Amazon Prime, the internet's most devastati... by mikeash on Friday May 03, 2019 @12:33PM (#19819841)

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.

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Re:The making of Amazon Prime, the internet's most devastati... by daveFNbuck on Friday May 03, 2019 @11:49AM (#19819463)

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

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Re:The making of Amazon Prime, the internet's most devastati... by praneshp on Friday May 03, 2019 @12:29PM (#19819802)

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

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Re:The making of Amazon Prime, the internet's most devastati... by daveFNbuck on Friday May 03, 2019 @01:22PM (#19820293)

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

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