Amazon offered overnight or 2-day shipping, and it turns out that customers apparently love it. I suppose we can quibble over who "creates" the expectation, but note that other things Amazon have offered or tested did not lead to intense customer demand.

Amazon offered 2-day shipping, then changed their free shipping from 5-days to 8-days, deliberately changing a luxury to a necessity so they could up-sell it to more people.

I know I was perfectly happy when packages that I ordered on the weekend arrived in time for the next weekend most of the time, and never paid for expedited shipping. It was only when most of those packages started taking more than a week to arrive that I finally signed up for Prime.

And that expectation is a key reason why many people use Amazon more often nowadays, in situations where they'd previously have gone to a retail store.

Yes Amazon has upped the game and everyone has to match them. You seem to think it's a bad thing?

The bad thing is their market position and ability to negotiate rates makes it much harder for independent business operators who must charge more for shipping or else lose money. The situation isn’t sustainable. Eventually, unless something drastic happens, we’ll be faced with asking whether they should be permitted to provide their own delivery services or not due to concerns about competition.

Ah I see - they’re too good and should be hobbled so people who aren’t as good can keep up. Consumer looses out.

Not really. There are two outcomes that are more likely to happen than others, both of which are terrible for consumers.

In one scenario, Amazon utterly destroys the ability of others to sustain their business, and then raises their own prices dramatically: a fairly typical monopoly scenario.

In another there are two tiers: Amazon and everyone else, which is only marginally better.

In both cases competition is reduced and the consumer suffers.

> then raises their own prices dramatically

When has that happened? How many times? And how much did it offset the previous period of low prices for consumers?

Instead of criticising Amazon for being able to achieve next-day delivery why don't you criticise FedEx for not being able to achieve it? We want to select out badly run inefficient businesses, not support them artificially. If there's a monopoly developing it's because everyone else is incompetent. Tackle them!

I think they created the expectation of vertical integration too. “Amazon does it better and quicker”, a retail customer might think, as they peruse possible cloud providers.

Amazon is an incredibly sticky brand because they created expectations that you almost have to be vertically integrated (or at least one of the largest customers of the post office, the electric company, the computer hardware company, the software vendor, etc) to fulfill.

True, but UPS/USPS/Fedex all helped to enable that expectation. It pains me (almost physically) to give the benefit of the doubt to Amazon, but if the carriers couldn't reasonably fulfill the 2-day delivery expectation the way Amazon wanted, they wouldn't have attempted it, and the expectation wouldn't be set.