Amazon Prime shipping transit times have been rock solid for me throughout. There was a period when their estimated delivery dates were pushed way out, but the actual delivery was never late.
Re:Amazon Review Scam
by ineedasername on Monday November 09, 2020 @05:49PM
(#25040920)
The delivery issues may be regional, or maybe it's just certain product categories. Where I live, Prime shipping from March-May was about a week to 10 days, but now it's back up to 1-2 days for almost everything. I'm in the North East though where there's a warehouse about 15 miles away, and at least half a dozen major national shipping hubs within ~100 miles.
Same in terms of delivery. It was bad for awhile, but got better a few months back. I'm in the southwest; local warehouse is about 30-40 miles out but not everything is in the local warehouse so I often get stuff from other states' warehouses. Still getting the 2-3 day thing in general for those, 1-2 if local.
So for me at least Amazon has finally exited default territory, because it doesn't even have the "well it's more risky, but it's fast and reliable" rush argument anymore. Of course I don't expect the general population to move instantly, and it's not like I've dumped them entirely either. There are even some manufacturers I like who use them for fulfillment pretty exclusively (at least for small orders). But I do wonder in cases like this whether we'll see a non-linear curve: everything seems to be going swell for a business, right until some tipping point is reached and suddenly things go backwards fairly quickly. And that can be hard to recover from. Of course Amazon does have some moats overall, I don't expect them as a going concern to have any real trouble particularly on the service side, AWS and all that. But the moats actually seem weakest for Amazon-as-a-B2C-market, there isn't really anything inherently sticky there beyond habit.