In the end, it probably took 3-4 weeks to get my money back for a $5k 1-day delivery package that wasn't ever delivered. I would have gone the bank route next, but since Amazon did eventually give me my money back, it wasn't needed.

I'm sure the shipper was who lost/stole the package. But my point is that you can't take your great support experience with Amazon buying $50 sheets and expect that you get the same experience when they lose something expensive. For expensive or specialist items, you can often get the item faster and cheaper going to a different retailer despite how all your experience buying cheap stuff on Amazon tells you otherwise.

As I've moved more of my shopping away from Amazon I've noticed that lots and lots of online retailers are now competitive on the logistics side. Fast shipping is now table stakes.

I'll go one further and say that some are actually quicker than Amazon. I've recently bought two different items from bestbuy.com that I would have normally bought from Amazon when prime shipping actually took two days.

In both cases bestbuy's free shipping could get the items to my house 1 day quicker than amazon so I went with them.

Amazon is also I think still trying to push prime on people. It used to be that stuff arrived basically overnight for me when I bought early enough the day before. When they started prime we suddenly started waiting for our regular free shipping packages. And you can't tell me it's because of volumes and they had to introduce prime. This literally started overnight when prime was introduced, not slowly getting worse until you could pay for priority.

They basically just have the order sit around, sometimes with the tracking number already created and in the system but it takes 3 or 4 days before the shipment actually leaves their facilities. They basically have an incentive not to be fast now unlike when they started out and the fast an free shipping was one of their great selling points over other online retailers.

Best Buy, in some cases, fulfills using Geek Squad folks delivering locally. Was very cool to order two SSDs in the morning and have them show up a few hours later.

Unfortunately many have also opened the doors to so-called third party marketplace sellers. It's making the experience of looking for items online worse. Some label this poorly, some offer no easy way to filter to only items sold by the actual company.