Logistics and operations is the kind of job where no one cares whether you exist when you’re doing well, but everyone’s beating down your door when something breaks.

It's worse. Everyone thinks your lazy when everything is running smoothly.

No. They don’t. Amazon Prime’s pioneering free two-day shipping was noticed. The same day shipping was noticed. I often hear about Amazon’s speed as a factor for why people use them. In fact, among my friends people remark that Amazon can often deliver to our homes faster than Best Buy can deliver to their stores for us to pick up.

It’s just that smoothly is table stakes. Amazon raised the bar so now you have to do it smoothly blazing fast.

> It’s just that smoothly is table stakes. Amazon raised the bar so now you have to do it smoothly blazing fast.

Amazon raised the bar. And then they completely failed to meet their own new higher bar.

Amazon will no longer allow you to select the speed of your shipping. Amazon will offer you shipping at whatever speed they feel is appropriate, and if you want faster shipping than that, you can suck it. This is a huge downgrade from the system Prime started out with.

And when Amazon fails to meet the shipping deadline they quoted you, again, you can suck it. This is not infrequent. This despite the fact that the deadline is something they made up.

Between this and Amazon's giving up on offering lower prices than other stores, I tend to prefer ordering from other stores.

Re:Prime-- Yes! I can understand if not everything can be practically or profitably delivered in two days, or next day. But I used to at least have the option to pay more and get it when I needed it.

What I think the parent meant is that oddly, if you mention to random folks at a bar or in line at the grocery store that you work in logistics they run away instead of them and everyone else in earshot mobbing you for an autograph. As compared to being a rock star, movie producer/actor/actress, etc.

Not in real life. Usually, in most orgs, career oriented people in ops pick the sexy, easy to sell aspects. At best, they delegate the non-sexy basics to capable people. Usually those aspects are just ignored so, because someone will sort this easy stuff out.

The notable exception here is, and that is a common theme, Amazon. Amazon realized how important ops and logistics and SCM are for their success. So they put them at their core (let's ignore AWS for now, I assume the AWS guys put ops at the center of stuff as well so). And it shows. Not everything was rosy at Amazon for sure, as relentless as Amazon is with operations it is with politics. And still, for an ops guy like myself it was the best place I ever worked at.