Draclvr: It seems Amazon does have it's own delivery people. See my link above. These delivery people are somewhat like Uber drivers. I can see that such delivery persons may not be as reliable as USPS or UPS and harder to get accurate tracking info. from them.

Yes, Ana. We too have the option to pick up at various locations. But much more convenient for me to have delivered with Amazon Prime. In addition, my husband loves that he can movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime without paying extra for them.

Draclvr - it is Amazon delivery service.

AND Amazon LLC when they do not ship the packages when they say they will and keep changing the delivery date even though I see the item showing "in stock". Two different CS reps told me the item was in process of being packed up, then one told me that they only had a limited quantity in stock and other orders were fulfilled, mine has to wait, no new delivery date available.

This may be just a one time problem as I never had that happen before but I still say they are starting to spread themselves thin, trying to be too many different things and starting to lose their way.

I have Prime but really don't use all/any of that stuff so I find it way over priced now. Keep telling myself not to renew, but then keep letting it auto renew.

Interesting... must depend on where you live for delivery options. Sounds to me like whoever they are contracting with to provide this Amazon deliver service is not doing a good job. Maybe they need to go back to UPS!

Interesting... must depend on where you live for delivery options. Sounds to me like whoever they are contracting with to provide this Amazon deliver service is not doing a good job. Maybe they need to go back to UPS!

Sorta, I thought we were the only ones who had different mail people everyday. Sometimes not till after 6PM. I also have had several things scanned as delivered that I never received. I have never had a problem with Amazon, only the Postal service. I'm a Prime member. We are getting a Huge Amazon warehouse built in Orlando. It will cover around 6 blocks.

Just let me loose in an Amazon warehouse for one night! Oh the stuff I would grab!!!

I was looking for a timer for my 15 year old dishwasher and couldn't find it anywhere but guess what, yes you are right, Amazon had it. The same thing happened when I was looking for a motor starting capacitor for my 15 year old air conditioner.

Geo, we needed a part for our kitchen sink. The manufacturer had it, but sent us to Amazon as they had it for a much better price and much faster delivery. I don't quite understand how, but......

Good to hear these opinions. Let me offer a European perspective. I owe it completely to Amazon that I've been able to find and buy so many great vintage games, books that are out of print, rare DVDs and CDs, which I could not get otherwise, and nearly always at very reasonable prices. Well, I'm exaggerating just a little bit here, because a reasonable number of them could have been ordered second-hand from eBay or the Dutch Marktplaats ('Marketplace'), but Amazon is far more institutionalized and offers far greater control and safety. Because I order from US Amazon, as well as its British, French and German branches, availability is nearly always guaranteed as well as an affordable price.

As far as the delivery of items is concerned, I've never experienced any trouble, apart from the fact that I won't order any expensive books from Amazon. The one time I did, it came in a very large cardboard box, directly from Amazon, completely unprotected by any bubble wrap, foam or crumpled cardboard, so its edges got damaged from the shaking and scraping inside. Never again!

There are two things that I find really annoying, the sometimes ridiculously high cost of packaging and shipping, and weird territorial restrictions. Often, when I order an item, sometimes even from neighbouring Germany, the product itself may just cost a few euros, but when I place my order, it turns out I have to pay twice as much or more for packaging and handling. It happened to me yesterday: a DVD would cost me just $ 2.50, but then shipping and handling added more than 13 dollars, so I cancelled the order. And for a DVD and CD from Germany, together just 16 euros retail price, but 30 euros in all including shipping costs.

Territorial restrictions are another, apparently increasing irritant around the world. Let's say 10 options are shown to me for ordering the item, but then it turns out none of these would ship to the Netherlands. As Amazon states for third party sellers: "Note: Buyers outside the U.S. cannot purchase software or computer games from Amazon sellers". Why on earth? I'm not talking about recent movies here which may get a later European release, or some 'classified' item. And, to be sure, none of this has to do with regional protection of DVDs. I rang up Customer Service about it, and in the end they had to admit that these restrictions were completely arbitrary.

I agree that, in general, there is a problem with deliveries. Because of the insane pressure of competition between online stores to deliver goods free of charge, they more and more rely on private, anonymous (unmarked) delivery vans, owned by the driver, who have to take the risk of investing in their own cars, and only get paid per ordered product, no longer per delivery. This means they try to get rid of their parcels as soon as they can, and illegally (!) offer it to your neighbours, dump it on the porch, throw it through an open window etc. The number of complaints indicates that this is on the increase. Anyway, this was something unheard of until about a decade ago.

In this sense, I hope neighbourhood stores will survive, I try to buy as much from them as I can, and God forbid future deliveries will be done by armies of drones trying to evade one another (or your trees or own heads) and dropping stuff in your garden. At that point, despite my satisfactory Amazon experiences, I will end my membership immediately!

As always, the underlying issue remains: are we willing to pay a reasonable price for personal service and care, or only go for the lowest offer, and leave it to underpaid workers, computers and robots?

Best,

Rich

Excellent comments, Rich! For me, since I live in the country and an hour away from any kind of serious shopping, Amazon has been wonderful. Out here, they use UPS and their service and delivery is flawless. I was able to order a dedicated tomato and vegetable press yesterday after doing extensive research and comparisons on-line. I could have never done this otherwise. I do not patronize big stores like Wal Mart, but at every chance I will patronize locally owned businesses.

While living in an apartment complex we did have issues with Amazon Logistics. They had a habit of leaving our boxes at the lobby door without ringing the bell, outside and were often stolen.

From what I understand, if you are near a distribution center, Amazon will utilize their logistical (tracking, stocking and delivery services) to deliver goods when it's cost effective for them. Now that we've moved to a more rural area, all of our deliveries are coming through UPS because we are much more distant from an Amazon distribution center.

Oldbroad, when you mentioned the cost of something tripling, I'm guessing that's because it's being sold by an Amazon partner, but being fulfilled by Amazon logistics. If it is a product being handled by Amazon and they tripled the price, I'd just look for another supplier. We go back and forth between Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart for most goods. Walmart is the same story though, they have "partners" as well with odd price point spreads for the same product. Supply and demand has a lot to do with it as well. When they get low on stock for a particular item or if the item has been discontinued it seems they occasionally engage an exponential upward curve for pricing as the inventory drops.

I actually dropped Prime for a year due to the aforementioned delivery issues and some pricing discrepancies. We're back on it again and so far, knock on wood, things have been running OK. Again though, it's because we aren't dealing with their logistics and delivery service here.

I hope things improve for you OldBroad.,.it can be "very frustrating" in this digital age when the item you get comes from ??? and not the store down the street. The years ahead are going to be very interesting for our kids and gkids

Dano

Well, in the end, I cancelled the order and paid a little extra to have it shipped from Canada as I got tired of the run around I was getting.

And RichAlexis, I also will cancel my membership if the drones start coming!

soot - I'm glad I won't be around when everything is digital only. At least I hope I won't be. I won't know how to survive.

In my youth, the biggest new invention was the 'electronic calculator' and 'transistor radios'. Amazing stuff. No cords, and oh the things they could do. My first, Casio, calculator did add, subtract, multiply and divide. Period. No percentage, no square roots. Just a simple, small, palm size gadget that made my algebra teacher angry.

Now it's so much stuff with digital, HD, Wi-Fi, phones that do everything and those new Ciri, Echo, thingies that talk back to you. Wild stuff, most of which I am resisting because I like living a simple life.

I remember when I was a teenager and my friend bought her sister (who was also my friend) some kind of digital phone book. I asked my friend why would she need that? Is she too lazy to use a regular phone book?

Boy, I must admit, I wish I had took a look at it and been more interested in it and learned early on about this stuff!

My ex hubby had one of those phone book thingies. He let the battery die and LOST all the programming. Ha. So much for the new and improved gadgets. I laughed a lot. Now things are so much better. Never ending improvement on electronics. I'm resisting except for my very simple computer.