Since it hasn't been mentioned let's just put it on the table here that Amazon Prime, a service with a fairly steep annual fee, supposedly came with a promise of two-day shipping, in exchange for that fee.
Now if there was some fine print I didn't read, shame on me, but has Amazon explicitly addressed this?
I do understand that the physical items themselves are in short supply and cannot be instantly produced by any kind of magic. (Although as an aside, and it's really not my main point, but I do think Amazon has the buying power to incentivize many suppliers to move mountains).
Just like the physical items, the money to pay the fee for Prime memberships can also correspondingly go into short supply as well, and individual members may have good reasons to stop paying if they aren't getting what they paid for.
Certainly facts on the ground have changed the deal. Maybe we Prime members will just be in the front of the line for frequently hoarded items... sigh. Will be interesting to see how Prime fares through this.
I think any given service on this earth is expected to have some degree of delay during a once a century global pandemic. People out there can't even buy basic life necessities in stores. It may be a little unfair, but it's not really the time to think a $120/year membership means someone should be put at the front of the line to order whatever they want and constantly push others trying to get their necessities to the back of the line. It's better to hope everybody is getting their hand sanitizer and toilet paper at an equally expedient time, instead of hoping Prime members and Prime members alone can order a new package daily and have it arrive in a timely fashion.
Yellowstone could potentially blow during our lifetime as well. I doubt most companies have that factored into their contracts, and I wouldn't hold it against them if they didn't.
Business don't need to survive Black swan events. If they fail that's fine. If they can't fail without irreparable harm, there's a bigger problem. We don't have anything resembling a free market when there are irreplaceable businesses.
Absolutely, we agree and I thought I had covered the impossibility of the logistics in my comment. However what I was wondering about is whether Amazon will keep collecting the fee. Just as a reminder, they are pretty wealthy as a corporation, and the fee is collected in exchange for something that they understandably cannot provide.
If the item you're ordering is out of stock or unavailable to ship immediately, the shipping method time starts when the item ships. For example, it will take two business days after an item ships to reach you with Two-Day Shipping.
Amazon could easily make the case that even though the item you ordered was "in stock," it was still unavailable to ship immediately due to warehouse backlog or other operational reasons.
I am curious about this too. Even before covid outbreak I occasinally had packages that took more than 2 days to be delivered. With the current situation, of course I understand it is going to take longer to deliver packages. So I do not make a fuss about these things nor did I for three instead of two day deliveries in the past. However I still think Amazon is responsible for not honoring their part of Prime membership contract. I am not in any way demanding priviledged service during these times because I paid an annual membership fee. Still I expect Amazon to partially refund membership fees to Prime members.
This is clear as day to me. For whatever reason they fail to provide the service they take my money for. People tend to think of you as an entitled person when you say this. It is not like I am mad at them for delivering my Nintendo game in three days instead of two. No. It is just that they asked for extra money for delivering that game to me in two days. I gave them what they asked for. In the end, they did not perform the action that they asked the money for. So they have to give that money back.
I get the generally sympathetetic comments about businesses struggling in these hard times. I believe you guys that want to help businesses and our economy get through hard times are good people. Just forgive me for not feeling sad for a company that is making huge profits anyway but still trying to keep one or two dollars here and there that they did not really earn.
>>Since it hasn't been mentioned let's just put it on the table here that Amazon Prime, a service with a fairly steep annual fee, supposedly came with a promise of two-day shipping, in exchange for that fee.
You really got them. You should request a refund and call it a day if you can't wait for non-essentials. The entire world is either on lock-down or it will be and someone is trying to get cute. No company can scale that quickly, given the amount they move and risks employees take (one virus case and the entire warehouse shuts down).
CoronaVirus will hit US like a ton of bricks in 7-14 days, then page 44 of Amazon Terms & Conditions will seem like a joke.
The support agents are given freedom to extend your Prime membership a few times (up to 6 maybe?) by 1 month. After that they can just tell you you're free to cancel your subscription so it's hard to really abuse.
That support button to talk to a person over the phone was really hard to find at some point though. Didn't need it in years but when I did I think I had to dig for an hour or two until I found it.
The last time a package was delayed, I couldn't even find the button to complain. I looked for a few minutes and then just canceled Prime instead.
There was about a 50% success rate and since their other services are garbage, too, I don't see why paying a yearly fee is worth it. The Amazon Prime Video apps have a 100-300ms audio delay on all my platforms (Android, TV, Chromecast). Unacceptable.
Well it's probably in their interest to make the pathway to complaining difficult. Their return and refund policies are very generous, in my experience. With little to no effort I was able to get full refund on three separate missing/stolen packages no questions asked, in the past 6 months.
All I did to find this:
- web-search the term "Amazon chat support"
- apply intuition
Now if there was some fine print I didn't read, shame on me, but has Amazon explicitly addressed this?
I do understand that the physical items themselves are in short supply and cannot be instantly produced by any kind of magic. (Although as an aside, and it's really not my main point, but I do think Amazon has the buying power to incentivize many suppliers to move mountains).
Just like the physical items, the money to pay the fee for Prime memberships can also correspondingly go into short supply as well, and individual members may have good reasons to stop paying if they aren't getting what they paid for.
Certainly facts on the ground have changed the deal. Maybe we Prime members will just be in the front of the line for frequently hoarded items... sigh. Will be interesting to see how Prime fares through this.