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Amazon Prime Is a Blessing and a Curse For Remote Towns (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: If access to Prime is reduced, or in some cases, cut off, it can leave many remote towns in the lurch. One dozen five-gallon barrels of hydraulic oil. A 2x4x8 of lumber. A pallet's worth of 10-ply, heavy-duty truck tires. These are just a few of the heavy, cumbersome orders one Redditor on the Alaska subreddit claimed to have ordered from Amazon Prime, with free shipping, before users started to notice difficulty finding eligible products. For many remote and rural communities in the U.S. and Canada, the arrival of Amazon Prime, with its low prices and free, expedient shipping was a boon. Hard-to-get or expensive products were now accessible, and reasonably priced to boot. For the cost of a membership (which now runs $99 per year), residents were able to get deals on everything from food to diapers to truck tires. But sometimes when something seems too good to be true, it is. Prime has proven to be a bit of a double-edged sword for many of these communities. Residents become dependent on Prime as local retailers struggle to compete. If access to Prime is reduced, or in some cases, cut off, it can leave many remote towns in the lurch.
Anyone else remember the song about the "Wells Fargo Wagon" from 76 Trombones? That was the end result of a remote order business hooked up to a rail-backed transportation system.
See also "Sears Catalog Home":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home
Years ago, not long after becoming a Prime member, I was renting a cottage in a very remote location in the middle of a national forest for a couple weeks. This location was without mail delivery. Population density of the county is maybe two dozen per square mile, so not the sparsest but fairly low density.
I ran an experiment, set that as my main address in Prime, and ordered something (I don't even remember what.) Imagine my surprise two days later when I heard the delivery truck hustling down the country road 4 miles away!
If only that place had consistent, reliable internet service (Verizon worked if you held your phone just right in certain places and the cottage was equipped with Wild Blue? satellite internet) I could see setting up shop semi-permanently, provided I could find a job that allowed me to work remotely.
But I was always concerned about dependency on delivery service, it seemed like a fluke that it worked, there's no way that was economically viable for Amazon.
I ordered a water heater via Prime this year. Saved a good amount of money on the heater itself, and got the free shipping where every big box in town wanted to charge >$50 to deliver one. That one transaction payed for half a years worth of the prime membership.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Amazon Prime does more for northern food security than federal subsidies, say Iqaluit residents
Not really, it just seems like it because it's hard to deny. Most people in urban areas pay their own way. In rural areas, virtually nobody pays their own way. And I mean that literally. Between the roads, electric grid, telephone service, shipping and basically everything else that gets subsidized by urban areas, the only people in rural areas not on the dole are the survivalist types that live in the middle of nowhere with no services of any kind just growing and producing for themselves. Everybody else is on the government dole and should be ashamed of themselves for being so judgmental about other people that can't afford to feed and clothe themselves due to economic policies that the rural voters love.
We don't call it welfare because OMH teh soshulizm. But, let's be honest about the fact that cities are net exporters of wealth and rural areas are net sponges of it producing little of value while being subsidized by the producers of wealth.
To get back to the point about the people living in the projects and inner cities, it's hard to solve those problems while the leaches in rural areas are sucking us dry. There's not a lack of money to solve the problem, but every time we try to address it, those welfare queens in the suburbs and rural areas curtail our abilities to address the problem. They want both tax breaks for their lazy asses and service cuts for the city residents.
You'd be surprised. BP (Before Prime) people used to fly to one of the (four) 'large' cities (Anchorage, Fairbanks and to lessor extents Juneau and Ketchikan), go to the Walmart / Costco / etc and fill up an small airplane or part of a barge and ship a year's supply of stuff home. Some even go to Seattle and barge stuff up.
In the two years or so before Amazon wised up, you could do this from the safety and comfort of your own Tyvek strapped shack anywhere you had a Post Office and an Internet connection. Good times. I just loved the looks at the Post Office when you had six 40 pound bags of dog food to pick up. And so did your neighbor. Benjamin Franklin would have been .... confused.