Slashdot Mirror
'Amazon Prime is Getting Worse' (fastcompany.com)
Mark Wilson, writing for FastCompany magazine: That little Prime logo used to mean something. Now it feels like a ruse that lulls shoppers into a false sense of security, until they go to checkout and see a shipping arrival date far later than anticipated. This cuts through the greatest promise of Prime. It's not just the free, two-day shipping. It's that it's so reliable, you never have to think for more than a second about buying something. In this sense, Prime was constructed to be great for the consumer (so efficient) and great for businesses (mindless impulse shopping!). I've been a Prime member myself for over a decade, so I've come to expect that the rush of the holiday season will clog the arteries of Amazon's fulfillment centers and delivery services alike and make shipping less than reliable. But anecdotally, to me and many of the people I know and work with, this year, it feels worse than ever.
It doesn't help that we've seen a slow dilution of Prime itself over time, with the rise of Prime Pantry and Add-on Items. They force you to buy a minimum number of items to get the best deal, adding back the very psychic burden Prime had eliminated from the equation of online shopping in the first place. As a result, it can be hard to find true, two-day Prime items that aren't marked up to insane prices by third-party sellers. But Prime was still Prime. This holiday, I've noticed things that are in stock and labeled "Prime" have nonsensical shipping dates. I'm not alone in experiencing Shipping Shock. Complaints about slow Prime shipping abound across the internet. Quora literally has a thread asking, "Has Amazon slowed down their free shipping speed intentionally?" The "top answer" with 22,000 views is a customer rant about late shipments. Many others chime in to confirm the slowdowns, and offer conspiracy theories as to what could be going on.
It doesn't help that we've seen a slow dilution of Prime itself over time, with the rise of Prime Pantry and Add-on Items. They force you to buy a minimum number of items to get the best deal, adding back the very psychic burden Prime had eliminated from the equation of online shopping in the first place. As a result, it can be hard to find true, two-day Prime items that aren't marked up to insane prices by third-party sellers. But Prime was still Prime. This holiday, I've noticed things that are in stock and labeled "Prime" have nonsensical shipping dates. I'm not alone in experiencing Shipping Shock. Complaints about slow Prime shipping abound across the internet. Quora literally has a thread asking, "Has Amazon slowed down their free shipping speed intentionally?" The "top answer" with 22,000 views is a customer rant about late shipments. Many others chime in to confirm the slowdowns, and offer conspiracy theories as to what could be going on.
If slashdot is 'tech news', and the subject is Amazon Prime, then we should really be discussing UX design and Dark Patterns. EG
Amazon dark patterns force people to fill up their Amazon pantry
Then when they don't like this, Amazon dark patterns make it more difficult to leave low-rated rather than high-rated reviews
Then if the user wishes to leave Amazon, the user must navigate a complex, non-intuitive chain of commands that do not start with 'close my account'. This chain changes regularly, to ensure that current 'close your amazon account' instructions found on google do not work for more than a few days. I closed my account in March 2018. At that time, this was the process:
1. select 'let us help you'...
2. select 'help'...
3. select 'need more help'...
4. select 'contact us'...
5. choose 'prime or something else'...
6. dropdown, choose 'update account information'...
7. dropdown, choose 'close my account'...
8. user is put into 'chat'...
As soon as the phrase 'I need to close my amazon account' is typed into the chat input, the user is logged out of chat and must repeat the above (I found this 'bug' was repeatable)
At that time, I had to find a way to communicate that I wanted to close my account without using the phrase 'close my account' in chat.
Someone crying that they can't spend their hard-earned money fast enough?
Hope of humanity: Low and declining.
It's greed.
Every company is trying to eliminate positions and increase the workload on fewer people in order to increase the profit margin on their revenue.
Unsurprisingly, the only place they aren't cutting costs is among the upper management who put these policies in place. Their salaries and bonuses have skyrocketed while the pay rates for the low level workers have remained stagnant (and have actually decreased significantly when you take inflation into account) for decades.
"Well, screw /. because I just lost my entire post by switching the format to plain text,"
If you are using anything but the classic view, shame on you, you should know better. If your browser doesn't restore form contents on back navigation, shame on you, you picked a crap browser.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Absolutely right this is complaining. That's what normal people do when they pay extra for a service but it is not delivered, repeatedly. Or did you forget that Prime is not free?
It's not just during peak. I think Amazon scales down during non-peak times and performance is almost just as bad.
I been a Prime customer since the year after it launched. I probably returned an item a year; if that. Today, our ordering has only doubled but we return atleast one package a month; primarily due to delivery issues.
I think we are on some "bad customer" list because every once in a while the rep says "You return a lot..."; implying that we shouldn't do that. We always respond with, look the notes and figure out who is at fault.
If we order blue, we shouldn't get red. If we order something gift wrapped, we probably want it before TK... not two weeks after the dinner. No, we aren't going to go to the other neighborhood or even down the street and pick up the bad delivery. No, we are not going to accept a box with a forklift hole in it. No we don't want another brand automatically substituted and billed to us. You credited us because your tracking number became active. Don't recharge me because you didn't get the return in time!
And all this we find out if we inquire or after delivery. I think Amazon just doesn't care anymore. They are more focused on AWS, warehouse automation, and another HQ.
I lived in the US for a short while, and I've lived in other affluent countries. In all those places people have way too much stuff, but Americans have more shit they don't use than anyone else. Who knows why. And it's imperative that it turns up as quickly as humanly possible so they can use it once and then consign it to live forever in a kitchen cupboard.