It’s that time of the year where Amazon’s shipping estimates range from the surprisingly accurate to the outright fanciful and everything in between.
To be fair, I’ve generally had reasonably good luck with the vast majority of my Amazon Prime orders arriving when they’re scheduled if not a little earlier. And most of the time, a delay in shipping or arrival really isn’t the end of the world.
But every now and then the shipping process goes more than a little pear-shaped and makes you wonder just what in the world is going on with them!
Take for instance the cases of drink powder that were ordered last night for someone who will remain nameless who was joyriding on the ol’ Amazon Prime account.
Enough of those cases were ordered to trigger the free overnight shipping which was scheduled between 1000-1500 today.
A quick look at the order tracking looked like they’d scheduled the delivery window and the package was put in the hands of the delivery person in Durham round 1130 or so.
So far, so good!
When it became obvious that 1500 had gone out the window and I checked the order tracking, I was greeted with a message saying that “we’re sorry but the new arrival time is 1800 tomorrow”.
At the risk of sounding like I’ve got a serious case of the “first world problems in a world full of far more critical things to be worried about”, I will say that the message is a bit irritating.
It’s not that this particular shipment was critical…it’d be nice to have in hand to hand it off to my Prime Joyrider(tm) this evening as expected but if it didn’t happen, it’s not the end of the world.
Trust me, I was far more invested in the emergency hard drive order when one of the RAID-5 arrays had a constituent hard drive crap out being delivered on time so I could rebuild the array before potentially losing data!
No, the irritating bit is that Amazon gives you this binary choice of sitting on it and spinning or canceling the order if you can’t just wait for it to turn up in it’s own time. What they don’t offer with that apology is some sort of token compensation for the fact that enough product was ordered to take explicitly advantage of the overnight delivery during the window they offered on the website and I just had the temerity to ACCEPT.
Perhaps if there was a financial hit to missing a delivery commitment, there might well be more attention paid to ensuring that delivery delays are a much rarer occurrence than they actually are for people who are paying quite a bit extra per year for Prime.
At this point, I’m resigned to having to wait an extra day for the order to arrive.
So imagine my pleasant if not abundant amount of surprise when right as I’m about to take Alex over to WakeMed…the Amazon driver turns up with the package that wasn’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow if the tracking on the website was to believed.
I’m guessing the website decided once 1500 had passed and no delivery notification had arrived that the back-end just presumed that it’s a shipping delay and guess that the earliest I’d see it is the next day by default (though it seemed to pick an oddly specific time of day).
At the end of the day (literally!), it worked out…perhaps a bit later than planned and without the bizarro loops one order made with Fedex Smartpost (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) but it ultimately arrived just in the nick of time.