Amazon Prime is hit or miss, they are effectively using Uber drivers to deliver packages.. sometimes my stuff delivers a day early in front of my door, other times is a week late and in someone else's mailbox
Amazon here opened a massive new distribution center and we went from having everything delivered by UPS mostly with the occasional USPS from Prime, to a Prime labeled van owned by some sub-contractor delivering the majority.
Also went from two days to one day. Apparently over in cow-town they have same day now in most of the metro. We are too far out here.
The weirdest thing is Amazon making these poor schmucks take a photo when they deliver now and getting a “survey” question every delivery now of whether or not they did a good job. It would take a lot for me to click anything other than great, since Amazon is truly awful to sub-contractors and fires people for tiny infractions.
Honestly at this point I’d rather pay more for an Amazon competitor that behaves better to people for this same service, but they don’t exist. Also interestingly though, I’ve found direct sales from a number of tech companies to be better deals than they offer on Amazon if you buy direct and can live with waiting a few more days for the item. So Amazon is losing clout with them.
Prime Day by all accounts was a complete bust this year. Almost no manufacturer played the game this time other than ones in second place or further back with Amazon warehouse stock to clear out.
As far as USPS goes, the little rural PO and their private rural delivery sub-contractors seem as normal as ever. Not great, not bad. The sheer volume of packages has forced them to say if you don’t grab one in a day or two they’ll clear the Mail house package box for someone else who can be bothered to come get it.
Their (USPS) “Informed Delivery” service also working great here. Photo of everything first class in e-mail on wifey’s phone every day.
The little rural PO never had the tracking code scanners though, so the other package and letter tracking style never worked here. If it came from out of State you’d see it hit cow-town and that was always the end of tracking. No PO code scanners and the rural delivery contractors never had them either.
Pretty much business as usual out here. But your Amazon using Uber thing there is wild. Definitely went 180 degrees the other direction here. Very strange to order late at night and still have an Amazon van show up mid-day the next day.
Haven’t been to the office or needed anything same-day there yet, but will be fun to try that sooner or later. We buy piddly IT stuff like cables from Amazon sometimes. Will be interesting to see if it’s in the local warehouse stock.
Office does truckloads of USPS in and out, literally, since we have a print shop, so any USPS stories from there aren’t representative of much. They often use forklifts to load or unload so we’re being handled at the bulk level and no complaints from us or customers with any of that. Our first class stuff just rides along with the massive flats and boxes of other junk.
