The ultimate in stupidity and wastefulness from Amazon.

Last Friday, I ordered a small bag of Scotts lawn fertilizer through Amazon Prime. Weighed 12.5 pounds, to cover 5000 square feet.

When I ordered, it gave a delivery time of a week. OK, so they're sending it slow. No problem, it does weigh quite a bit, for what it costs ($17). A week is fine.

What showed up on my doorstep this morning, via UPS Next Day Air? A bag of Scotts fertilizer.

UPS's list shipping cost for that was $83.64. I do realize that Amazon isn't paying UPS's list prices for anything, but WOW. Especially so, when I had been warned that it could be a week for it to arrive.

I remember when I was there the internal price we can pay for is almost half or cheaper than the retail rate. Any large business would have corner cases that they lose money on for large number of transactions. I remember ordering a camber kit for my Mazda 5 and they send a replacement after a lost order, arriving next day air for about 50 lb from across the continent, for $36 worth of cast iron metal. That retail shipping would likely be $150.
 
I don't recall Apple being the biggest. The competitors to Amazon in cloud services are Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

the official order is AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), Alibaba, then distance 3rd Google, then somewhere between IBM and Oracle and Tencent. Apple is only for internal use just like Facebook, although they are big they are not a public cloud that retails to outsiders.
 
I worked for a small auction house that would ship roughly one truckload of goods per day with Fedex Ground. They easily negotiated a 50 percent discount from retail prices for shipping. Now think of what amazon does.
 
The funniest to me is large items thru Warehouse Deals...the bot seemingly keeps dropping the price with zero regard for shipping cost. I've received several items that came freight for a song.

I'm not complaining and I guess they just want it gone but seems like it'd be easier to crush it and write it off on financials as a loss or damaged product ('cause it is technically damaged in some way to be in Warehouse Deals)

One time they shipped me a standalone mailbox thing that you'd use for a small apartment building when I had actually ordered a large (like where the files run left to right) filing cabinet (again, for a song). They tracked down the lost item and sent RAC back out to retrieve the mailbox center....crazy. They initially wanted me to take it to the hub but I refused....Amazon's been good to me but I'm not paid to load their screw-up in my SuperDuty with my tractor and drive it around to be shipped.
 
I don't recall Apple being the biggest. The competitors to Amazon in cloud services are Microsoft, IBM, and Google.
I would expect JT20 thought I was referring to streaming media services. You are correct that the big competitors to Amazon in the cloud services sector are Microsoft, IBM and Google.
 
Amazon's motto appears to be, Anything you can do I can do better. I can do anything better than you.
 
I have never bought anything from amazon because I am not allowed too and I want to look at the item in person before I buy it and plus everyone I know that has always gets knock off stuff. Most of the people I know have prime and have tried to get me to get it several times. But why would you order soil online?
 
I have never bought anything from amazon because I am not allowed too and I want to look at the item in person before I buy it and plus everyone I know that has always gets knock off stuff. Most of the people I know have prime and have tried to get me to get it several times. But why would you order soil online?

Price.
 
I have never bought anything from amazon because I am not allowed too and I want to look at the item in person before I buy it and plus everyone I know that has always gets knock off stuff. Most of the people I know have prime and have tried to get me to get it several times. But why would you order soil online?

Who is buying soil?
 
I don’t know why they assume we are always so hot to trot. I typically get a single Walmart order in three separate deliveries. It seems so wasteful.

I wish I could check a box that said in effect “That’s OK. Take an extra couple of days and send it too me all at once.”
 
The thing with Amazon retail is, it’s not like stores routinely are making money. Black Friday is called thst for a reason.... and if it takes some retpain until after Thanksgiving to get in the black, there was never much hope.

Say what you will about the efficiencies or lack thereof of home drop off, I suspect overall there are some...

and there’s lots of stuff that you just need to do brick and mortar regardless...
 
I don’t know why they assume we are always so hot to trot. I typically get a single Walmart order in three separate deliveries. It seems so wasteful.

I wish I could check a box that said in effect “That’s OK. Take an extra couple of days and send it too me all at once.”

There's a very good chance that they're coming out of different warehouses.
 
There's a very good chance that they're coming out of different warehouses.

That's one of the reason, the other being they don't want to waste the space in warehouse holding inventories until they ship. Despite having the ability to do same day shipping, if you are not in prime they just hold your order and money for a few days then ship, and the cash flow adds up.

If they already have a full van delivering on their own, making an extra stop won't cost too much more. Holding your cash and then order from their vendor instead of keeping inventories is a good business if they can pull it off. Target on the other hand do ask if you want to save $1 and wait for the deliveries to be combined or not. I like that option better.

One thing I also heard is that the inventories you see is not the same as the inventories others see. They favors showing you items in stock nearby instead of far away only. If they are low on inventories or closing out at a great price, they show them as in stock near the warehouse and out of stock for far away customers. (I'm pretty sure they also do that to profitable customers instead of cheap stakes looking for only loss leaders).
 
They trying to keep the prime customer real happy, I do not pay for that and my stuff takes weeks for delivery.
I don’t pay for it either and besides during the shutdown my stuff has always arrived very quickly. I’ve had stuff come in less than 24hrs but usually 3/5 days.
 
I was in a UPS program where I shipped 200 or more packages
a week and got overnight red and blue shipping for one flat rate. Dirt cheap. I often sent many items overnight because it was a few pennies over ground...
 
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