The more they innovate on shipping the more I commit to a set of values that doesn't include instant gratification or equating consumer possessions with happiness.
A rule of thumb I use before buying something is, do I need it or want it so much that it's worth more effort to obtain than a few mouse clicks?
If it took a week to ship and I can do without it for that long, can't I do without it altogether? If I need it sooner, can't I just go get it? I used to be a huge online shopper but I've rediscovered that going out into the world is not a chore and it's good to have excuses to do so.
Freeing oneself from Amazon is even better than freeing oneself from Facebook.
> If it took a week to ship and I can do without it for that long, can't I do without it altogether?
No? For this to be true in general requires a complete inability to plan for the future. If my daughter needs diapers but not urgently, that's not something I can just do without. If I need a new wireless router because mine is failing intermittently, I can probably wait a week, but I'm not waiting forever.
Piling on, If I need a special wrench to repair my bicycle, I can drive to work for a week, but abandoning the bicycle and driving all the time is clearly worse...
While I get your point here's a counter example. I needed a power adapter for a router urgently. I checked Amazon and they could deliver it by Prime the next day. I decided instead to go out into the real world and check first. I went to 3 different small electronics stores near my home - none of them had it. After an hour of searching/wasting my time I bought it on the Amazon app as I walked home. I think the point is - it depends where you live. These electronics stores were small places that doubled as internet cafés and were run by local people. I would have really had to go out of the way to find a Maplin/Radioshack/Best Buy kind of store. If I drove a car or lived near a mall I probably could have gotten the item easily but I live in a city and small locally run stores are much more common than chains which stock everything. It wasn't even that obscure an item but without wasting several hours and spending £6 on public transport Amazon was the only solution.
Going to Best Buy in my experience means paying more for the same product. It's also a 40-minute round trip, minimum. It's 30 minutes if I go to Target, or Barnes and Noble, and similar times for most other stores I'd go to.
If I could walk to a store to get most of the stuff I'd otherwise get from Amazon, I'd consider it more often. But driving 20 minutes or more to pick up something small is not a good use of my time. It's not enjoyable. It's not a meaningful amount of exercise to walk through a store. And frankly driving for a small item is not very earth friendly. I suspect that it's better for the environment to have UPS add another package to their truck than it is for another car to drive to the store and back, even if you consider the environmental cost of the box.
> aimed at promoting instant gratification and maximizing consumerism
So it's a retail company. I feel like this statement applies to at least 99% of retail companies, likely including the ones you're shopping at instead of Amazon.
A rule of thumb I use before buying something is, do I need it or want it so much that it's worth more effort to obtain than a few mouse clicks?
If it took a week to ship and I can do without it for that long, can't I do without it altogether? If I need it sooner, can't I just go get it? I used to be a huge online shopper but I've rediscovered that going out into the world is not a chore and it's good to have excuses to do so.
Freeing oneself from Amazon is even better than freeing oneself from Facebook.