Remember the old FedEx television commercials from the 1980s — the ones with the tagline, “When it absolutely, positively has to get there overnight”? Overnight gradually turned into two days, which gradually turned into three, then five, then whenever we get around to it.
Amazon seems to be headed in the same direction. The company has gotten huge by maximizing profits at the expense of the customer service that made them huge.
These days I try to support the local businesses where possible and buy in person, I think I like the experience more of meeting people and making friends and getting to hold the product in hand before buying (I often take a long time to decide to buy something).
That said, sometimes you don’t have a choice, but to go the online route for price or lack of local retailers.
What are you making with your yarn 
?
I’m in the latter boat. 
As for my yarn needs. I am at the tail end of my years project of a temperature blanket and I’ve run out of blue. Of course I picked a shade of blue that seems to be nearly impossible to find a year later 
Otherwise I just finished a blanket for my Niece for Christmas and currently working on Victorian coat cuffs for my Sister in law
This is the temp blanket … October with my Bella inspecting it
and November:
All 12 months will be joined together after Dec is done. Each row represents the temp for that day.
This is the blanket for my Niece.
This one shows the pattern a bit better. It’s the Granny Ripple.
I don’t have the cuffs ready yet … but when I get finished I’ll post em
The only trouble I have is with FedEx trying to find anywhere in NYC. I often get delivery exceptions that say business closed when in fact most of the businesses I send Fedex to in NYC are open 24/7. I have to call them to tell them to send the driver back. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
The latest online trick is to tell you something is in stock and that it will ship and that you’ll have it in 2 days, when in fact it isn’t in stock and isn’t expected for weeks. I don’t have time for that in my industry. It’s happened 3 times in the last 2 weeks.
Those are some pretty things RKK!
We cancelled our Prime membership some time ago; it felt good to do so. I won’t attempt to argue with the convenience factor of Amazon, but I prefer shopping locally whenever possible. Then shopping online (anywhere but Amazon). Then shopping Amazon if I absolutely can’t get it anywhere else. And this is coming from a guy who doesn’t enjoy shopping… or leaving the house for that matter. 
Also, the convenience was a little too much. By that I mean, it was too easy to buy stuff without really thinking if you actually need it.
The temp blanket is cool (or cold or warm or hot ). Never heard of such a think before. I’d like to see a photo of the whole blanket when it’s finished.
I can do that 
And thank you PD 
It’s “peak” for UPS and FedEx. Volume during this time almost doubles They do their best to keep up but as you mentioned there are a lot of other factors that are hindering delivery times. Try using USPS and see how long it takes to show up. USPS is the worst.
Yep … I realize that. But, this is specifically to do with Amazon and when they ship it out. I’ve had no problems with any of those mentioned once the item has been shipped
That could be an unfair blanket statement to make without hard data backing it up. Where I live, USPS is the best.
My complaints about Amazon’s delivery aren’t related to peak season delays. Instead, it’s their service throughout the year.
Over the past several months, on three separate occasions, I’ve gotten messages saying the package was out for delivery, only to get a subsequent message saying the package was undeliverable (for no apparent reason) and to reorder it. On other occasions, they’ve said the package was delivered, but the photos they shot of the delivery points were of someone else’s front porch. Other times, I’ve had other people’s packages dropped off on our porch. A couple of times, they’ve put our packages on the nextdoor neighbor’s doorstep and the neighbor’s on ours.
As for the US Postal Service. They might be a bit slower, but unlike Amazon Prime, they make no false claims regarding delivery dates. And most important, they’ve been reliable.
My first reaction was a “Granny WHAT!!! blanket???”
Nice job!
I’ve just about had it with Amazon Prime. Since before Christmas, I’ve ordered eleven things from them and purposely kept track. Not a single order arrived on time. Two were delivered to the wrong address. Two more were mysteriously returned to Amazon. The rest were between two days late and still waiting for them to arrive.
Today, for example, three items that I ordered last Friday were supposed to be delivered. All three items, according to their website, were out for delivery on an Amazon truck.
I got a message around noon saying the Amazon truck was six stops away. It drove right by the house without stopping while I was out shoveling snow.
Then I got a message saying the packages would be delivered by 7pm, then another by 10pm, then by midnight.
Just after 11pm, I got a message saying one of the items wouldn’t arrive until Feb. 23. Then I got still another message saying the other two items wouldn’t arrive until Friday, which I suspect will be a week from Friday.
I’m still waiting for a two-day delivery order that I ordered two weeks ago.
If that weren’t enough, they keep charging more for their ,um, “service” each year, and the video selections on Amazon Prime are mostly ads to purchase or rent the videos instead of them being included with the fee.
Yeah, I think I’ve talked myself into giving up on them. I used to be an Amazon fan. No more.
Just a bad delivery driver etc.
I find their customer support excellent - well worth getting in touch.
I cancelled my Prime last year. You can get free shipping without it, you just have to wait about 4 days instead of two. But that exactly why I cancelled, I never got stuff in 2 days. I did decide on a month free trial in December just in case I needed something fast for Christmas, and got caught up on the shows I liked, but again, freebie and cancelled as soon as the trial was up. #EffBezos
I wonder if it is an issue with delivery drivers in your area. I’m in a large Metro area and 99% of the time I get my deliveries within 2 days. Sometimes even next day and lately I’ve had luck with getting quite a few of my deliveries same day if I place them early enough in the day.
TBH, the service I use the most with Prime is their unlimited photo backup.
I occasionally watch things through Prime video, but not often. With Prime video if you select “free to me” it only shows things that are actually free and included with Prime.
Not trying to defend Amazon, their worker treatment is pretty terrible, but deliveries at least in my case have actually gotten better. I wonder if they figure they should just focus on bigger metro areas since it is probably more cost effective and opted to “screw it” when it comes to smaller cities.
I think that’s a big part of it. I noticed a huge deterioration in reliability as soon as Amazon switched from using UPS or FedEx to their own Amazon Prime delivery trucks.
I used to do precisely that, but I haven’t been able to find that option on their site for two or three months. I figured they probably removed it to prevent people from not seeing what they wanted to sell. I’ll need to look harder for that option if it’s still there. My membership doesn’t run out until July.
My metro area has about 2.6 million people. Amazon has two large regional fulfillment warehouses within 20 miles of where I live. In the rural part of the state, Amazon still relies on UPS and FedEx, and their service seems to be better, according to my friends and family who live there. Again, that seems to point to the underpaid and inexperienced drivers they hire for their own delivery trucks.
Odd, I mean yes our metro area is bigger (close to 7.5 million), but 2.6 million is plenty larger enough to have good distribution. Our delivery people are in Amazon branded trucks, perhaps we are just lucky and have a more efficiently managed distribution center/delivery workers.
And the “free to me” is near the top, at least on their website. I’m not sure how it looks if accessing Prime Video through a FireTV, Roku, AppleTV, etc. This is how it looks on my browser:
No disagreement here, but they aren’t just underpaid and inexperienced; they are also under duress. Mind you, it’s all just stuff I’ve “heard,” but the source is very reliable. The Amazon-owned vans are closely monitored via GPS, which these days isn’t all that unusual, but it is known to the driver that at any given time, they may be, and often are, subject to real-time surveillance, with management watching the efficiency with which they execute their route. That includes the movements of the vehicle as well as its stop time between movements. In the likely case a driver becomes disoriented or misdirected, be it driving or on foot, the “negative” time spent driving or walking in redundance or confusion is logged as such in the driver’s performance record. It is known that this elevated pressure has resulted in all kinds of mis-deliveries, careless handling of packages (e.g., hurried tossing over porch railings and up stairways), drivers running across oncoming traffic, and even drivers being relieved of their duties mid-route, with a replacement driver showing up otherwise unannounced at a delivery stop and demand for surrender of the high-visibility vest coming in an ensuing cell call. The turnover that results is largely to blame for the typified “inexperience,” which takes its place in the vicious circle and produces poor service. In the course of building and staffing its own delivery fleets, Amazon has transformed itself from wealthy and productive citizen providing quality service to overgrown and odious predator, running its empire on the backs of slaves.
