Modern Logistics

I do a fair amount of shopping on Amazon and have the $100/year Prime membership.  It is cost effective to shop on Amazon compared with driving around checking prices in real life and vastly more secure than giving my credit card to unknown merchants all over the web.

Today I bought some cat medicine.  While writing this Gratitude blog post, I checked prices.  It is the same price on Amazon as at the local Petco store (according the Petco’s 50% ad on the web…cough…cough…BS).  Before deciding on which medication to get, I consulted some cat health sites and read reviews.  The choice of medication was obvious.  It will be here Tuesday.

Amazon Prime purchases used to arrive in 2 days.  In the last month, some Prime purchases have been scheduled for 3ish weeks away.  My guess is they are shipping from China.  It feels like bait and switch scummy that these items are presented as “Prime” and yet shipped via slow boat.  Definitely diluting the Prime brand with small print about arriving in 3 weeks.

/rant off

My thought in writing is how fast products and services are delivered at low cost in my life.  My sister sent a printed document from Australia that got here in less than a week.   Amazon has a same-day delivery service for a large selection of goods for customers living in selected places including the Seattle metro area.

Email blows snail mail out of the water.  Digital downloads shrank Blockbuster movie rentals from custom built stores to Redbox vending machines in a few short years.

My dad was a pilot and got to fly around the world for work in trips lasting up to two weeks.  Now the world comes to me faster than he could make it to Hawaii and back.

I am grateful for modern logistics including Amazon, UPS, FedEx, the USPS, and the web.  They make informed shopping a lot easier for me.