Originally Posted by
bae
Amazon shopping is a near-essential to me.
I live in a remote place with few stores. The stores here tend to hugely overcharge, as this is a tourist destination. I can't easily drive somewhere else to shop - that takes an entire day and $75 in ferry charges and fuel, not to mention food for the journey. All goods here that are not locally produced are brought in by sea or air.
It is incredibly efficient for me to "add-to-cart/buy now" and have the goods I need delivered to my house within a few days. It is even now usually cheaper. By batching-up my orders, I try to reduce the impacts of the shipping.
My community's big complaint these days about Amazon is that they have been trying experiments with delivering here "more efficiently". This seems like a good idea, but it has resulted in:
- Causing chaos at our local Post Office, which has only a few employees, when they diverted using UPS/Fedex to using USPS. They had to put up tents in the parking lot the handle the volume, and an extra 3-4 day delay was caused simply due to the couple of USPS employees having to sort through the huge piles of parcels. The stress caused a good portion of the experienced staff to quit, making the problem worse. It impacted regular first-class mail delivery too - it quickly degraded to the point that to send a letter to my neighbor took 10-ish days for delivery. This impacted local elections, which are all by-mail, billpaying, jury notification, etc.
- This change also caused the local delivery company, which subcontracts out to UPS/Fedex, to lay off most of its staff without any warning. These employees are our friends and neighbors, and this was not received well.
- Amazon next tried to send over their own contract delivery folks from the mainland. This is an ongoing disaster. They almost got lynched when they seized part of the undersized parking/loading facilities at our ferry docks and turned them into an outdoor package sorting location. The foolish State ferry officials who approved that deal for a very small sum of money, if they visited here to see how it was going, would likely be strung up from the streetlamps, if we had streetlamps. This change to using their own trucks also caused local employees to get laid off.
Fun times.
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