Amazon’s “Two-Day Shipping” is no longer Two-Day Shipping
Along with millions of other Americans, I made a purchase on Amazon this weekend. As a Prime member, I benefit from free “two-day shipping” on many items. In reality, an item shipped via “two-day shipping” sometimes arrives outside of the two-day time frame. It happens for a number of reasons: an item could be temporarily out of stock, it could be a holiday, Sunday shipping might not be available, or maybe the shipment just got delayed. All of the aforementioned reasons are perfectly valid, and have never bothered me.
However, what I expect to remain constant is that ‘one-day shipping’ is always one business day faster than ‘two-day shipping.’ Unfortunately, Amazon has introduced a fairly dark pattern. Their ‘two-day shipping’ option is often now more than a day slower than ‘one-day shipping.’ In fact, this happened to both of my purchases this weekend:
What I chalked up to a bug has been confirmed by several Amazon customer service representatives as a matter of policy. A policy that I find to be at odds with their marketing messages and contradicts their help page on Prime shipping benefits.