Amazon just said in its quarterly results that it's kicking ass, in part because of the new Amazon Prime service. Basically, for $79 a year, you can have absolutely everything shipped to you 2-day with no additional charge. You can get things overnighted for $3.99 per item.
When they announced this, I thought it sounded like a dumb idea. But the one developer I work with gets a lot of Amazon boxes, and he bought the membership. So I started to think that if this smart guy thought it was worth it, maybe I was missing something.
I looked at my order history and discovered that I spent extra on faster shipping. A lot. Almost every time, in fact. Then I remembered from the early e-commerce days that one of my chief objections to buying online was the lack of immediacy, which I didn't like despite a lower cost in most cases.
So I figured, what the hell, let's try it out. One of the perks is that if something isn't in stock, so what, they'll ship whatever they have and there's no additional cost. No need to group stuff together. In fact, turning on the "1-click" actually makes sense when you don't care how many boxes get shipped since there's no additional cost. Suddenly, I find myself knee deep in Harry Potter books, cookware, DVD's and cooking books. It's just dangerously easy now to get what you want quickly. It's empowering to see something and be like, "Yeah, I can have that in a day or two, and it costs less and there's more variety than conventional retail."
I think I'm done for awhile. Christmas sure will be super easy!
I go the opposite and never/rarely pay for shipping, as I always spend over $25 and they ship from Lexington in most cases. I get stuff in 2-3 days unless it's not in immediate stock - then I wait.
If I did not get such good shipping (I send it to work and my office is in KY) I would pay the $79. It seems worthwhile in the long run.
Great post, Jeff. Your title says it all.
Shipping costs were one of the last reminders that the internet wasn't pure and unbridled magic afterall. All of us had, in the course of our own personal internet histories, great moments of potentially life-altering commercial revelation only to discover, shortly after hitting the checkout button, that these wondergoods actually needed to come from an actual location. The George Foreman Grill wouldn't just magically appear out of the sky and start cooking salmon before our very eyes, or George Foreman himself for that matter. The magical world-flattening portal all of us had sitting in our home office had betrayed us - it turns out it was still bound by the limits of the physical world afterall.
When we think of Amazon.com, we think of those smirking brown boxes showing up in our (physical) mailboxes, or the online confirmation form you print out and hang up on your bulletin board to remind yourself Harry Potter is only four metaphysical states and 72 hours away. No one thinks of the windowless stockpiled stadiums of doo-dads or miles of trucks at a port in Shenzhen* waiting to unload them all at said stadiums.
During the era of the dial-up connection, waiting for a page to load reminded people of the internet's limits. In this regard, Amazon Prime is the commercial equivilant of the cable modem. And just as faster internet connections have only sucked people into spending more time online (myself very much included), free shipping (or in this case, one-time $79 shipping) will eliminate that last reason to postpone their purchase, that final pop-up checklist from the voices in our head asking, "hey gang, do we really need this?"
With the last sanity clause of online retail lifted and banished, we're free to consume as much crap as we can stuff into our homes without any of those pesky reminders they came from somewhere else on the planet. We're tempted to leave our doors unlocked at night, because now George Foreman might actually show up afterall! Our wealth will no longer be squandered on those trucks, or those ports, or those stadiums. They no longer exist. $79 gets each of us a guilt-free ticket and a bucket full of tokens into the world's largest prize counter.
Clearly I've gone off on a tangent here and I honestly don't mean to pick on Jeff, or anyone for that matter. My experience with Prime was the same, a co-worker sang its praises while I scratched my head and only later realized its possibilities. It wasn't until I watched this process from a third-person perspective that it made me reflect on it more. So what's my point? No idea, still thinking it through, but if you consider what the long term goals of internet mammoths like Amazon must be based on programs like Prime, you begin to see a physical world dictated and governed by virtual reality. It's a weird place. I'm not sure what to think about it.**
*I just googled "major chinese manufacturing city" and Wikipedia told me about Shenzhen. Assuming the entry is legit - I'm not going to check it - the internet, like Amazon Prime, clearly has a value different than its cost.
**I kept reading about Shenzhen, and apparently its a major manufacturing hub for the Intel-based Macs like the one I'm using to type this with. So, the computer I bought just taught me about the place where it was likely made and shipped from. Think about that. What's in front of you right now? Where has it been? What does it know about the world that you don't, or that you haven't reminded yourself of in a while?
What the fuck are you even talking about?
Here's a news flash: You pay for shipping no matter where you buy stuff. The only time its impact is minimized is when the retail chain has the most efficient supply chain possible. That narrows it down mostly to Wal-Mart, and it's all made in China crap. Buy something from Target, or God forbid the mall, and you're paying for shipping, and probably a brand name.