I am sure this will impact the railroad industry at some point. I am a Prime Customer of Amazon and increasingly the shipment guarantee advertised online is not achievable. It has nothing to do with the recent weather either. I suspect Amazon is starting to choke on it’s own service standards and logistics. UPS is phasing their packages out and I think the goal is significant percentage reduction by end of 2026. I read that Fed Ex absorbed some of it but I don’t think they will absorb all of it. Postal Service is not fast enough in my opinion for anything beyond last mile delivery. Seems to be an increasing gap between the guarantee and the ability to support it via logistics available. What will Amazon do? Seems to me potentially the railroad industry might fill part of the gap here with innovation of some kind?
I am about ready to just cancel out of Prime. What good is it anymore?
The problem with Prime is it’s two day shipping, once shipped. Unfortunately, they don’t count the time the items are put on their trucks and are shipped to your local DC. Once it hits you local DC the two day shipping kicks in.
Time was if you didn’t mind waiting, you used USPS, wanted is soon, it was UPS, and if you needed it tomorrow, it was FedEx. Now they’re pretty close to the same.
You can tell who the “youngsters” are on here. I remember the days when you got a paper catalog, cut the order form out of it, filled it in, wrote a check and mailed it. Then you waited, and waited, and waited. One day, you got a package through “parcel post” or maybe UPS (Fedex wasn’t a thing yet). By that time, you’d almost forgotten what you ordered. Or, you could go to your local hobby shop and choose between what they had, because they sure wouldn’t order anything for you.
That was kind of my reasoning.
To actually comment on the conversation itself, though: I’ve become disgusted with shipping. Here’s an Amazon example: I ordered four remote-control relay modules. According to Amazon, they were all supposed to be delivered on the 29th. Instead, three of them came on the 27th. The other one? It was still supposed to come on the 29th. Where is it now? I don’t know. According to Amazon, it will arrive on the 29th., which, of course, is long past. I have noticed that delivery time and reliability have both improved now that Amazon started using their own delivery drivers here in town. UPS did it decently, but USPS did it absolutely horridly.
I order quite a few things from Amazon, rarely have they been later than they state. It does seem that model railroad stuff generally takes longer than other items I order.
I have been an Amazon customer since 2000. I can only remember one time when my stuff did not arrived by the promised date. And that was during the time I lived in Australia.
We don’t know nearly enough about the stated problem to even begin to think of a solution.
There are four major delivery systems in the US:
USPS - looses $9 billion per year. Slow, erratic service.
UPS - currently intentionally downsizing due to:
a) Changing market environment
b) Expensive contract with Teamsters Union that makes a large slug of deliveries unprofitable
FedEx - splitting its LTL business from its traditional package and document delivery service to form two distinct companies. The LTL is very profitable. The packages and documents, not so much. FedEx is the largest LTL carrier by revenue in the US.
Amazon - they’re building a new DC just down the road from me. It’s huge. (I now live in Cottage Grove, WI). They do use rail intermodal.
I did a search on YouTube…more than me. I cannot pin it down to a specific shipper it started intermittent and then got worse. None of the delivery shippers were UPS. Been USPS, Amazon, also FedEx transfer to USPS.
