And exactly which essentials are being delivered instead?
They are prioritizing the hand sanitizer that is always out of stock? How about Clorox wipes? Fine, how about making your own...oh...isopropyl is sold out too.
> it said it would only accept new stock in its warehouses through early April if it was in one of six essential products categories, such as health and household goods or medical supplies
> The company said most of the products it was still accepting from third-party sellers and wholesale vendors fall into one of six categories: baby products, health and household, beauty and personal care, grocery, industrial and scientific, and pet supplies
Amazon doesn't have an infinitely large fulfillment network. Instead of being snarky, maybe we can acknowledge that Amazon is facing unprecedented disruptions in their normal demand patterns and supply chains, and they are making very reasonable efforts to handle them in the best way possible. Just like every other business that has been impacted by this pandemic.
I wonder if this is why I saw Displayport to HDMI adapters this morning in the "Health and Household" category on Amazon over the past couple of days, or if those have always been there and been mislabeled.
Interesting. I hadn't noticed that, although last week I did order a USB-C to DisplayPort adapter that is slated to arrive this week and is on the low end of "essential" for my new work-from-home life.
Possibly. There is lots of category abuse going on right now. I’m primarily aware of masks, hand sanitizer, etc. being listed under other categories (Amazon put a moratorium on new listings for the sold out product categories; this would be a way to avoid that). But it would not surprise me at all if some seller is listing non-essential products in essential categories so that they’re able to send in replenishment shipments.
I guess food, detergent, toiletries, batteries, basic clothes, other cleaning supplies, small tools like screwdrivers and such.
Of course the essentials people want are the ones that wipe bacteria or protect you from it, as well as the FOMO items like toilet paper, but hardly their fault since they don’t control the production of those things. The best they can do is prioritize their supply chain to get those goods into warehouses.
I ordered a replacement toothbrush and a dutch oven to bake my own bread. Not really essentials but I feel like they are serving the purpose of health and isolation.
I just got a Dutch oven for the same reason, too! I get the feeling that the world supply of domestic bakers will increase dramatically in the coming months. A lot of grocery stores nearby us are out of sandwich bread, but full of flour. Wonder how long that will last!
Yeast, which you won't have if you haven't been making bread, doesn't even show up on Amazon at the moment (and normally it's Just There. Even got one via Amazon Fresh before the apocalypse started scaling). Also, bread flour is best but not absolutely needed. Lastly, if the bread the machine makes just doesn't tickle your fancy, they still are a great way to make pizza dough.
If the cat tree was already sitting in an Amazon warehouse, selling it and freeing up that space for more essential goods was probably the best thing they could possibly do.
This is especially true for smaller commonly purchased items as they get mixed in bins to make them faster to pick. Each bin could containn one DVD, one paperback etc. No practical way to sell those on.
Maybe she shouldn’t have bought it? When two parties consent to a transaction, the responsibility for that transaction occurring rests equally on both parties, as either one could have vetoed it.
Should Amazon have an intern filtering through every listing to decide what makes it essential or not, then block non-essential?
A comment above made it clear, they went by category, which is a very reasonable approach. It treats pet supplies as important (which makes sense, my dog's food comes from Amazon for example).
It’s not unreasonable that people also show some discretion when Amazon has made it very public that they’re dealing with an unprecedented situation.
I needed a new phone case and a few random odds and ends recently but hit save for later because I’m not going to die if I wait a few weeks to order these things.
Unless it’s on the website in the cart, I don’t expect Joe Random consumer to be paying attention to the likely impact on Amazon distribution from the pandemic. If they want to curtail it, put it on the site in the checkout flow. Anything less, and my take is they’d rather take the order.
That they’re offering $3 for “no rush” now and just pushing sone items out to a promise date 30 days away tells me they want the order if you want to give it to them.
The original comment was someone saying they don’t get why a cat toy gets 2 day shipping.
The point is Amazon is making it abundantly clear they’re struggling with demand and at some point you should also take a second and ask if you need that cat toy by Tuesday.
They did the reasonable thing and prioritized internally AND they’re literally paying you to wait longer for things, what more are they supposed to do?
Honestly this kind of logic is what the hoarders have been using...
“There was no sign that said don’t buy the 10 cases of toilet paper and the register asked me for payment after I scanned it all, so they wanted to me to order it!”
... well now there’s a sign. It won’t be surprising if eventually Amazon has to do the same, they’ve already stopped accepting new Pantry orders
I’m on Amazon’s side here. I think they’re doing what’s best for Amazon in the long-run. Maybe we’re violently agreeing that increasing the bounty on no-rush delivery is helping customers make a decision that causes delays to flow to the customers most willing to take them and priority delivery to those most desirous of it.
If they shipped it to you, they had capacity to do so. I think right now their bottlenecks are 1) getting sold out products back into their warehouses, and 2) just dealing with the overall increase in ordering volume.
We've done shelf-stable groceries in bulk through Amazon before. We don't have a large enough bulk shopping list to justify Sam's club or BJ's, but an occasional order to Amazon is fine. Rice, noodles, things like that.
I got a package with some food and coffee yesterday. I imagine that kind of thing is the bulk of it; a quick glance shows they're out of stock of a very high number of staples.
They are prioritizing the hand sanitizer that is always out of stock? How about Clorox wipes? Fine, how about making your own...oh...isopropyl is sold out too.
What exactly is being shipping now?