The Cost of Convenience-Amazon

When it comes to shopping online it is quite clear nobody does it better than Amazon. Amazon is amazing, especially with their PRIME service which for $99 per year gives you unlimited 2 day free shipping on Prime products, as well, if 2 days isn't good enough you can pay an additional $3.99 for 1 day shipping. That is a drop in the bucket when you need it now.  Amazon uses UPS and in the past year have added the USPS to the list of delivery options which you do not have a choice about.That being said, there are times when the 2 day shipping doesn't arrive in 2 days. For me that has only happened a few times, once when there was a blizzard going on and planes weren't flying so the delivery was delayed by 1 day. The other two times it happened to me, it was when the package was shipped via USPS. The bonus to USPS would be that they now deliver on Sundays!  In the USA, mail service is already on Saturday so this mean 7 days a week you can get things from Amazon.. that is, when USPS works!  My most recent package didn't arrive in the 2 days and unfortunately it was going home with a friend (from Canada) so now I would have to ship it to them. Customer Service at Amazon is also pretty amazing as I was told to simply let them know how much it costs and they will cover it... the part that I was very sad about is in order to send it in any reasonable reassurance it would get there, I sent it UPS and so the $60 items which was initially shipped for free (2 day amazon prime) was now being shipped to Canada for $127.. knowing that a full year of Amazon Prime is $99, the customer service rep could have just dismissed the issue by crediting my account for another year and I would have been quite happy but instead they covered the costs of shipping this package. Pretty awesome but what does that do to the bottom dollar of the company? Amazon is huge, we all know that, but according to the share holders they are losing money... it is no wonder if they continue to provide this sort of service.  In hindsight, I could have quite easily paid the $3.99 extra and had the package arrive in 1 day, knowing it would have been shipped via UPS it would have arrived on time and I could have saved (amazon) all that money.  So where does this leave other online shopping websites? So long as they offer free shipping at a reasonable time frame they may be ok. The bottom line still must be the cost of the product however, and if I can drive to the local Walmart and buy it for less money and have it NOW then that is still going to win and so the battle for supremacy in home shopping continues!