Last Saturday, I ordered some ethernet wire and patch cables to help my cousin pre-wire his house. Estimated delivery was Wednesday.
Wednesday I check status, "Estimated delivery February 1st. (Wednesday). Status: Preparing for Shipping. And it had a UPS tracking number? Tracked it and UPS said "A label has been created but UPS has not received the item yet." WTF?
We were supposed to prewire tomorrow so I checked Thursday, no change, checked this morning, no change.
Chatted with Amazon and let them know I was very unhappy. Immediately escalated to a supervisor. "Sir this item is stuck in our warehouse, I will file a ticket for you."
I said - "No offense, I am not upset with you personally, but I don't believe it is stuck in the warehouse. I can place the same order right now to a Houston address and says it will be delivered tomorrow morning between 7-11am. You are not being given the information by Amazon - this is a problem shipping to our area and I am not the only one who has this issue."
He went through a bunch of other excuses then offered me a $10 gift card. Ok, I'll take it. Now what is the phone number for a supervisor? He asked for my phone number and my phone rang immediately and - it was a supervisor. (So actually, that is pretty impressive, I admit.)
Supervisor proceeds to give me a bunch of excuses.... the items hadn't arrived at their warehouse...If I have an important item I should order it on it's own order... and I finally said "Look - let's go through my past ten orders one by one." And we did, and I showed him that every one of them took four, five, six, seven days to arrive. Even orders with a single item. I said "I can start a new order for this item right now - and it will say it will arrive here on Tuesday or Wednesday, but if I change to a Dallas or Houston address, it will offer to delivery the SAME DAY or the next day. Yes - I get they have Amazon vans there but the point is - last fall two day shipping meant - it would arrive in two days. In fact usually, I ordered today, it shipped tomorrow and arrived the day after. Even on Sundays.
Long story short - I said you need to escalate this because there are a LOT of people in this area who are not going to renew Prime if something doesn't change. He was very apologetic and gave me $50 gift card - so I did net $60 in gift cards for my time.
Maybe if enough of us call and complain and they have to issue enough $50 gift cards they'll finally do something to fix the problem. You would think they could rent a warehouse up here, get a couple dozen Prime vans and run and 18 wheeler or two up from the Humble distribution center every day.
Edit: So, I met my mail carrier at the mailbox today and asked him "What is going on with Amazon packages lately?" He responded that they (the carriers) are wondering the same thing. He said in December he was scanning 250 Amazon packages a day, and then a week before Christmas, they just died off. He said he's lucky to do 100 a day now. This does not seem to jibe with the theory that the local PO is telling Amazon to throttle their shipments.
I honestly have no idea what the heck is going on at this point.
Anybody want to start a new business?
https://logistics.amazon.com/ 
