Paladin wrote: ↑Wed Mar 18, 2020 8:19 am
Excaliber wrote: ↑Wed Mar 18, 2020 8:11 am
Amazon is halting shipment of "nonessential" items through April 5.
Details
here.
The longer version is a bit more descriptive:
Amazon will now focus on delivering products in the following categories:
baby products;
health and household (including personal-care appliances);
beauty and personal care;
industrial and scientific, and
pet supplies.
“For products other than these, we have temporarily disabled shipment creation,” the Amazon memo continues. “We are taking a similar approach with retail vendors.”
It appears the suspension of certain items only applies to items that are “fulfilled by Amazon.” Orders that are fulfilled by the reseller will continue as usual.
The public facing Amazon blog, applicable paragraphs updated yesterday, can be found here:
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-ne ... y-covid-19. The Breitbart article references an undisclosed Amazon internal memo, but the public announcement doesn't mention an April 5 date anywhere.
I get the feeling that April 5 five was an internal estimate, not a policy. They're trying to rapidly hire a boatload of people, so maybe April 5 is a shifting guess.
Just FWIW, I use Amazon a lot and have an affiliate account--don't sell stuff through them, but advertise. In my little corner of Texas at least, the U.S. Postal Service has become so completely unreliable that after pressing Amazon about it, they put me on a list that stops USPS shipments...but only "fulfilled by Amazon" orders, not things shipped directly by a 3rd party vendor. After three completely lost USPS shipments from Amazon in 12 months, one of them a $140 refund from Amazon, I guess they decided they would be happy to flag my account as "use Amazon Logistics or UPS only." I assume others who've had lost and refunded USPS shipments can request to be put on the same list.
I confirmed the "only on fulfilled by Amazon" orders thing by accident. Ordered a small water bottle spigot two weeks ago and the Ohio company shipped directly, with USPS. My fault for not checking the "fulfilled by" status closely. You guessed it. USPS says it was delivered, but I was at home on the day claimed and my security cameras back me up that no postal worker ever approached my house that day. That was only an $8 order, so I'm just writing that one off other than my public service announcement here that at some point the federal government needs to scrap the USPS as it exists today and fix it.
The worst USPS foul-up for me was in fall of 2018 when my county property tax bill was never delivered, and was returned to the county. They have a policy that the returned mail signalled I didn't really live in the house, so they removed my homestead exemption...which I didn't realize until I went online to pay my 2018 property taxes...and the county removing the exemption also meant the exemption no longer showed on the school district taxes either. After several calls, the end result was that I paid over $1,500 more in taxes than I owed and had to refile for the homestead exemption with explanation and utility bills showing that I really did still live in the house. Finally got the money refunded in October 2019. All because of the U.S. Postal Service probably sticking that 2018 property tax bill in someone else's mailbox who probably wrote "return to sender, not at this address" on the envelope, and back to the count tax assessor it went.
So if you're "social distancing" (wonder if that will be the word of the year for 2020) staying at home and ordering online, Sam's Club only uses FedEx (to my knowledge) and you can ask Amazon to stop shipping to you via USPS. Because if you're self-quarantining and hours matter to you receiving your shipment, the U.S. Postal Service is days away and in some other neighborhood across town.