A better headline would have been "Amazon merges Prime Pantry into regular .com site".
> "As part of our commitment to delivering the best possible customer experience, we have decided to transfer Amazon Pantry selection to the main Amazon.com store so customers can get everyday household products faster, without an extra subscription or purchase requirement"
A better headline would have been "Amazon merges Prime Pantry > into regular .com site".
Not exactly. The products for sale are still for sale on the site, yes.
But the "pantry" product including a volume-based flat rate shipping. You entered products until you were told that your box was filled and then they shipped it to you flat rate. I used to fill it with kitty litter, dog food, cans of stuff and other heavy products.
Now kitty litter is covered by prime free shipping so why pay extra for pantry?
FWIW I used to order kitty litter on Prime. Free shipping and all that. Turns out they hugely marked up the retail price for the free shipping. I’ve since found it on Walmart’s website for about 40% cheaper. Free shipping if I order 5 at a time.
> FWIW I used to order kitty litter on Prime. Free shipping and all that. Turns out they hugely marked up the retail price for the free shipping. I’ve since found it on Walmart’s website for about 40% cheaper. Free shipping if I order 5 at a time.
This is really common on Amazon, even for things that aren't heavy/large. Amazon used to be a place that gave you some of the best prices on things, but that hasn't been true for a long time.
Awhile ago I used to sell a lot of consumer grade electronics on eBay, and one of the first things I noticed was that people were generally willing to pay more to have free shipping. $X+$Y shipping could easily turn into ($X+$Y+20%) + free shipping, and people would do it to themselves -- I'd start iPhones bidding at $0.99, and without fail I'd drum up a ton more business than I ever could with substantially lower fixed prices and accurate shipping costs.
For the expensive-to-ship items that I've specifically looked into I've generally found that Amazon's price with "free" shipping is cheaper than the price with 2 day shipping from anyone else, but more expensive than slower shipping. When I actually need something in a hurry that makes Amazon the best choice, but I've mostly stopped buying from them for recurring purchases that I can do well in advance.
Had mediocre results with pet products on Amazon. Had an entire bag of dog food busted open because of how it was shipped. Often the litter products I get aren't available, and it's a mixed bag with other pet food. I pretty much stick with Chewy except for rare one-offs.
> I used to fill it with kitty litter, dog food, cans of stuff and other heavy products.
And if your experience was anything like mine the few times I used it before I felt too guilty, the delivery folks looooved you for it. (To be fair, I did have a third floor walkup.)
Pantry was actually sold by Amazon and met expected retail parameters. The coffee beans I used to buy through pantry would have a typical expiry date - 18-24 months out.
Once that product moved to normal Amazon, it transitioned to the standard jobbers and hucksters... you’d buy a can of coffee whose best by date was 30 days out.
I think this segment is really being replaced by Whole Foods, it is somewhat constrained by the more limited selection of Whole Foods vs normal grocery.
Also, I think Amazon is getting a run for its money with Target and to a lesser extent Walmart. The target drive-up service in particular is best in class. Every mom is hooked to it, and you see people waiting for drive up orders ordering more in the car.
The Walmart vs Target experience can be store specific. In my area Target moved in before Walmart which means their stores and their parking lots were designed before pickup services were started. This means the pickup experience at the Targets in the area is less than ideal. Walmart on the other hand built their stores and designed the traffic flow around them specifically to support large scale pickup service. As a result the Walmarts in the area seem to do a much bigger pickup business. I know many people that have switched from using Target to Walmart because of the vastly better pickup experience. This is all specific to my area and anecdotal. The original comment was also anecdotal, so I feel less bad about it.
It’s a hard problem for sure and there will be regional variance.
The overall point is that both companies have to some extent enveloped every US population center and have figured out how to use their real estate in a competitive way.
I called out Target because they seem to have gone from 0-60 quickly in my region. Walmart seems to roll out features slower, but is more comprehensive in what they offer.
>Why would someone with prime use prime pantry if it was free shipping anyway?
I used it because there was stuff on there that was (and is) significantly cheaper via Pantry than straight Prime.
And as long as you ordered $35+ worth of stuff from Pantry, shipping was free without that additional Pantry subscription.
Now that Pantry is gone (although they decimated the list of available products on Pantry in the months before shutting it down completely), most of the stuff I used to buy from Pantry is at least 50% more expensive with Prime.
I'm going to be using Amazon for stuff like that a lot less now, because they're no longer competitive with my local grocery store.
And don't even get me started with Amazon Fresh either. Their selection really sucks too, and while their prices are roughly competitive with the local grocery store, the lack of selection just kills it for me.
I'd also point out that FreshDirect[0] is much better than Amazon Fresh in terms of selection as well.
A lot of amazon products are considerably marked up to account for "free shipping," especially cheap items, but Pantry product were actual real retail pricing.
Many of the products weren't available but on Pantry. It was usually a lot of small, low margin items that would be a total loss for Amazon to ship one at a time. Pantry had a minimum order size as well. (similar to most grocery delivery's minimums)
I think it was a product from a different era. When Prime Pantry launched, Amazon hadn't acquired Whole Foods, and they didn't have a story for last-mile delivery yet.
So they had to ship your order from a warehouse, and the only way to do that profitably on low-margin grocery items was to batch them up into a large order in a box of uniform dimensions.
The fact that they no longer need to do this speaks to how far Amazon's logistics have come over the last 7 years.
Among the growing list of documentaries I would love to watch, but have yet to find, Amazon's logistlics solutions is one at the top. Would be very cool to get a deep look at how all the various types of orders are handled.
+1 for Wendover. Haven't seen the Amazon video myself yet, but the channel in general has a lot of videos that I think HN users would find interesting.
The shipping companies guard their operations somewhat zealously. A lot of present company could learn a ton by being present as an engineer, but they keep even dedicated warehouse employees in a frustratingly low-information position.
Prime Pantry covered the whole country--including rural America. Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh are only in parts of urban America--and doesn't service rural America at all.
This doesn't make sense to me. They've always had a solution to batching: minimum order size for free shipping. They've always had plenty of low margin items.
When they launched pantry here a couple years ago suddenly stuff I was _already_ buying regularly on Amazon (pasta, tomato paste, olive oil) I was blocked from buying unless I signed up for pantry and filled a box.
Ahahah, well for at least a year now they had dropped the whole box filling aspects, which made it more or less identical to shopping for anything else. Honestly the only difference then is how it was shipped and what items were available.
That said, I do miss the "Buy 6 items in this category for $6 off" discounts, especially the few times that there were items for less than a dollar in that category. A couple years back I scored absurd amount of Spaghetti Os this way, paying effectively negative money. The only downside is I ended up with a lot of Spaghetti Os :'(
> A couple years back I scored absurd amount of Spaghetti Os this way, paying effectively negative money. The only downside is I ended up with a lot of Spaghetti Os :'(
Experiences like this have taught me to be careful about over optimizing. If I want one of something, and can't use (or don't want to use) more than one, it doesn't matter if buying two (or more) costs less than buying one; I should just buy one.
Yup, and often those tempting bulk discounts, if calculated, only end up saving a few cents or a dollar or something, so the trade off becomes -- Do you want to be payed 50 cents to store extra supplies at your house? Sometimes that's a good trade-off, but often it isn't.
Bulk-buying mentality is so prevalent in the US, it can sometimes be hard to avoid, and I think US urban planning has a lot to do with it as well - e.g. in many cities I've lived in the US, it would take longer to walk to my car than to walk to a grocery store when I was living outside the US, so you get trained to focus on economizing trips.
Some of it is holdover from various economic depressions that are holding on tight to our collective habits.
My wife and I both favor bulk shopping for a majority of our household goods, and when we pondered why, it came down to our families having done the same and followed that thread to our grand/great-grand parents that lived through the great depression.
Having bulk food/household goods means that at any point, if income halts for any reason, we still have X number of meals/tp rolls/litter changes before we enter the danger zone. That was reassuring when we were living paycheck to paycheck.
I do agree on urban planning being a part of it as well. It's a 15min drive to my closest grocery store, and 10 minutes of that is driving out of my neighborhood. Walking to the store is nearly impractical, and generally not safe due to the lack of sidewalks for a fair stretch of the main road.
I also think US (ex)urban planning has a lot to do with it as well. It's influenced by/influences the extra hauling capacity of the over-large median US household vehicle(s), the extra square feet of available/dedicated storage space inside homes, etc.
I have friends that "need" big SUVs if only for their Costco/Sam's Club trips. Whose homes by square foot would be palatial mansions and palaces to royalty of many previous generations, but are cookie-cutter one of hundreds in over-vast neighborhoods full of them, with rooms dedicated to bulk goods storage. It's a fascinating world.
Consumers with their first bulk-buying experiences have always amused me. When Sams Club (Walmart) started doing business around here everyone complained about "having" to buy big lots to get the good deals, and that storage at home was becoming an issue.
I had said many times Amazon had too many ways to order groceries:
1. Amazon.com
2. Amazon Prime Pantry
3. Amazon Fresh
4. Whole Foods via Amazon Prime Now
5. Amazon items via Amazon Prime Now*
*I never figured out what exactly this was. Was it just Amazon.com listing reproduced in the Prime Now app? Was it Amazon Fresh and/or Prime Pantry items? Was it some other set of items?
Don't forget, Subscribe and Save. Prime Pantry had a subscription service too, so people were very confused about what to do - Prime Pantry or Subscribe and Save - and what saves the most money. Also, with Subscribe and Save, it was and still is* confusing as to WHO the product is bought from. On low-profit price-flucting products (e.g. Case of Redbull), the price will differ AND sometimes it will be unavialable via the subscibed listing but if you searched for the item, you'd find it Prime from Amazon. The opposite also happens, when Amazon.com is clearly out of an item, yet somehow your subscribtion still makes it on time.
Honestly, just typing all that made me very confused.
At the end of the day, I don't care from who (as long as they're reputable) or how, just get me my product, in this price range, this many times per period.
*: I still use Subscribe and Safe for the 15% discount - a nice discount if 5 subscriptions are due in the same month.
> I still use Subscribe and Safe for the 15% discount - a nice discount if 5 subscriptions are due in the same month.
I have used Subscribe and Save for the better part of a decade, and I think there were maybe 2 times that my subscriptions lined up this way. I've tried delaying all non-essential subscriptions to get to the magic number, but in my family it almost never happens.
Exactly. I use Prime all the time but never have sorted out the grocery stuff, so I use Instacart.
I did once try something that iirc was Pantry. I searched for Pantry items, they mixed in a bunch of stuff that wasn't Pantry but wasn't obvious about that, and after I filled my shopping cart with various items they wanted to charge me lots of extra shipping. So I backed out and didn't bother with it anymore.
I actually prefer amazon fresh because they only show you items that are in stock. If something is out of stock, its out of stock. Where as ordering through instacart to a regular grocery store, or even the equivalent through kroger, safeway, HEB, etc, you have no idea if items are in stock. Half the time they are out of a pretty significant number of items and either are substituted or just not included entirely. Entire dinner plans can be ruined by a single ingredient being out of stock and you have no idea until after you've already ordered.
Since there are no shoppers going into the physical stores, amazon fresh can actually keep track of what they have.
Amazon Prime Now is basically direct courier delivery from the closest warehouse to your house. the app only presented things that were readily available in your area.
My understanding was that it was distinct inventory at a distinct warehouse optimized for same-day fulfillment. At least in SF years ago, they had cold items like eggs and ice cream (before the Whole Foods merger).
But whats weird is sometimes inventory would be different depending on if you were on the primenow website, or browsing amazon.com for same day or fresh. Sometimes prices were even different - like items would be on sale from primenow but full price on amazon.com.
I very much miss prime now restaurants though. It was the best, no extra fees or anything other than a tip.
Amazon Prime Now was intended to be same day delivery. Amazon Fresh usually wasn't.
AFAIK when you order whole foods, someone goes to the store and picks it up for you. They don't have nearly as accurate inventory tracking as Amazon Fresh/Prime Now do. If you order things from Prime Now, they will arrive guaranteed. (well, 90% guaranteed)
Yep. The advantage of Prime Now/Fresh is that if you put it in your cart, it's yours.
With Whole Foods online, your personal shopper is competing with in-store customers.
On a slightly related note, I've given up on Walmart for groceries. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was among the best. Now it's terrible. My last order, almost 80% of the items I wanted were either suddenly unavailable and removed from my cart at checkout, not available for delivery, or not delivered at all because they ran out just before delivery.
Two times before that, Walmart just forgot my order and left it behind. The first time it happened, my 6pm delivery was delivered at 8am the next morning, once customer service could get in touch with someone in the store. The second time, someone must have noticed it sitting there, because my 5pm delivery got delivered at 1am!
I've given up on Whole Foods delivery because of similar issues as yours. I ordered from While Foods four times. Each time I ordered there were issues. In all three orders I received incorrect items. These were not substitutions but just incorrect items I received. For example in 3 of the orders I received regular cola instead of the zero calorie cola I ordered. For the 3rd order I even sent a message to the shopper asking they confirm they grab the zero calorie version because of my past experience. Still received the regular cola. Each order I had to submit for a refund for at least 2 incorrect items. For the 4th order I received notification that it was delivered but it never actually was. I had to get a complete refund for that order.
In the East Bay Amazon via Amazon prime now carries numerous whole foods grocery items but has much more reliable inventory (it seems) and I actually get the items I order. They are missing a lot of fresh produce and curiously often have slightly different prices. Its fulfilled locally from a warehouse nearby.
It's so confusing and easy to create another cart... I've had groceries end up in the normal Amazon cart, then below that Amazon Fresh cart, and below that Whole Foods Market cart.
There were a lot of internet grocery stores that sold nonperishables in the days before Instacart. It was useful for people in rural locations that weren’t very mobile... and still is for the people who don’t live where fresh grocery delivery is available.
It might be better for society to help the orderly shutdown and consolidation of those areas towards communities dense enough to have a functional local economy.
This would integrate well with new New Deal style programs where people are helped to migrate to jobs that enrich society and those working; and possibly recapture the former community areas as nature reserves or other non-housing lands.
Many people naturally do this. The "I can't wait to grow up and get out of here" trope is universal to basically every small town in America.
Many people with the means to do so also like to leave the city to move to small town America. There's really nothing wrong with either of these life experiences. People's needs are varied, both by person, and by the stage of their life. Living in an economic hotspot is more important to some people than it is to others.
Yet those small towns continue to exist, until some very poor last remnants eventually stop having children and the town dies off in a literal sense.
A market based solution isn't going to repair a fault like a place doesn't want to economically exist on the map. That's a spot for market regulation to exist and limit suffering.
Serious question: do you have any friends or family who choose to live in rural areas?
There are a lot of people who enjoy the peace and quiet, wide open spaces, and tight community that is unique to life outside of urban areas. Some people like the lack of noise, air, and light pollution more than they like instacart.
There are people on this forum who live in rural areas and participate in the economy quite well, and have a higher standard of living than 98% of the world.
it would also be better for society if everyone was grown in a vat and fed a nutrient brine like ants.
Might not be fair to the ants tho. Also given that most of the viruses are spread via city center, centralizing everything like that might not be a viable long term solution for the survival of the human species.
What you have to consider is that there are risk/reward trade offs that are involved in creating economic centers, and most of our history the city has been the place where more people died than were born.
Better not to force it so the norms around this will evolve naturally as people select into the Schelling point naturally.
I for one welcome our new borg hivemind overlords promulgated on back of the concepts of a breakaway society.
That'll last all of about 5 minutes, until some granny goes on the local TV news talking about how she's been forced out of the home she's lived in for the last 70 years.
No loss - Prime Fresh has all the stuff that Prime Pantry had without that whole fill the box or pay a fee concept that was such a pain to work around. Though I have to admit I’m a bit disenchanted at the moment because I’ve had the same prime fresh basket open for almost two months now and all the baked goods I want are perpetually either out of stock or available one day further out then I can schedule. No problems with meat, cheese, or dairy but bakery goods are like catching unicorns.
The move makes sense. In theory Prime Pantry is a good idea, since it reduces the cost of shipping that we're all paying as consumers on "free" shipping items. But the logistics of finding enough stuff to fill the box went against the idea of Amazon, which was think of a thing and order it immediately. I'm not sure if others were organized enough to order their paper towels/soap/toilet paper etc at the same time, but I certainly wasn't.
It was a strange offering from Amazon. They had a very limited selection coupled with poorly boxed items meant that I only tried it twice before giving up on it. All the items in the second and last order I received were thrown in a single box with no effort to protect the contents from each other.
I get the feeling this was a common occurrence, because the interest in it amongst my friends vanished almost as quickly as it started.
I made the mistake of ordering both crisps and bottled juice in one Pantry order. I have no idea why they don't algorithmically structure what to pack together, but I don't think I've ever had a full order arrive in non-broken state from pantry.
Prime Pantry was great... if all you care about is processed food
Every time I tried to use it I couldn't find enough stuff to fill the box with. The bulky stuff (like canned sodas) were more expensive than costco, and I can only eat so many boxes of Cheez-its and Belvita bars
This was just another experiment for Amazon. Shutting it down just means it didn't work out for whatever reason but they'll probably try a similar concept again with a few twists. There are so many 'businesses' under Amazon and many of them compete with each other. Often times this doesn't make sense to the end consumer but these are all just experiments being run to see what kinds of businesses might work.
> "As part of our commitment to delivering the best possible customer experience, we have decided to transfer Amazon Pantry selection to the main Amazon.com store so customers can get everyday household products faster, without an extra subscription or purchase requirement"