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Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

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Re: Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

#31

Post by s0rce »

bootlooped wrote: post #8

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?

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.

Re: Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

#32

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

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.

Re: Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

#33

Post by reaperducer »

WWLink wrote: post #24
bootlooped wrote: post #8

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?

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!

Re: Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

#34

Post by lathiat »

ubertoop wrote: post #23
jonas21 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

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.

Wendover Productions - How Amazon's Super-Complex Shipping System Works (18m49s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qanMpnYsjk

Would also suggest watching pretty much everything else on the channel.

Re: Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

#35

Post by ultimape »

mjevans wrote: post #18
kube-system wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

#36

Post by mkhalil »

bootlooped wrote: post #8

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.

Re: Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

#37

Post by samatman »

mjevans wrote: post #18
kube-system wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might be better for society if you gave me your shoes and jacket in an orderly fashion.

Did that sound like a threat? After all, I didn't provide any reason why it might be good, and you don't want to do it.

Re: Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

#38

Post by dave5104 »

lathiat wrote: post #34
ubertoop wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wendover Productions - How Amazon's Super-Complex Shipping System Works (18m49s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qanMpnYsjk Would also suggest watching pretty much everything else on the channel.

+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.

Re: Amazon permanently shuts down Prime Pantry

#40

Post by michaelpb »

sigjuice wrote: post #5

Good riddance. Most people just want to buy mundane household items without having to solve knapsack problems.

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 :'(

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