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Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

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Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#151
post #49

I hope they can do a better job than Amazon but I'm not confident. I'm currently gaming their system of one day delivery failure credits because they can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact hat USPS won't deliver to my door and the packages are too large. USPS gets a box, it won't fit, they take it back to the post office and tell me I can pick it up the next day. I contact amazon, tell them it's late because…

I am in the same boat. I have called and begged and pleaded and escalated to get Amazon to stop using USPS but it just doesn't work. Here in Brooklyn if anything is unusually large they just punch in "attempted delivery" a couple days in a row and send it back. They don't even bother trying, I'm pretty sure it never even leaves the regional sort facility and gets on a truck. I'm not sure I blame them. Amazon once use…

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Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience with FedEx until I filed a BBB complaint. That got things sorted out quick.

I am still amazed that people take BBB complaints seriously. It’s just like getting a bad Yelp rewiew.

I think the fact that they're so popular is, ironically, why they're so effective. They're not a government organization, they have no enforcement arm, yet complaints there can and have resulted in satisfaction when other avenues fail.

Yelp, on the other hand, is where "let me speak to your manager"-types go to bitch about restaurants screwing up their orders. BBB complaints seem a bit more fleshed out.

Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#153
post #104
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the same boat. I have called and begged and pleaded and escalated to get Amazon to stop using USPS but it just doesn't work. Here in Brooklyn if anything is unusually large they just punch in "attempted delivery" a couple days in a row and send it back. They don't even bother trying, I'm pretty sure it never even leaves the regional sort facility and gets on a truck. I'm not sure I blame them. Amazon once use…

Bad delivery is a huge annoyance over here in The Netherlands too. My experience is that the big webshops (Coolblue, Bol.com) are excellent with their deliveries, but as soon as you order from some of the smaller stores or via the brand-sites, it's a mess. DPD in particular is absolutely atrocious, and that's been my experience in multiple cities in Europe. The problem seems to be that the local webshops work with th…

DPD is the worst. They almost returned my package to the origin because they couldn't call me to deliver once, I asked why couldn't they knock, ring the doorbell or leave a notice and while trying to excuse themselves they accidentally told me the number they tried to call - it was the package shipping number. :facepalm:

Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any area in particular that seems problematic?

For me it's board games, and more specifically expansions. The last expansion I bought had slightly differently colored card backs than the base game, meaning you could tell if someone had expansion cards and making the expansion unusable. I had to compare them both to a friend's sets to know which was counterfeit.

Outside of the biggest major game manufacturers, that's long been a problem with legitimate board games having inconsistencies like that, for instance because different printers with slightly different process were used for different print runs of the same expansion.

Its perhaps a sign of the times that counterfeits are perceived to be common enough that the natural assumption when this occurs is "counterfeit" not "QC/supply chain issues".

Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#155
post #18
post #2

That is maybe the first sign of brick and mortar retail finally waking up. Considering that technically they have one fulfillment center in every small town they should be able to achieve really short lead times out of these. Fulfillment Centers obviously being all their stores. While it is a non-trivial thing to connect all these stores to last mile courier services it is not necessarily overly complex. Just what th…

A major hurdle to that is finding the space to pick and pack then organize the packages for pickup by whatever delivery company they create or partner with.

I saw what Target's same day pickup / two day shipping workstation looked like on Black Friday last year. It was two 6' workstations with a shared printer, tape dispenser, air pillow machine between them. Maybe 4 employees packing, and 2-3 employees picking items and either bringing them up front or to the back. I think they had a handful of pallets that they stacked all the boxes on and left at the loading dock for UPS. New orders were coming in every 10 seconds or so, but they could have handled 10X that.

Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#156
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lowes bought the Craftsman line from Sears so you can still buy good hand tools.

Good may be a bit too generous to Craftsman. I've never found their hand tools reliable. Their powertools less so. Worst was a ratchet where the first thing to break wasn't one of the teeth on the gear, but instead the pawl, meaning instead of simply slipping and still being mostly usable, it became immediately useless. Which is just annoyingly bad engineering.

Depends on one's window of time when buying Craftsman. Anything in the last ten years is definitely crap, fifteen-twenty years ago was becoming hit-or-miss, anything older than that was definitely good. My father was a tool-and-die maker since the 60s, and always had Craftman tools. Err, correction, still has; I'm sure a ratchet or two has been lost to abuse (i. e., "cheater bar"), but last I checked the vast majority of his collection is intact.

So when the old farts bemoan that old Craftsman quality, they're talking two decades ago.

Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't renew my Amazon Prime after they pulled this "one-day" BS on me more than once: https://i.redd.it/p816orvkrr021.jpg Hopefully Walmart will have better shipping logistics.

Not to point out the obvious but your example is an order placed on Cyber Monday...so the biggest online shopping day of the entire year...you might experience a slight delay that week.

I don't have a problem with delays... I have a problem with them being deliberately misleading about delivery times on their product pages.

It happened several times where they used the term "same/one-day" delivery yet at checkout the delivery time was 2-3 days out. So... in other words... they knew damn well what the time frame was, but deliberately chose to use "bait-n-switch" like methods.

Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#158
post #113

I'm pulling for Walmart! I've seen the death of so many stores that I dearly miss (Sears, JC Penny, etc.). I can no longer get good hand tools or good t-shirts locally. And, the online stores are full of rip-offs and forgeries. Walmart is the last bastion of honest retail (where I can talk to a fellow human in person). I really hope they make it.

Lowes bought the Craftsman line from Sears so you can still buy good hand tools.

Lowes might sell Craftsman tools, but Stanley bought the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craftsman_(tools).

Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#159
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the same boat. I have called and begged and pleaded and escalated to get Amazon to stop using USPS but it just doesn't work. Here in Brooklyn if anything is unusually large they just punch in "attempted delivery" a couple days in a row and send it back. They don't even bother trying, I'm pretty sure it never even leaves the regional sort facility and gets on a truck. I'm not sure I blame them. Amazon once use…

The USPS is all shenanigans. I had something shipped to my office and they told me they "couldn't access the building." There's a USPS location inside the building.

Funny thing is ordering out of the USA to Canada is way better with usps because they turn the package over to Canada post, which if anything only charges gst. Everyone else rips you off with huge brokerage fees

Re: Walmart announces next-day delivery, firing back at Amazon

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the gas wasted on each trip.

That's covered by Amazon in the shipping cost they pay to move from their warehouse to the USPS sorting facility. USPS isn't making any additional trips to not deliver packages. They drive out to the mailbox cluster every day except Sunday (a day which Amazon also said they'd deliver a package via USPS...) and go no further.

You have a cite for that waste? That's not remotely correct. The marginal cost to ship one package across the world is literally pennies, that's why our junk is so cheap. The cost to drive to one store for one shopping trip is two orders of magnitude higher.

Buy online and save the planet. I'm serious.

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