Stress Buying and Super Shipping are Here

Last week, I (grudgingly) ordered something small from Amazon after being unable to find it locally. Something new popped up as I was checking out.

“Need this fast? Choose 4 am – 8 am shipping!”

I’ve always wondered how they complete deliveries when everything from a toilet brush to candy seems like an urgent order. Long ago, I thought they should offer “no rush” shipping, and now they do. (Get out of my head, Bezos!)

But when you think about it, that doesn’t fit the Amazon brand. It wants EVERYTHING to seem urgent. That’s what social media tries to do as well. Creators make everything seem critical when really, very little is so important.

There’s nothing I could order that I’d feel comfortable saying, yeah, make that delivery driver get here before sunrise! I didn’t click the box and accepted regular next-day shipping.

Surge Pricing is Real

My cousin and I spent a couple of days booking transportation and stays for our upcoming trip to eastern Europe. If I left a travel website and later returned, the price usually increased by a few dollars a night. If you order diapers at 3 am from Amazon or Walmart’s websites, they’ll cost more than during the day. The sites are designed to know whether you’re likely to be desperate and willingly to pay more. It applies to Uber pricing too. The Uber app might only show you the more expensive “comfort” ride at night. They’ve decided nighttime riders are likely to agree to the higher price.

Those are findings from research reported by Ronan Farrow who breaks it all down in a 3-minute video. It applies to some grocery stores as well. And even if our local stores aren’t doing it yet, it’s probably coming soon. Families like the Westons and the Waltons and Amazon’s Bezos are behind this strategy.

Maybe you can see where this is going. Remember how WestJet said it was putting cheap seats on its planes to save us money? That wasn’t the plan at all. The cheap, cramped seats would cost the current rate. The old regular seats would become “premium” and their prices would go up. Thankfully, that’s been delayed and might not ever happen. All it took was executives from the airline going on a test flight of the tighter seats. It’s amazing what can happen when the suits’ butt cheeks fall asleep.

Which Brings me to Billionaires

Someone whose net worth is ten figures spends a lot of time on how to squeeze more out of us. I’ll never change that. But I can amplify the people who do it differently and leave you with some hope. Like Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott who has given away more money than all the richest men of the world combined. And actor Kunal Nayyar who played Raj on the Big Bang Theory, who made millions while on the show. It was recently revealed that he sneaks into random Go Fund Me campaigns and pays off people’s medical bills. That’s his idea of fun. I like to think that if I had his net worth, it would be my idea of fun, too.