No Post On Sundays?

It would appear that, at least in the UK, Amazon are now using owls to make their deliveries. I ordered a small item from Amazon late on Friday and didn't pay any attention to the expected delivery date, I just assumed that, as I have Amazon Prime, it would arrive on Monday.

When I got up this morning I had an e-mail which said that my parcel was out for delivery today, i.e. Sunday. My initial thought was that it was a glitch in their system, and that it had actually only been dispatched today and would be delivered tomorrow.

Given that the weather today has been great, we spent the afternoon in the garden working, but I did keep an ear out for a delivery vehicle just in case. When it got to 6pm I decided that it really was just a glitch in Amazon's system as who would expect a delivery after 6pm on any day let alone a Sunday. So imagine my surprise when at 7:10pm there was a knock on the door and my parcel was delivered!

Am I Just Unlucky?

I don't think I'm particularly prone to bad luck more than the next guy, which makes me think that amazon.co.uk is having a very bad week.

Over the last two days we should have received three parcels from Amazon. We have Amazon Prime (we order a lot of stuff over the year) which means we have guaranteed next day delivery and the ability to track our parcels. This usually really helpful, but this week it's just been frustrating.

Yesterday I was expecting two parcels, both of which were supposed to be delivered by City Link. When neither parcel had arrived by about 4:30pm I decided to check the tracking website only to find that there were no details after the initial "we have details of your parcel message". I rang City Link only to be told they weren't sure where my parcel was. I decided to give them all the benefit of the doubt and so waited until this morning and then rang again. This time I was told that Amazon had never passed the parcels on to City Link! I contacted Amazon who were very polite and helpful and have replaced the missing orders while apologizing profusely.

I should also have had a parcel today, this time via DPD but yet again by 4:30pm no sign of useful tracking info. Rang DPD and got the same story; they never received the parcel from Amazon. Amazon slightly less helpful this time as they want me to wait until the 6th to see if it turns up -- unlikely if they haven't given it to a courier.

Amazon MP3

Amazon finally launched their MP3 store in the UK today. Finally their is a competitor to iTunes in the UK with a reasonably sized catalogue.

Now I've been using iTunes to buy music since before I owned an iPod. I like the service (I detest the actual application) apart from the fact that not all the tracks available through iTunes are DRM free, and even those that are are sold in Apple's AAC format and not as MP3 files. Given it's name the Amazon MP3 store is selling Mp3 files with no DRM.

The new store from Amazon also appears to win on price. Many of the tracks are just 59p which is a saving of 20p when compared to iTunes. A lot of the albums are just £3 which is a bargain as far as I'm concerned. Finally a store that understands that if you sell the product people want at a price they deem fair maybe people will buy it.

Amazing Amazon Offers!

You can often get quite good discount prices on DVDs and CDs at Amazon. Then again sometimes their offers seem to make little sense. Take for example this collection of Ingmar Bergman films with a retail price of £209.99 which Amazon is selling at the greatly reduced price of £209.98 -- a vast saving of just 1p!