If Amazon made it possible for a customer to pick (and pay for the presumed incremental cost of) alternative carriers, they'd have a gold mine of data on customer WTP and carrier quality at the local level.
I suspect that Amazon does not want to put additional cognitive load on the purchaser right at the most critical point of the conversion funnel.
As a customer, I want a delivery time/date and let Amazon figure out how to do it. They're presumably way better at it than I am. If Amazon fails at that, I want to be able to complain without feeling like "oh, it was my fault because I picked Rickshaw Bob as the carrier".
When Amazon would willy-nilly give away a month of Prime when a guaranteed package was late, I would frequently wish I could get a package over to Mail Innovations or SurePost. Both would pretty reliably be late and for most packages, I'd rather have the $10 credit.
> I suspect that Amazon does not want to put additional cognitive load on the purchaser right at the most critical point of the conversion funnel.
> As a customer, I want a delivery time/date and let Amazon figure out how to do it.
The big problem here is that Amazon no longer offers you the ability to pick the delivery date. They'll tell you when your package will arrive, and you'll suck it up.
It's a huge step backwards from the old system, where slow shipping was free, two-day shipping was moderately priced, and one-day shipping was expensive. (Or, with Prime, two-day shipping was free and one-day shipping was $7.99.)
Under normal circumstances, I don't care which delivery company drops off my package. I might develop a preference if one of them is chronically late, or usually damages the package[1]. But I always care what the delivery date is!
[1] Guess what! Amazon's also stopped shipping individual books in boxes with bubble padding. Now they come in manila envelopes. And they usually take damage in transit from being squeezed by the envelope.
> The big problem here is that Amazon no longer offers you the ability to pick the delivery date. They'll tell you when your package will arrive, and you'll suck it up
But this isn't true. You can choose which day you want your package delivered. That's the point of setting your "Amazon delivery day". What am I missing?
>I suspect that Amazon does not want to put additional cognitive load on the purchaser right at the most critical point of the conversion funnel.
They can do it off the side, like how you can select an amazon locker to ship to (but still have your default mailing address set to something else). They could easily use the same flow: just add a "pick your shipper" section similar to how some small time retailers too it and have separate pricing for each (if you're not on prime).
I have no idea where the stock is that they're planning on sending me. If the question is "what carrier service do I feel best about based on my anecdotes?", I am better than Amazon. If the question is "based on all the places from which Amazon could fulfill my order [or combinations of outstanding orders], which one(s) are likely to satisfy the constraints given our large base of actual carrier performance, and which one of those is optimal?", it seems laughable that I'd have any hope of answering that better than Amazon.
(I oversee Logistics software for another e-commerce player. Our network is vastly simpler than Amazon's and yet I'm quite sure we're better at it than our 99.5th percentile customer.)
They have a more accurate results by seeing actual performance numbers, not opinionated results. They see customer retention in certain areas, they see damaged, lost, stolen, late packages. They have numbers for every type of issue and every location.
If they let customers decide, they'd be a lot more limited in both their reporting and their testing.
You can also get a 1x6 piece of oak (or other hardwood) from your favorite lumber yard or home improvement center. I grabbed an offcut of red oak for about $2 a year ago. Thirty seconds with a jigsaw to form a handle.
I have a Matias Tactile Pro that I'm quite fond of, but its loud.
A quick glance at their website and it looks like they now have a "quiet" version. I might have to give that a try...
Perhaps even more important than strict valuation is that banks (and especially institutional investors) have strict rules on the type of investments they can make. One of the most important issues is the level of risk carried. T-bills have historically been considered a (or the) risk-free asset. Suddenly they are not which potentially leads to a lot of selling (lowering prices) or attempted selling (if markets freeze).
Consistency is important. There are multiple styles (Chicago, APA, MLA, AP, etc) - picking one and sticking to it makes your writing more readable. Subconsciously, a reader will come to expect certain constructions or a particular flow (e.g., serial/Oxford comma or not). Think about consistency in areas such as document layout/structure (bullet points or prose), sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation.
