My First Amazon Prime Now Experience

I had just eaten lunch one day last week when I noticed that my phone was almost out of batteries. I had, yet again, forgotten to charge my phone the previous night. Draining my phone of batteries has been a recurring event ever since I lost my second phone charger that I kept at work. Clearly it was time that I get another phone charger.

These days I buy almost everything on Amazon, and since I have Amazon Prime I generally get things within 2 days. But I’m also lucky enough to have access to Amazon Prime Now - which promises free 2 hour delivery. I had never tried out Amazon Prime Now due to the ambiguous tipping situation (it’s optional). However, my desire to see if I could get a phone charger delivered to me before my phone actually ran out of batteries proved to be too enticing of an experiment to pass up. I opted for the premium 1-hour delivery window ($7.99 extra), and acquiesced to their “optional” but preselected tip of $5, and submitted my order at 2:21pm.

The app immediately took me to an uber-like screen where it showed me as one pin, and my item as the other pin. Not coincidentially, the pin for my item was located at Amazon’s rumored Herald Square store/wearhouse. Within 20 minutes there emerged a large dot with the name “James” hovering over it. This dot was covering up the Amazon’s pin, and was presumably meant to represent my delivery person, James, who was now on his way.

A few more minutes pass, no movement on the dot, but Amazon sends me a text message saying that my item is now out for delivery. I keep looking at the map, but no movement. My phone alerts me that I have less than 10% battery left, but still no movement on the dot. I check a few more times, and nothing. Then, at 2:47 - just 36 minutes after I had submitted my order - I hear my name being announced at the front desk. My delivery person, James, was there with a brown paper bag with an Amazon Prime Now logo on it. My phone charger had arrived - and with just enough time to avoid running out of batteries!

Overall it was quite an impressive logistical feat to be able to pull this off. I’m sure Amazon will fix the map glitch, which prevented me from tracking my delivery person in real time, but honestly that wasn’t terribly important. I still have reservations around Amazon marketing this as a free service and then pressuring you into tipping. But those two things aside I’ll probably end up using Amazon Prime Now again - it’s amazingly convenient and instantaneously rewarding.