Amazon Speeds Up Delivery Even More With 1- and 3-Hour Options


Same-day delivery apparently isn’t fast enough for some Amazon shoppers. The retail giant said on Tuesday it’s adding new shipping options that will get products to front doors within a one- or three-hour window.

The company said in its announcement that the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities across the US, while the three-hour option is now live in more than 2,000 areas. Amazon’s web page at amazon.com/getitfast shows whether those options are available to shoppers for their location. More than 90,000 products will be available for those shipping windows, the company said.

For those who can’t get those services (including the author of this post, who lives between Austin and San Antonio in Texas), a message will display: “3-hour delivery is currently unavailable. Check back at a later time or shop products with Same-Day delivery below. “

Pricing for the faster delivery options is not cheap: It’ll cost you $20 for one-hour delivery and $15 for three-hour delivery for those without an Amazon Prime account, or $10 and $5 for customers who subscribe to Prime.

Last year, the company rolled out faster Amazon delivery options to 4,000 additional areas

In a video of the podcast Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon’s CEO of worldwide stores, Kandace Kapps, the director of the company’s same-day strategy team, spoke in more detail about the challenges of fast shipping. Kapps discussed shifts in customer buying habits over the last few years, such as more people buying household essentials like toilet paper on Amazon.

She said that Amazon can deliver so quickly by placing same-day delivery hubs close to customers in metro areas and by getting products ready to ship within 15 minutes, aided by warehouse robots.

“I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver to their doorstop,” Kapps said. 

Herrington said fast shipping increases sales: “When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up.”

Other retailers, including Walmart, have been adding same-day delivery options or exploring other ways to speed up shipping times to compete with Amazon. 

Removing buyers’ moments of hesitation

Part of Amazon’s strategy, which has involved a massive buildout of locations, deployment of thousands of trucks, deals with other delivery services and investment in logistics software, is actually pretty simple: being there when people need last-minute items or make impulse buys.

“It’s about removing the last moment where you would’ve reconsidered the purchase,” said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at coupon and promotional-code website RetailMeNot, a sibling site of CNET. “It changes how you shop, not just how fast you get things.” 

Carls said that Amazon’s super-fast delivery is removing the timeframe when people might change their minds about a purchase.

“There used to be a gap between deciding to buy something and actually having it. That’s when you’d price check, rethink it, or decide you didn’t need it after all,” she said. “This closes that gap.”

The retail expert said that competitors, including Walmart and Target, have been speeding up delivery times in some markets. Still, they’re not matching Amazon’s scale or product range at those speeds or levels of consistency. 

“And that’s what starts to make everyone else feel slow,” Carls said. “Amazon’s advantage is how tightly connected its technology, inventory and delivery networks are, which makes this level of speed more repeatable.”





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Recent Reviews


A new class-action lawsuit, filed on Monday by three teenage girls and their guardians, alleges that Elon Musk’s xAI created and distributed child sexual abuse material featuring their faces and likenesses with its Grok AI tech.

“Their lives have been shattered by the devastating loss of privacy, dignity, and personal safety that the production and dissemination of this CSAM have caused,” the filing says. “xAI’s financial gain through the increased use of its image- and video-making product came at their expense and well-being.”

From December to early January, Grok allowed many AI and X social media users to create AI-generated nonconsensual intimate images, sometimes known as deepfake porn. Reports estimate that Grok users made 4.4 million “undressed” or “nudified” images, 41% of the total number of images created, over a period of nine days. 

X, xAI and its safety and child safety divisions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The wave of “undressed” images stirred outrage around the world. The European Commission quickly launched an investigation, while Malaysia and Indonesia banned X within their borders. Some US government representatives called on Apple and Google to remove the app from their app stores for violating their policies, but no federal investigation into X or xAI has been opened. A similar, separate class-action lawsuit was filed (PDF) by a South Carolina woman in late January.

The dehumanizing trend highlighted just how capable modern AI image tools are at creating content that seems realistic. The new complaint compares Grok’s self-proclaimed “spicy AI” generation to the “dark arts” with its ease of subjecting children to “any pose, however sick, however fetishized, however unlawful.”

“To the viewer, the resulting video appears entirely real. For the child, her identifying features will now forever be attached to a video depicting her own child sexual abuse,” the complaint reads.

AI Atlas

The complaint says xAI is at fault because it did not employ industry-standard guardrails that would prevent abusers from making this content. It says xAI licensed use of its tech to third-party companies abroad, which sold subscriptions that led abusers to make child sexual abuse images featuring the faces and likenesses of the victims. The requests ran through xAI’s servers, which makes the company liable, the complaint argues.

The lawsuit was filed by three Jane Does, pseudonyms given to the teens to protect their identities. Jane Doe 1 was first alerted to the fact that abusive, AI-generated sexual material of her was circulating on the web by an anonymous Instagram message in early December. The filing says she was told about a Discord server by the anonymous Instagram user, where the material was shared. That led Jane Doe 1 and her family, and eventually law enforcement, to find and arrest one perpetrator.

Ongoing investigations led the families of Jane Does 2 and 3 to learn their children’s images had been transformed with xAI tech into abusive material.





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