Amazon Prime Now

» see primenow.amazon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Amazon did not sell anything in this country until September 2018, and when it finally arrived it arrived as a website. A website travels. A fleet does not. Prime Now was vans and bicycles and a rented building close enough to a city center that a driver could get back within the hour, which is the one part of Amazon that has to be rebuilt from nothing in every place it operates. So the two-hour promise was never on the table here, and the reason is not that Turkey was overlooked. It is that the promise was made of concrete and diesel.

It opened in December 2014 in parts of Manhattan, run by an Amazon vice president named Stephenie Landry, and the offer was simple enough to fit on a button: one hour for $7.99, or two hours for nothing, if you were a Prime member. The catalog was small on purpose, tens of thousands of items instead of the hundreds of millions on the main site, because everything on offer had to be sitting in one building a short drive from your street.

It spread quickly for something so physical. London took it in June 2015 and Birmingham, Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool followed. Japan and Singapore came next. In Europe it ran in Milan, Rome, Paris, Madrid and Munich, and India got it in February 2016 under the name Amazon Now, launched in Bangalore and renamed Prime Now in May 2018.

On 21 May 2021 Amazon said it would retire the Prime Now app and the Prime Now website worldwide by the end of the year. In India, Japan and Singapore the folding-in had already happened. Nothing about the service was described as a failure, and nothing about it stopped.

~ the record ~

~ the two hour promise ~

The interesting thing about Prime Now was that it inverted the company. Amazon spent twenty years learning to put enormous warehouses in cheap places an hour outside town and move goods to you overnight. Prime Now required the opposite: small buildings in expensive districts, stocked with a narrow selection, staffed for bursts.

The app carried the consequences of that. It had its own icon and its own cart, and it had a tip screen for the driver that the main Amazon app did not offer, because for once you were dealing with a person who came to your door with a bag rather than a package left on a step. It also carried an entire restaurant delivery business inside it for a while, which reached more than seven thousand restaurants across twenty American metros before Amazon closed that in June 2019.

~ what it cost to keep ~

Two hours is an expensive number. Every order is one trip for one household, and the window is short enough that a driver cannot batch the route into anything efficient. The economics only work if the building is full of exactly the right things and the orders come in thickly enough to fill a van going in one direction.

Then Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017 and suddenly owned several hundred small buildings in expensive districts, already stocked and already staffed, sitting close to the customers who order groceries at short notice. Amazon Fresh grew into the same slot from the other side. By 2021 the standalone hubs and the standalone app were a duplicate of a capability the company now had twice over.

~ the name and the thing ~

This is a grave for a brand rather than for a service, which is a rarer kind. In most of the cities Prime Now covered you can still get groceries in two hours from Amazon. The van still comes. What went away was an icon, a separate login flow and a set of URLs, absorbed into the main app the way a company absorbs an experiment it has decided to keep.

Still worth marking. For seven years there was a second Amazon on the home screen, one that behaved nothing like the first, and people who lived in those few dozen cities learned to reach for it when something ran out at an inconvenient hour. That habit outlived the icon by a while, which is usually the sign that a product was real.

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