Amazon Today

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

~ the goodbye ~

Amazon Today started from a fact that Amazon's whole logistics empire is built to work around: the item you want is frequently sitting on a shelf a few streets away, in a shop that has no idea you want it. The program launched in 2022 and inverted the usual flow. You ordered on amazon.com, a Flex driver went to a participating retailer's actual store, picked the item off the actual shelf, and drove it to your door the same day.

The launch partners were mid-size specialty chains with a lot of physical locations, PacSun and GNC among the first, with Office Depot and Petco reported later. For those retailers the appeal was straightforward, since store inventory that had been sitting there aging suddenly had access to Amazon's demand. For Amazon it was a way to offer same-day delivery in categories and zip codes its own warehouses did not cover well.

On Monday 21 October 2024 the roughly 175 people working on it were told in a meeting that it was over. Most partners stopped on 2 December 2024 and a handful ran until 24 January 2025. Amazon's stated reason was that it had seen a growing overlap between Amazon Today and its own same-day delivery offerings, and most staff were moved to other teams.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was for ~

Between 2020 and 2023 every large retailer in America was trying to turn stores into fulfillment centers, because the buildings were already paid for and already near the customer. Target did it with Shipt and Walmart did it with its own driver network. Amazon, which had almost no stores, had to rent somebody else's.

That is what makes the program interesting in hindsight. It is the only major Amazon logistics product built on the premise that Amazon's competitors owned an asset Amazon lacked, and the deal on offer was a share of the demand in exchange for access to the shelf.

~ the wind-down ~

The cancellation was not a failure notice. Amazon's own same-day capacity expanded fast between 2022 and 2024, adding same-day facilities and pushing perishables and pharmacy through them, and once your own network covers the same promise in the same neighborhoods, paying a third-party retailer for the privilege stops making sense. Amazon Today was killed by the thing it was invented to compensate for.

The partner retailers kept selling on Amazon. They just went back to shipping from a warehouse like everyone else, which for the shopper means the difference between an item arriving in the afternoon and an item arriving on Thursday.

~ the distance ~

None of this reached me and it was never going to. Amazon did not open a Turkish storefront until September 2018, roughly twenty years after I first got online, and what launched here was a marketplace rather than the logistics organism that American shoppers describe. Same-day delivery from a physical store is not exotic in Istanbul or Ankara, but it arrives through Getir or Trendyol, or through a shop that has always been willing to put a courier on a motorbike, not through a Flex driver on an Amazon route.

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