Amazon Subscribe & Save.
In theory, Amazon Subscribe & Save is a great idea - you and Amazon know in advance what's been ordered, you and Amazon agree a schedule of delivery dates (so you can plan to be available to receive deliveries), each order should arrive as one delivery (to save planets), and there are discounts (which may or may not save you some filthy lucre).
In practice, Amazon Subscribe & Save is a steaming pile of shit.
Leaving aside issues like price fluctuations (most items seem to become magically cheaper just after they've taken payment) and the fact that most orders are split into multiple deliveries, I decided to make a rough & ready chart, plotting items delivered against relative delivery days. They say that a picture's worth a thousand words... most of my thousand are expletives.
Number of items up the side, relative delivery days across the top. If you can't understand that, you should go back to school on Monday.
The chart above includes all ordered S&S items for 2020 and 2021. Ordered items are supposed to be delivered on 4th March, 4th June, 4th September, or 4th December.
Of a total of 68 items ordered, 5 never arrived and only 4 arrived on the agreed selected date. To put it another way, only 5.9% of items were delivered on the agreed selected date, so it's a certainty that someone here needs to be available to receive items for at least six consecutive days every three months.
It's not as if the advisory emails are any use either - yesterday morning I received six emails informing me that all outstanding items would arrive today (Saturday), but those emails were bullshit - all of the outstanding items arrived yesterday (Friday) afternoon. Go figure.
And then there's the packaging... Amazon are trying to do their bit by reusing boxes, but for [insert your preferred deity's name here]'s sake, they could at least try to tape up the sides of the reused boxes. This was today's yesterday's first delivery (three packages):
Yes, this is how it was left on our yard. It's a disgrace.
Like I said, it's a steaming pile of shit.
