Amazon's non-Prime Shipping

Since I’ve taken it upon myself to rail about Amazon’s behavior, here’s another thing.

Does Amazon actually delay delivery for it’s non-Prime customers? In the times I have not had a Prime account, it seems that orders are delayed in being filled on purpose. It seems like they make an effort to delay picking and filling the order, not really changing the shipping method itself.

This statement is based on two (unscientific) observations. First, when I ship things myself, delivery time isn’t really affected by the type of shipping tier that I choose unless it’s “Overnight”. The overnight shipments get there the next day. The others get there in two or three days – what I typically see with Amazon prime. The amount of money I pay makes no difference in shipping time unless I want something “overnighted”.

Second, when I order something non-Prime, Amazon goes silent on the order for a couple of days, then I get a notification that something has shipped and it arrives two or three days later. So the only difference seems to be the time it takes Amazon to pack and ship the items, not the method the carrier uses to ship something.

Since Amazon has such a highly automated picking and packing operation, I find it hard to believe that there needs to be any difference in the pick and pack time between Prime and non-Prime orders. I suspect that they just stick the non-Prime orders in a queue somewhere that intentionally holds them back from being fulfilled until a few days later.

Could be that I’m just full of hooey. It would be nice to hear from someone that actually knows what happens. Somebody must know.