Amazon deliveries

[L Austin France]

We subcribe to Amazon prime & recently their deliveries have been remarkable.
An item ordered on Friday was delivered yesterday (sat) & some Torx keys I ordered yesterday afternoon are being delivered today (Sunday) if their tracking info. is correct.
I know there's lots of things against Amazon but recent shopping with them without having to use fuel & time to search around for items I need certainly proves their worth.

[niemeyjt]

Yes - I agree - I use it in the UK (Prime is by country) and there is a delivery arriving at my daughter's today. So much less hassle than traipsing around several stores trying to find if they have an item in stock.

Their return service is also good - if they ever launch in Switzerland they will destroy Digitec Galaxus - our current mail-order store - whose return service is poor.

But it should serve as a wider wake-up call for retail outfits with poor customer service and/or silly parking charges and penalties - in all of Europe, not just France and the UK. I have said before that there are no parking charges and obscene penalties on the Internet.

The only criticism is they scam you out of VAT if you ship internationally - so I try to avoid ever doing that with them.

[L Austin France]

Just found the item ordered in our letter box.
That's about 24 hours, order to delivery & on a Sunday as well.

[Bayleaf]

Yes, usually they're very good, but sometimes things happen beyond their control. I ordered some ramps recently - looks like they were coming from Germany. The sort we all recognise that you can drive a vehicle onto to work underneath.

Well, someone at DHL obviously took a liking to them, because they've disappeared. OK, we got a refund and are now buying some from someone else. How can such a big, heavy item go missing like that???!!!! Let's hope this second lot don't go astray!

[Liz]

Living in a rural area I love online shopping, Amazon and elsewhere.
A few years back older French people here decried online as destroying local shops. My argument was OK, but you have always used catalogue shopping and itinerant tool trucks, what is the difference?
I recently tried to buy a simple type of exterior window blind within a 10 mile radius. No luck. Clickety click, found and ordered, l was not going to waste petrol driving the 25 miles to the next possible shops who can't tell me over the phone if they stock what I need.
Haven't looked locally for things like ink cartridges, hoover bags and lots of simple stuff for ages, why bother?

[Nomoss]

What really annoys me is the refusal of many French shops to tell me the price of something when I phone them.

[L Austin France]

My wife is in our UK 'home town' to visit the kids & has just walked the one mile length of what once was the main town shopping street leading to the harbour.
She reports that what was once a vibrant place is now full of empty shops, druggies, beggars & vagrants & she couldn't wait to get away from the place.
Has online shopping caused the decline of shops or is it the ridiculous high rents & business rates coupled with high energy costs causing this?

[niemeyjt]

Well I suspect a lack of customers is as likely as higher running costs - so my suggestion is things like lack of / expensive car parking as more and more councils look at ways to hammer the motorists to fill their coffers and owners of privately owned land employ cowboy clampers.

[L Austin France]

Well I suspect a lack of customers is as likely as higher running costs - so my suggestion is things like lack of / expensive car parking as more and more councils look at ways to hammer the motorists to fill their coffers and owners of privately owned land employ cowboy clampers.

Yeah, I forgot the obvious parking thing. I was in business in the town 20 + years ago & parking then was available but expensive especially if one just wanted to visit one shop for a quick purchase. Out of town shopping was up & coming with free parking so it was a doddle if your chosen commerce was there.
Notwithstanding the parking thing, the town then was vibrant with shoppers so it wasn't just a parking problem. Maybe attitudes have changed & folk now want to be able to park close to where they shop for little or no cost & are also put off by the costs of buses etc.
The strange thing is that a sister town has just started the demolition of it's in town multi storey car park which is to be replaced with shops & flats so that's a few less hundred parking spaces available.

[Hotrodder]

The last time I visited Plague Island I was amazed at not the amount of boarded up shops but the number that no longer sold anything useful having been replaced by fast food outlets, coffee bars, and restaurants doing takeaways.

I guess people don't do much cooking these days.