Home > News

’Where’s My Amazon?’ Retailer Slowed Deliveries for Low-Income Users

By Laura Tucker
Amazon Lawsuit Delayed Deliveries Featured

Amazon Prime set a precedent with its free one-day deliveries. It makes paying the subscription fee worth it. But what if you paid the fee, only to find Amazon is not honoring its end of the deal? Amazon is the subject of a lawsuit that says the retailer made deliveries slower in two low-income zip codes but didn’t tell those residents, and still accepted the Prime subscription fee.

Lawsuit Accuses Amazon of Deceptive Delivery Policy

I have to admit: it’s the reason I pay for Amazon. I want those free next-day deliveries. Why leave the house if you can get nearly anything you want in 24 hours, and the things you can’t get in that time are usually delivered in 48 hours, and some stuff is delivered overnight. Trust me when I say that I order enough that I make that $139 fee back.

But if you’re not getting that same delivery time as others, you would start to question why you’re paying that $139. That’s the case for people who live in two zip codes in the Washington, D.C. area.

Amazon Lawsuit Delayed Deliveries On Doorstep
Image source: Unsplash

According to the lawsuit filed by the D.C. attorney general, Amazon started excluding residents of the two zip codes in 2022. Members wait for UPS or the U.S. Postal Service to deliver their purchases, and that takes longer than Amazon deliveries.

Not only do these residents have to wait for their deliveries, despite paying the $139 yearly for the Amazon Prime service, no one notified them in 2022 that they would be getting delayed packages. The attorney general believes the residents were misled about the reason for the delay.

The lawsuit is asking for the policy for the 48,000 residents in those two D.C. zip codes who paid for Amazon Prime to be reversed. It is also asking for financial damages.

Good to know: as if slower deliveries weren’t enough, you also need to watch out for these Amazon Prime Day scams.

Slower Deliveries a Consequence of Safety

Not surprisingly, Amazon is not admitting to deceptive practices. Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, says the accusations raised in the lawsuit are “categorically false.” She says it’s made very clear during checkout what day the purchases will be arriving. I have to say, that’s true.

Amazon Lawsuit Delayed Deliveries Same Day

The simple explanation for the slower delivery times to those two zip codes is safety. While it’s important to Amazon to deliver all Prime purchases as quickly as possible to all customers, they are prioritizing safety of their drivers above speedy deliveries.

Further, Nantel said Amazon would like to partner with the attorney general’s office to work on reducing crime and improving safety in those two areas with slowed delivery times.

Amazon’s decision to no longer deliver to those two area codes was due to “concerns about driver safety.” The attorney general agrees that it’s within the retailer’s rights to protect their workers, but they can’t continue to charge people for services they aren’t receiving and not notify them.

Amazon Delays Deliveries 50 Percent Off

One D.C. resident said deliveries went from two days or fewer to taking up to four days – and sometimes more. She noted that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post, lives in a more affluent area in town. She’s asking for the same service he gets.

I have to say that I agree with the D.C. attorney general. Amazon has the right to prioritize driver safety, even at the expense of delivery times, but it seems disingenuous to continue to accept the $139 yearly fee and not inform the customers. If you’re in one of these areas, or similar, that aren’t receiving timely deliveries, follow these steps to cancel your Amazon Prime membership.

Image credit: Unsplash. All screenshots by Laura Tucker

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When Edme Mariotte stared at marks on a wall in the 1660s, one mark vanished inside a six-degree hole where the optic nerve leaves the eye and the brain has been filling in wallpaper, sky, and faces ever since
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.