Amazon Grocery (Prime + Fresh)
I have tried, genuinely tried, to make Amazon work as a weekly grocery source. I’m done. Today’s the day I stopped, and I’m not calm about it.
Went to shop this morning and got this:
“Our shelves are restocking.” It’s a fucking web page. Not a storefront with people walking around, not a warehouse aisle, not a shelf anywhere in physical reality — a website, telling me it needs time to put invisible groceries on an invisible shelf. And this is Amazon. The distribution company. The one whose entire reason for existing is logistics at scale. If your catalog system is down, your catalog system is down — say that. Don’t cosplay a supermarket at me when the thing you’re actually bad at, apparently, is the website.
Afternoon, it got worse. I had a Fresh cart and a Prime cart running at the same time, because that’s what Amazon makes me do every single week to buy groceries — two separate fulfillment networks, two separate minimums, two separate carts, for one grocery order. “Normal for me” the way using health insurance to half-cover a medical bill is normal for me: I do it because the alternative is worse, not because it’s remotely okay that it exists. I fucking hate that I have to run two carts for this. On top of that, Amazon decided, on its own, to drop a cabbage into the Prime cart instead of the Fresh cart it obviously belonged in. I don’t have a theory for why. I’ve stopped trying to have one — this whole setup is such a mess I’ve given up on understanding what it does or why.
Didn’t catch it before Fresh went out — delivery #2 for the week had already been sitting delivered at my house for hours by the time I got to the Prime order. Go to finish that one, and it stops me cold:
A cabbage. It can’t ship a fucking cabbage. To the address it put the cabbage in front of me at. In a cart it put the cabbage in itself. On a subscription I pay every single month specifically so groceries — vegetables, the most basic grocery item that exists — can get to my door. I pull it, fine, whatever, let me just get the rest of the order same-day instead. Amazon’s answer:
No windows left. Weekday afternoon. Right after it spent twenty minutes fighting me over a vegetable. So now I’m bailing on my own Prime order mid-checkout and moving it to Instacart — delivery #3 for the week, for what should’ve been two orders.
This isn’t a bad day, that’s what gets me. This is a regular fucking Tuesday with Amazon grocery. Split fulfillment networks that don’t talk to each other, minimums that never line up, items that teleport into the wrong cart, and now apparently produce that can’t even reach my own address despite Amazon being the one that offered to sell it to me. I’ve tried adjusting around every version of this. I’m done adjusting.
Amazon is off my grocery list. Not “reconsider next month” off — the way I handle anything I’ve decided is a genuine lost cause: make the call, walk away, don’t reopen it for years. I’ll look at it again around 2029, maybe. Already cancelled the $9.99/month subscription that was supposedly the thing making any of this workable:
Instacart costs more per item some weeks. Fine. It doesn’t do this to me. It just delivers what I ordered, once, without a fake restocking screen, without teleporting vegetables, without telling me a cabbage is unshippable to the house it just offered to ship it to. That’s a bar Amazon apparently can’t clear anymore.
1/5. And that’s being generous.
Update, same day: Amazon Help replied to this on X a few hours after it went up, apologizing and asking me to fill out a form with my handle and “any relevant details” so they could “escalate”:
I said no. Everything above is one order’s worth of a system that’s built wrong — two fulfillment networks that don’t talk to each other, a catalog that can’t tell what’s shippable to an address it already put the item in front of me at. That’s not a ticket, it’s an architecture problem, and it’s not my job to hand over more details so a support rep can read me back the same page. Declining and posting it here instead, for the honesty of the record: they did reach out, and I said no.
Research and drafting assistance for this piece, including image handling, was provided by Claude (Anthropic). This account describes a personal experience documented from the author’s own records rather than a claim resting on external sources; the analysis and opinions are my own.