Amazon deliver cats now too, apparently (Photo via)
Amazon has announced that it is going to start delivering alcohol to your door within a few hours with the advent of its new quicker-than-quick delivery service, Prime Now. This is how I die, by the way. This is the beginning of the end for me. This is the first step towards finding me, sticky and naked and drunkenly slipping into the abyss, in a pool of my own wine vomit on the floor of my trendy east London flatshare.
On Tuesday, the company confirmed it would be providing alcohol deliveries in the Seattle area (where its US HQ is based) within one or two-hour windows for anyone subscribing to its annual Prime delivery service. The Prime Now thing they’re doing is being expanded in the US (New York is the current testing ground for expansion, but 17 cities US-wide have been announced) and in the UK, with the London version launching in June. No official word on when the “booze train” feature will roll out and away from Seattle, but it can’t be long, can it.
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It’s estimated that 40 million users worldwide now subscribe to Prime, although it’s hard to know exactly how many of them signed up for a trial over Christmas because they forgot to do any Christmas shopping and, as surely as night follows day, also forgot to cancel the aforementioned trial and, now they are begrudgingly on the hook for £79. Those statistics are not available.
Anyway, if you’re also a member of the couldn’t-really-afford-to-lose-£79-in-January Amazon Prime Havers Club and you’re currently thirsty: Prime Now offers deliveries within an hour for £6.99 and no-additional-cost deliveries within two-hours for free. THE FUTURE IS NOW. THE FUTURE IS A DELIVERY DRIVER SPRINTING YOU SOME HAIR GEL AND A LENA DUNHAM PAPERBACK. IN THE FUTURE, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WAIT MORE THAN 120 MINUTES FOR SOME DEODORANT.
What I suppose I enjoy most about all this is that after 21 years of expansion and infrastructure and drones and damaging warehouse conditions and delivery services and development – after all that, Amazon are only now delivering at just below the speed of your average London drug dealer. I could seriously text someone called “Dammo” right now and ask for “an eighth of lemon”, and he’d pull up in an exquisitely blacked-out BMW before the afternoon is out.
Can Amazon compete with that? Can Amazon compete with a man who decided once that the name Damien was too time-consuming and complex to say, and so truncated it? It cannot. A £30 billion company brought to its knees by a kid in tracksuit bottoms who has a hammer in his glovebox for when things get a bit perky.
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Anyway, this is all just one step nearer to total market domination from Amazon, and I for one embrace it.
“Oh, but they didn’t pay tax,” people say, as they one-click order some candles and a big box of cat food. “But they treat their warehouse workers like fried shit,” they say, signing into Amazon Prime on their Kindle Fire. “The thing I have against Amazon is they undercut the market just to dominate the field,” we preach, don’t we, before shopping around and realising that, actually, Amazon really is the cheapest place to get the new Metal Gear Solid game, and… I mean, would it be so bad if I ordered it there? I mean, I pay my taxes. I’m just a man. It can’t hurt, can it, just one man, buying one copy of Metal Gear Solid? And maybe some wine and beer? And some on-sale Lego?
And then we find ourselves, all of us, in a dystopian future where all other shops have been ground down to dust and ashes, and we’re fellating the big glowing tick of the Amazon logo like a penis, crying and sobbing – undoubtedly, we’re debasing ourselves at the high church of commercialisation – but also, with our one free hand, browsing the 3-for-2 offers on the latest books. Let he who is without an eight-year shopping history on Amazon.co.uk cast the first stone. We are none of us without sin. Enjoy your wine, spirits and beer.
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