Your Amazon Prime Order Could Be Over a Month Late

If it’s not essential, you may not get your Amazon shipment for quite some time.

According to Vox, customers and Amazon merchants have started noticing nonessential items are showing April 21 delivery dates, even if they’re in stock and Prime eligible (which usually means you can get it in one or two days). Other items had a five-day delivery window.

This follows on the heels of recent news that Amazon was banning its warehouses from stocking non-essential items during the coronavirus pandemic through April 5, even as the company itself is hiring up to 100,000 new workers to fulfill orders.

Currently Amazon Prime "2 day shipping" orders are scheduled to arrive on April 21, 2020.

— Matt Dagley (@mattdagley) March 24, 2020

In a statement to Vox, an Amazon rep suggested the company had “changed [their] logistics, transportation, supply chain, purchasing, and third-party seller processes to prioritize stocking and delivering items that are a higher priority for our customers.”

There’s a good Reddit thread where people are comparing delivery dates for certain items, which does seem to vary by zip code and item (no surprise, Amazon Basics items seem to be in stock and deliverable at a normal timeframe).

But there’s no real rhyme or reason to what the company considers essential or what they’re delaying. Loosely, Amazon has defined “essential” items as “baby products, health and household, beauty and personal care, grocery, industrial and scientific, and pet supplies.”

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