The enshittification of Amazon "free shipping"


In my homelab, there has been a lot of heat output from my home servers. I run two Minisforum MS-01s running Rocky Linux 9 both with Marvell AQC107 NICs, due to a bug with the onboard X710 NICs.

I remember the copper 10G NICs generate a lot of heat when the onboard 2.5G NICs don’t, so I decided to order new NICs and SFP+ DACs off Amazon.

Little to my surprise that Amazon decided to offer me two-day shipping instead of the one-day shipping when I specify a quantity of two.

Delayed shipping, bah!

Delayed shipping, bah!

I didn’t want to wait two days, so I thought I’ll do two orders: one for tomorrow and one for day after.

Little did I realize that after placing the first order, the TRENDnet NIC now gave me one-day shipping with a second order:

Now I get one-day shippping, why?

Now I get one-day shipping, why?

We all know tech companies are enshittifying. I’m probably assuming Amazon is deliberately using two-day shipping here to save costs because we’re using Amazon for everything anyways.

I usually prefer to avoid Amazon for electronics unless I need an oddball component which isn’t sold by mainstream brands, or if Amazon shipping is faster. And B&H didn’t stock the NICs so I had to support Evil Bezos.

I’m just glad I don’t work at Big Tech anymore. In fact, you can’t pay me anything to go back, not even a $100M AI engineer salary.