Amazon Day: All Your Deliveries At Once, For Good Or Ill

Today Amazon Prime gets Amazon Day, a service that'll place all items ordered into a single delivery. This initiative is aimed at people who like the idea of using less boxes – and of getting a bunch of stuff they bought on the internet all at once. Less packaging means less environmental impact, and Amazon Day means you're more likely to feel like you've got a standing appointment with Amazon, a convenience-made-promotion not unlike that of a coupon or a gift card in such a sense.

If you're already using Amazon Prime to get a bunch of stuff, you can choose to drop it all into a single shipment that'll arrive on the day of your choosing. This is really great for people who aren't at home in the middle of the day all week long – especially when it comes to porch pirates.

It's also great because you'll have fewer boxes to dispose of at the end of the week. Unless you're using your boxes to make a cat box neighborhood – in which case maybe you want as many boxes as possible.

According to Amazon's Vice President of Delivery Experience Maria Renz, their test pilot group for this program has reduced packaging "by tens of thousands of boxes" – which is good. That's great, really. In at least a couple of says, it's a really positive move by Amazon.

This is part of Amazon's "Shipment Zero" initiative to reduce their carbon footprint over the next several decades. Shipment Zero is Amazon's vision to get 50% of all shipments to net zero carbon by 2030, then 100% of shipments to net zero carbon at some point after that.

Some people are going to be very displeased about Amazon Day – people who work with Amazon every single day of the year. Those people are retailers who work with Amazon to sell their products separate from those housed in Amazon's main warehouses.

These products will not be included in Amazon Day. Only certain products will be included in Amazon Day because shipping a bunch of products from different warehouses across the country on the same day doesn't reduce the amount of packaging used. This initiative is only a little bit about convenience for the end user, and a lot more about reducing the cost of shipping in two ways.

1. Less packaging from Amazon means lower cost to Amazon.

2. Less packaging takes a smaller toll on the environment (considering all the steps involved from the making of the cardboard and tape to the shipment, etcetera).

You should still use Amazon Day for shipping if you'd planned on buying all your stuff from Amazon anyway. In that case, this is only positive for you, the consumer. Until at some point in the future Amazon stops working with 3rd-party stores and sells only the products they, themselves, sell with Amazon branding. But don't let me convince you – wait it out and see!