>Customer service would waste an hour of my time each time I called to ask and verify just so I could know whether I needed to go to a brick and mortar store to buy the item

Amazon customer service is just the worse. They seem to only know how to press two buttons: "refund order" or "ship item." Or maybe "cancel order" and "return" too. If you need something that doesn't get solved by one of those buttons you're going to have a really, really frustrating experience. Every person I ever talked to has a fundamental lack of understanding of the English language, way worse than your typical Indian call center. You ask a question and they just don't understand what you're asking, they get confused, and tell you some irrelevant information. It's a frustrating, time consuming, back and forth to ask a simple question and sometimes you don't even get an answer and your issue is literally never addressed.

It just astounds me that it's that bad.

But because they reflexively just press "refund order" most of the time the average person thinks they are getting good customer service...

In contrast, Walmart's free two day delivery has been on point.

Yes, I've also had similar experiences. I rarely get 2 business day delivery! Such a scam. The service is amazing only if it works nearly 100% of the time. Otherwise, you don't know if your Prime item will come in 2 days or 6 and it gets really hard to order some things with that uncertainty.

I've been experiencing this as well- seemingly with increasing frequency as they use their own "AMZL" delivery service.

It's rapidly discouraging me from ordering things from Amazon if I'm going to rely on the delivery date. Or casually ordering things (i.e. via Alexa) that I might not be paying attention to the delivery of.

I've had prime since it became available, and this is a very disappointing turn for Amazon from my point of view.

My experience is that things still mostly take two days to ship/deliver, but that they often don't get shipped for random period of time (I just ordered something, for example, that looked like a regular Prime shipping product, but the ship date won't be until the 25th, though it of course notified me of such during checkout, though it's an extreme example). (Tangentially, I only have Prime when they offer a free month and then I cancel near the end of it.)

My wife and I have noticed this lately. If seems like they're trying to play a numbers game by setting too many items as prime and too aggressively setting delivery dates.

Just give me a date that you can hit 99% of the time. I don't mind a missed delivery every now and then, but lately 9 out of 10 deliveries are late.