A Sticky Special Delivery

 I plan ahead. I am a planner. I often think I make plans just to make God laugh when they go wrong. Occasionally, She returns the favor. Sunday morning was certainly one of those times. 

The reason I bring up planning is that the reason this particular laugh went off was due to me shopping online for the kid's birthdays. Taila's birthday is a month way exactly. Teagan follows two days later. Since September can get rather busy and expensive, I start planning things in June or July when possible. This year I am lagging a bit. The upside to that is that while I do not have everything mapped out, I do know what I want to gift to the girls. 

I hopped online and placed my orders. Getting 85% of the birthday shopping done in less than fifteen minutes feels like expert level. Amazon may be changing the face of the world in questionable ways, but it does that through making shopping too convenient. Seriously, I have a terrible Amazon problem. 

Then there is Walmart.com. As the original Evil Empire I am surprised at times how behind Wally World is. I understand their business model is hard in the paint on being the biggest big box store in the U.S. They killed K-Mart. They helped kill shopping malls. Wal-mart is just not quite catching up to Amazon as an online retailer. Moving a ship that big has to be a massive task. Don't consider these as criticisms. They are more fun observations. 

One of the things I purchased was a Walmart exclusive. I toyed with the idea of ordering other things from Walmart, but Amazon edged them out on price. There are times I am willing to pay more. This was certainly not one of those times. 

As an example, I try to order my gaming supplies from retailers with brick and mortar locations. If I were frequenting any of the local game shops they would get all of my business regardless of price. Since I am such a charming human I have created some awkwardness locally. As a result, I buy online. I have a favorite online retailer beyond Amazon and I spend about $5,000 a year buying books, dice, card games, and board games. I doubt they even notice, but I am sure to make more of an impact with them than with Amazon. 

Recently, I found myself paying $35 more to order two expansions for Arkham Horror: The Card Game on Amazon than I would have paid with my favorite retailer. Why? Simple, my "local" online shop didn't get the product after it had been released for over a month. It was not their fault. I could go into a lot of details about what likely caused this since I know a fair amount about gaming supplies distributors and Asmodee, but that isn't what this blog is about. I had to cancel my preorder with the little guy and order from Amazon paying more to be sure I got the product which was out of stock everywhere else I looked. I have all of the Arkham Horror The Card Game product except one novella and one satirical expansion. No sense missing out now. Perhaps to my credit, I made an order for some 3rd party 5E D&D books in exactly the same amount of the order I cancelled. It wasn't out of guilt so much as the transaction gave me an additional reason to buy product I was one the fence about. 

As I am working on my Walmart order I keep my Amazon cart open. What I am ordering is under Walmart's $35 free shipping minimum. No big deal, I tell myself. There is always something I can buy from Walmart to get over that hump. Given I was $6 short, I was confident I could make it happen. Rather than add a cheap toy or thing for myself I started looking about my house to see what I was out of. I typically order groceries on Sunday anyway. Nice to start the list. I nearly added a box of Fruit Loops and a back scrubbing brush. I decided those items felt decidedly local pick up. 

After a brief search through my well stocked home I decided the humorous thing to add to my order was duct tape. I keep a full roll around because it is massively useful in a variety of situations. If this blog is breaking the news on duct tape to you, consider me shocked.  I tossed two rolls in my cart because I found it funny and it met the order minimums. I checked out feeling as if I put paid to the initial gift layout. 

Imagine my surprise when my order showed shipped the same night it was placed. Amazon wasn't going to show up until Tuesday which I chose to be Prime day at my house after talking to my mail lady about when mail is typically lighter. I try and be thoughtful since I order a ton of crap. I thumbed away the notification without opening it an thought to myself," Good for you Walmart. Do that speedy service thing."

Then I got a notification this morning that my order was out for delivery.... on a Sunday morning. I immediately cyphered out what this meant. Without looking in the app or my email I accurately predicted that Walmart had used a ride sharing type delivery service to rush two rolls of Duct Tape to my house. 

Before I comment further on this I think it is important to point out that I did not request rush delivery. When I got my order up to their free order minimum I happily accepted that they would ship things the most cost efficient way. When I place orders that way with other suppliers like my online gaming store or for motorcycle parts or gear I am prepared to wait for a slower shipment. Revzilla seems to use a courier tortoise and I don't mind because paying $15.99 for FedEx to expedite feels bad. I am cheap in some weird ways. 

A few minutes after the notification my phone rings. My house is notoriously difficult to find via GPS. I consider this a good thing in most situations, but it is worth steering a FedEx person right. FedEx routinely delivers to the empty house across the street and it cracks me up. When the nice delivery person pulled in I was not surprised when she handed me two bags. In each bag was one roll of duct tape. One silver. One Black. I chuckled to myself back into the house and sat the tape beside my tablet to remind me to blog about this. 

Here is my thought process. Please comment if my logic is incorrect. 

In order to not lose money on shipping inexpensive items for free Walmart has created a policy where the order minimum must be $35 to get free shipping. 

My $30 item is shipping from somewhere not local.

I added $6 (ish) worth of tape to get above the order minimum and save $6.99 in a shipping fee. The item I chose has great utility and several recreational uses. Spending $6 to save $7 and getting something useful is a good deal for me even though Walmart makes a little more on the transaction. 

The duct tape is delivered to me by a service generating a fee (wish I knew what it was they paid her) to Walmart. 

The other item still ships costing them the same amount as it would have if I had paid the shipping fee. 

This would seem to lose Walmart more money. 

I also theorize that the delivery fee has to be at least half the cost of the tape or more. My delivery person was driving a full size Dodge Ram with a 5.7 liter Hemi. Granted she could be operating a gas guzzler and relying on making many deliveries rather than a premium per item. Who knows?

This one example of a bad deal for Walmart probably has little to no impact. Let's say my other item costs $9 to ship to me. Assuming that Walmart is profiting $15 on my $30 purchase their margin of profit lowers down to $6 once they pay for shipping. By adding the additional products they might break even until you account for the local delivery person getting paid. I figure there is a good chance that they at minimum took a lost on the two rolls of tape. 

As a single transaction, bad deal for Walmart and funny business practice. Figure that there may be dozens or possibly hundreds of these transactions a day. There is a very good chance that Walmart is losing money on this model. Billion dollar retailers may do that intentionally to have a loss leader to balance out their taxes, but it still makes very little sense. 

Although it is pretty cool that in the Bible Belt you can get duct tape delivered to your door on a Sunday Morning during church hours. I bet if I had ordered a roll in hot pink it would have showed up just as quickly. These are the things that I find interesting and funny. I likely need to get a life.