Tuesday was a slow news day on the interwebs, huh? Media sites here, here, and here all spent some writing power reviewing Amazon Prime Now, the company’s new instant delivery service in New York City. We tested it out, too, as part of our fancy new web show in partnership with MSNBC: Code Forward. Spoiler: Prime Now works!
Yes, Amazon’s One-Hour Delivery Is Magic. No, WunWun Isn’t Throwing in the Towel. (Video)
The competition will not go gently into that good night.
Anthony Quintano for Re/code
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
The service, which is only available to members of Amazon’s $99-a-year Prime membership program, lets Prime members in Manhattan get free two-hour delivery from a limited selection of products — around 25,000 at launch, Amazon says. One-hour delivery costs $7.99.
But Amazon is actually a bit of a latecomer to the instant delivery space. Over the past two years, startups such as Postmates, WunWun and Instacart have sprung up to ferry stuff from local stores to your doors in an hour or less with just a tap on your smartphone. We call it the instant gratification economy.
My colleague Lauren Goode and I sat down for an on-camera chat on Tuesday with WunWun CEO Lee Hnetinka, who is convinced that there’s a long-term business in offering one-hour delivery — for free. Amazon be damned. Here’s the clip.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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