Groceries in a flash: We tested ‘Amazon Now’ in Seattle — and got our delivery in 23 minutes

Amazon’s new “Amazon Now” ultra-fast delivery for household essentials and fresh groceries passed the speed test on Tuesday.

During a trial of the newly launched service, it took 23 minutes from the click of the order button on the Amazon shopping app to the drop of the items at my house. That time easily meets Amazon’s promise of 30-minutes-or-less delivery.

Amazon Now is rolling out to eligible neighborhoods in Seattle and Philadelphia. Customers using the Amazon app or website can browse a curated selection of fresh produce, meat and seafood, pantry staples, frozen foods, beverages, household supplies and more.

Customers are able to track their order status and tip their driver within the Amazon Now feature. Prime members pay discounted delivery fees starting at $3.99 per order, compared with $13.99 for non-Prime customers, with a $1.99 “small basket” fee on orders under $15.

GeekWire reported last week that Amazon was building out a new rapid-delivery hub at a former Amazon Fresh Pickup site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. (That site did not fulfill the order I placed on Tuesday.) Amazon this week revealed more details about Amazon Now.

Permit filings detail how employees pick and bag items in a back-of-house stockroom, stage completed orders on front-of-house shelves, and hand them off to Amazon Flex drivers, who are expected to arrive, scan, confirm, and leave with a package within roughly two minutes. The operation is slated to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “much like a convenience store,” according to the filings.

Keep reading for details on how the process works.

The shopping

My wife prefers to do all the shopping for our household and she does so at several different stores including Trader Joe’s, Fred Meyer, Town & Country, and Costco. Our neighborhood, Ballard, isn’t exactly a food desert, and prior to conducting my Amazon Now test, I passed a Safeway en route to stops at Walgreens and Metropolitan Market within a few blocks of my house.

But for the sake of speed and convenience and this test, I browsed the Amazon Now selection looking for a few items we could use. I chose a Red Baron frozen pizza ($4.37); 365 by Whole Foods Market multigrain bread ($2.85); a 4-pack of Duracell AA batteries ($5.47); Saltine crackers ($4.05); Sabra classic hummus ($3.95); and a 6-ounce pack of blackberries ($2.17).

The six items totaled $22.86, plus the $3.99 delivery fee, 64 cents in tax, and a $3 tip for the driver — $30.49 total.

There’s either a reason why my wife does all the shopping or groceries really are very expensive these days, because $30 feels like a lot for six items. Although, $7 of that does include delivery fee and tip — the price of on-demand convenience!

The tracking

I placed the order at 12:38 p.m. and the Amazon app and a confirmation email both immediately estimated that delivery time would be 1:05 p.m.

A status bar in the app showed where my items would be in the chain of events: ordered, packed, out for delivery, and delivered.

Within just a few minutes the status changed from ordered to out for delivery, and I watched as a small Amazon vehicle icon made its way west across Seattle toward my house. The delivery estimate time dropped a couple minutes to 1:02 p.m.

When a white van showed up in front of my house in less than 10 minutes I was sure this story was going to go in a different direction about just how speedy Amazon Now is. But my neighbor was getting a bunch of stuff delivered from IKEA — no one shops in stores anymore, I guess.

For what it’s worth, transportation software company INRIX released its annual Global Traffic Scorecard this week, with details on how much time people lose sitting in traffic. INRIX says Seattle congestion is climbing again, especially in last-mile corridors that delivery fleets rely on.

“The [Amazon Now service] may end up distributing demand more evenly across the transportation network, rather than concentrating congestion via larger hubs,” Bob Pishue, transportation analyst at INRIX, told GeekWire.

The delivery

I watched via the app as the Amazon vehicle icon neared my house and I stepped onto my front porch at 1 p.m. to see my driver arrive. Wearing his blue Amazon vest, the driver placed a brown paper Amazon Now bag in my hand for what amounted to a 23-minute process from start to finish.

The driver said he made his pickup from an Amazon Now-specific facility that is located near a Whole Foods location at Roosevelt Way NE and NE 64th Street — roughly 3.5 miles or 15 minutes from my house.

The driver had not heard anything about the planned Amazon Now delivery hub just down the road from my house in Ballard, at 5100 15th Ave. NW.

The groceries

The six items I ordered were packed as neatly as you’d expect, even if the loaf of bread did get a little smooshed.

The frozen pizza was still cold, and so was the hummus. The blackberries looked like any random, small pack of blackberries I might find in the fridge and finish off in one sitting.

The batteries were really the only thing I needed at the moment, and I’d have preferred to be able to buy a more economical pack of 12 or 20, but a four pack was the only option. Maybe four batteries is all anyone needs from their fast-delivery convenience store.

Final thoughts

I’m old school-ish. I like going to the grocery store. I like seeing people, browsing aisles, and talking to the cashier (if they haven’t all been replaced by self-checkout). We’re not in Covid times. No part of me really needs or wants a bag of six random grocery items quickly delivered to my front porch in the name of convenience.

I’m clearly not the target audience for Amazon Now. My 18-year-old watched me as I stood at the window waiting for the driver and asked, “What is it, like DoorDash?”

“I guess so,” I said.

But if I was sick on my couch and wanted soup, Saltines and a ginger ale in 30 minutes or less, and didn’t want to move to go get it, I might use the service again.

Or if I’d already been to the store that day and forgot some items that were needed for dinner, I could see biting the bullet. Especially if the drive back to the grocery store was not so quick.

While at Met Market earlier that morning, I watched a woman in self-checkout pull at her receipt and the whole roll of tape fell out of the machine and rolled across the floor unspooling.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it!” said the human employee monitoring self-checkers. “I need to show I’m essential.”