Amazon recently introduced one-hour shipping in many locations. Unmistakably a triumph of logistics, resource planning, and automation, it is also unmistakably a triumph of instant gratification.

The argument can be made reasonably that one-hour shipping satisfies a consumer need to get delivery in the nick of time, whether supplies for a last-minute event, replacement for a broken device, or to fill a gap when you can’t get to a store or none have in stock what Amazon can deliver. The reasonable argument is also false, when taken broadly, as the history of consumer society practically mandates that laziness is satisfied more commonly than urgency, just as mobile order pickup at Starbucks saves time when there is time and to spare.

Amazon has gotten something of a bum reputation in recent years, in part due to monopolizing many sectors, in part due to questionable decisions with concretely poor outcomes which optimize for the bottom dollar over health and safety. How absolutely a corporation may be judged when operating at scale may be besides the point; sufficient conditions exist that Amazon cannot be seen without the filter of its context in, and impact on, society at large.

In this context the introduction of one-hour shipping can be understood in part as haranguing to employees and objectionable to consumers. This is the sense found in many discussions online and in person, and it was this sense in which a particular post recently on Reddit after the announcement noted:

“We don’t want one hour shipping, we want the workers to have one hour for lunch instead” (source).

The consensus of the comments was in contrast to this opinion.

A Reddit audience is generally progressive on social issues. I admit I have slightly cherry-picked these examples from the thread,  but they are reasonably representative of the majority. Other threads across Reddit for this topic reflect a sense of conflict. Displeasure is rampant against Amazon, wishes are expressed for paid lunch hours, and yet a tiny minority only explicitly denounces the use of Amazon or its one-hour shipping — even at the extremely low entry required of anonymity. It is easy to announce you will forgo use of Amazon and make it a lie; to observe that relatively few even say they will stop using Amazon demonstrates a probable undercurrent that, no matter how awfully Amazon’s treatment of its workers may be perceived, its utility remains high enough to accept the cost.

One commenter in another thread summed it pointedly: Amazon is one of those companies that everyone hates but most people refuse to stop using. (source)

The reality may be more nuanced; reality is generally more nuanced as compared against reactions on online forums, but pro or con, lover or hater of Amazon or e-commerce in general, the improvements in automation and economy at scale are simply too blatant to ignore, and they become entrenched in our system of day-to-day life, with all the boons and dooms that accompany them (and so many of the balance of these are subject to interpretation).

It’s unclear whether one-hour shipping will last the test of time — even time as reckoned near, in the singles of years, rather than the far-flung and unguessable future. Amazon has tested other avenues which failed to last, in the Fire phone, and in Dash buttons, and though more efforts succeed than fail (at least of those that make it to public market) the more aggressive the proposition the more questionable its outcome. It could be transformational or it could fizzle. Amazon is not the first or only company to thread this line of daring. Whether it intends to or not, it is charting the course of the future — one-hour shipping is offered by other companies, and Amazon is not the first, but it is bigger, broader, and has more integration into daily life than most organizations can claim, even partial competitors like Wal-Mart. Where this carries consumer trends can be guessed only.

What happens next almost doesn’t matter — the human factor is most relevant and enlightening, if that is a word to be applied where a fact repetitively proves itself out over time. Humanity thrives on growth and scale, efficiency and economy. The aftereffects of growth sometimes become unsustainable, and the seismic reverberations cause it to collapse until a new and modified system takes over — but only rarely do the ideas behind the growth remain in the past. Mostly they are reformed, reinterpreted, reincorporated into the next stage of growth and development. This is the story of humanity. We each scrabble for success — defined variously — and try not to be left behind, and in the process everyone wins — speaking very broadly, since many do lose out and fall behind or sometimes meet tragic ends as the system shakes itself out. But this repeating process drives an engine as old as civilization; we’re not likely to stop it now, nor would we collectively gain in doing so.