Amazon’s One-Day Shipping Is a Perk Few Retailers Can Match

A Boeing 767 with an Amazon.com "Prime Air" livery flies over Lake Washington, Friday, Aug. 5, 2016, as part of the Boeing Seafair Air Show. Amazon unveiled its first branded cargo plane Thursday, one of 40 freighters that will make up the company's own air transportation network of 40 Boeing jets leased from Atlas Air and Air Transportation Services Group, which will operate the air cargo network. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)Photographer: Ted S. Warren/AP

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By Brad Stone

April 29, 2019 at 10:45 AM UTC

Corrected

April 29, 2019 at 5:54 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

Amazon.com Inc. shook investors and the retail industry last week, shortly after announcing its first quarter earnings report. “So, we’re currently working on evolving our Prime free two-day shipping program to be a free one-day shipping program,” Brian Olsavsky, the chief financial officer, said almost nonchalantly a few minutes into his regular conference call with analysts.

The move eclipsed both the day’s good news (a larger than expected quarterly profit) and the bad (dramatically slowing sales growth). It set Wall Street’s Amazon watchers into a mad scramble to calculate the impact of the projected $800 million it will take over the next few months alone to achieve the accelerated shipping feat.