As with its other regions – which today includes San Diego, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Austin, and Portland – Amazon says that delivery is free, and there are no additional fees for using its service, beyond the cost of the annual Prime membership, of course. Instead, the company says it relies on distance to a Amazon warehouse, number of Prime members in a neighborhood and the number of delivery drivers it has in an area.
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The move came as Boston mayor Martin Walsh on Tuesday lambasted the company for leaving, in the neighborhood of Roxbury, “a hole right in the heart of our city” in terms of same-day delivery.
Walsh released a second statement later in the day, saying he spoke personally to Amazon executives, and thanking them for the decision.
Facing heaps of political pressure, Amazon on Tuesday announced it plans to bring same-day delivery service to Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood.
There is no word yet on when the service will begin.
In a statement to The Boston Globe, the mayor’s office said the city’s chief of economic development and chief of policy “had been in conversations with Amazon before the mayor’s call”.
“We understand that the people who run Amazon don’t live here and might not understand our great neighborhoods, but this is an egregious mistake that must be changed”, Walsh said.
“The most striking gap in Amazon’s same-day service is in Boston”, the report found.
An Amazon spokesman told Bloomberg that Roxbury’s situation was an “anomaly”.
Through the Prime Now app, a user plugs in their zip code to see if Prime Now is available.
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Among the startups the Chronicle recently test-drove are UrbanEats, which potentially wants to be confused with UberEats and which offers a service for the truly lazy in which you don’t even have to open an app, and they just text you a bunch of lunch/dinner options and you reply with a single letter indicating your choice; and the Paleo/health-conscious prepared meal service Power Supply, which actually only delivers to CrossFit gyms. “We will not let vendors or other folks divide us and Roxbury is a central part, the physical central part, of the city of Boston”.
