In which the lack of integration and the strange selection of available items is weird.

Prime Now. It’s a thing where, if you live in a designated big city, you can order stuff from Amazon and have it delivered in a couple of hours rather than in a couple of days.

The stuff arrives in Amazon-branded paper shopping bags. Which is a cute but unnecessary touch:

Seems like a great idea, except, well, it’s not integrated with your existing Amazon account at all. You can’t shop Prime Now from amazon.com, you have to use the app. (The app which doesn’t even run on Fire devices! You can only run it on Android and Apple devices.) You can’t tell if anything in your cart or on your wishlists is eligible for Now unless you search for it in the app. You cannot see your current cart or lists in the Prime Now app, either.

The selection is massive but weird. You can get a coat tree, toilet paper, or a skein of black wool yarn delivered; you can’t get a plain ol’ gallon of milk (unless it’s organic or almond). You can get candy, game controllers, electronic cables, and snacks. You can get Amazon devices like Kindles and Paperwhites and a selection of cases for them.

You can get orange juice and organic TV dinners, high end kettle chips and most of the items you’d find in the organic or health food sections, but you can’t get much else food-wise that isn’t snacks. You can get some AmazonBasics items, but not the armless office chair you actually want now that you sat in this chair for 40 hours:

I mean, it’s a very cool chair, but it’s not height-adjustable and the cushion is quite lumpy and flat.

All in all, Now is pretty cool if your car is in the shop and you need certain specific things within a couple of hours, but the lack of dotcom integration and the unintuitive nature of the stock makes it a strange service.