I wondered the same when I recently ordered a mousepad (via one of their partners) for ~$3 with free shipping, but since they used US mail I can understand how they managed it; they can perhaps do the same for small quantities of dental floss.
I mean, somebody got paid to load my 90 yds of Reach onto an airplane in the middle of the night and fly it from Tennessee to California. With virtually no added cost to me, since I have Prime which I share with 5 other people in my family. New economy or not, there's just no way that makes economic sense.
I know the argument is that Prime alters one's spending patterns, and ten paying customers are subsidizing every yokel like me who's too busy/lazy to walk to the drug store. Still it feels like an unsustainable model.
I often wonder if we'll look back on this period as the apotheosis of consumerism, when cheap and abundant fossil fuels made it possible behave like we all owned matter transporters.
I don't know that it's so unreasonable. The floss at the drug store got there the same way, after all, and it's not as though they scheduled the flight especially for you.
Indeed. It would be expensive for me to overnight you some floss. It's not expensive for Amazon to overnight you some floss, because they overnight thousands of packages every day and have some sort of contract that makes that cost a lot less for them.
