The District of Columbia sued Amazon on Wednesday, alleging the company secretly stopped providing its fastest delivery service to residents of two predominantly Black neighborhoods while still charging millions of dollars for a membership that promises the benefit.
The complaint filed in District of Columbia Superior Court revolves around Amazon’s Prime membership, which costs consumers $139 per year or $14.99 per month for fast deliveries — including one-day, two-day and same-day shipments — along with other enhancements.
In mid-2022, the lawsuit alleges, the Seattle-based online retailer imposed what it called a delivery “exclusion” on two low-income ZIP codes in the district — 20019 and 20020 — and began relying exclusively on third-party delivery services such as UPS and the U.S. Postal Service, rather than its own delivery systems.
This is exactly it, and this is the point that is often missed in a great many discussions on modern racism and discrimination. Amazon is not refusing to deliver there because those people are black. They refusing to deliver because their drivers got attacked. The fact that those neighborhoods are mostly black has nothing to do with it. It is a correlation, not a causation. The root causes the same though, it was probably a red line neighborhood back in the mid-1900s and never recovered.
Amazon should make it clear to people buying prime in those areas though, that rush delivery will not be available and if they want to buy prime they will get all of the other benefits but not fast delivery.