Since most of the responses I've received so far make it clear that those who have responded have not read my entire post (yes, it's long) I'm putting my question first.

Has anyone else noticed that Amazon has stopped showing US Postal Service tracking info in the orders section in the last 2-3 days? If so, can someone tell me if there’s a way to see the USPS tracking info for Amazon packages aside from having USPS “Informed Delivery”?

The rest of my original post: As you may or may not have noticed, the USPS recently got saddled with handling most Amazon deliveries, at least in my area and many others. As of Jan. 1, the local USPS carriers have been handling most of their packages. I know this from various news reports and talking to my local carrier.

While I hate this for my local carrier, who is a great guy and gets paid less than he would if he worked for Target, I could at least get online tracking info for my packages. In my list of Amazon orders I could see whether they were Amazon delivery (tracking numbers starting with “TBA……) or USPS (tracking numbers starting with 9…..).

I check my Amazon orders at least every couple of days to see when my packages are arriving. Today (Jan. 21, 2025) I noticed that the USPS delivery info just isn’t listed with the packages that will be arriving by USPS, and as of Jan. 1, that’s *most of them *.

WTF Amazon??? It’s bad enough that some jack@$$ in the marketing, sales or app design group thought I wanted to see all of my Whole Foods orders lumped in my order history with my Amazon orders. I don’t, it makes it impossible to find my online orders, and no, I don’t want to archive all of my WF orders one by one to make it easier to find the orders I log into Amazon to make. I’ll be calling Amazon later today at 1-888-280-4331 to complain about that brilliant change. But that’s another rant, and others have already made it in other posts.

Over the years Amazon has:

• Changed their search so you can no longer specify entries that do not include a search term. For example, if I wanted duct tape, but not hot pink duct tape, I could search for “duct tape -pink” and get duct tape in all of its possible colors except pink. That hasn’t been possible in years.

• Changed their search so if you have the audacity to want to list the most highly rated items (not the f*ing featured items first) your search shows you everything from every department, so you could spend hours searching through every remotely similar item until you find one even close to what you want.

• Stopped showing items from past orders that they no longer carry. While I understand that that saves them room on their (unlimited?) AWS servers, in the old days, if Amazon stopped carrying something, being able to see the detailed description of what you bought in the past made it easier to order something similar that was still available.

And don’t get me started about the issues with their product listings, or the fact that manufacturers game the Amazon system by making something great, getting excellent reviews, then reducing the quality of the item. That’s why I always look at the most recent reviews for anything I buy from Amazon. It’s really become a “buyer beware” experience.

And if you think they really resell the things you return under their free returns policy, think again. There are plenty of reports from reputable news sources saying that most Amazon returns wind up in landfills!

It seems that the Amazon model is working as intended.

1. Offer good prices for lots of things, make finding them in your store really easy and getting them super convenient so people will mostly shop online, thus driving the brick and mortar stores out of business.

2. Once most of your competition has gone bankrupt, you can:

• Make it almost impossible to find anything that isn’t “featured” in your store, meaning, most profitable for Amazon, regardless of the quality or relevance to what you’re shopping for.

• Make it impossible to track your packages. For anyone who has trouble with “porch pirates” this could cause serious problems or at least real headaches.

• Limit the items available to only the things your customers buy, which since you’ve made it impossible to find anything else, are your “featured” (most profitable) items. And since you’ve driven the brick and mortar and other online businesses out of existence, you’ve effectively limited the availability of most things to what makes you the most money.

• Charge your customers whatever you want. That will be next.

I think I've convinced myself to stop using them altogether. It will be a lot more time-consuming and a lot less convenient, but with their latest changes they've added hours to how long it takes me to do my shopping and track my packages anyway 🙂

If there's a decent online alternative to Amazon, other than shopping at a dozen different online stores please let me know.