blurredvision said:
Not Amazon's fault, they shouldn't give you anything but a refund if you refuse shipment when it does get there.
next day air and 2nd day air are guaranteed services. The important thing here is "guaranteed". I call amazon because UPS won't work with me as the recipient, they will only work with the sender. But yes, Amazon calls them and unless there's like a weather exception or the recipient isn't home, UPS has to give amazon a refund on the shipping costs Amazon paid UPS, and usually (always actually) amazon has been cool about tossing me back a few bucks in credit (usually $10) as a result.
For Prime customers, guaranteed delivery services mean guaranteed. If it's not there when it's supposed to be, UPS has to refund the shipper and the shipper will usually pass some of that back on to you. Of course stuff like free super saver shipping, ground, Home Delivery (FedEx), etc aren't guaranteed services. But usually if it gives a number of days (overnight, 2nd day air, 3 day select, etc) it means it's a guaranteed service and they have to refund to the shipper if it misses the schedule because of a company problem.
edit - I should point out that I've worked with this as both a customer and a business. as a business we used to put refund requests through to fedex all the time for missing dates. well, actually fedex wasn't that bad with it, but if they missed a date all we had to do was fill out a form on the web and there wasn't a single time we (as the business) weren't given the refund which we then gave back to the customer sans handling. And we were actually given refunds on weather also, though as I understand it the companies aren't required per terms to give refunds on weather. FedEx wasn't bad, but as a customer it seems UPS is much worse. Anyway, like I said I've gotten a number of refunds from Amazon on shipping, and the biggest thing to point out is that I don't "pay" for shipping in that it's covered under prime. But I'm paying them $80/year for a guaranteed service. If it doesn't arrive when it's scheduled to, it seems only fair to be compensated.
edit 2 - all is well...
next day air really means next day to UPS. currently out for delivery.