Amazon is making impulse buying even easier for college students at five universities. Instant Pickup, an initiative started this August, allows to students using the mobile app to choose from several hundred fast-selling snacks, drinks, personal care items and electronics. Within two minutes, one of the location employees will move the goods into a locker and customers receive barcodes to access them. For students in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Columbus, Ohio, Berkeley, California and College Park, Maryland, this provides extra fast access to the kind of items you wouldn't want to wait two days for with normal Prime delivery.
Anyone who knows me knows that I overuse my boyfriend's Amazon Prime membership. Between ordering my textbooks, groceries for the two of us, and random things that I periodically need like beauty products and birthday gifts, I'd say I'm an Amazon aficionado.
One might say I spend far too much of my money on all that stuff, and they'd be right, but the truth is that Amazon just makes it so easy. As a college student with a severely limited income and no car, being able to have essentially anything I want or need delivered straight to my door in two days or less is hard to pass up. Hell, they even sell Whole Foods products on AmazonFresh now, meaning I can order their fancy hummus and fresh veggies along with the chicken nuggets and tins of coffee I typically buy.
Amazon continues to find innovative ways to get products from them to you as quickly as possible, which is why they have seen so much success, particularly among busy twenty-somethings and college students. Younger, tech-savvy shoppers are more inclined to buy Prime memberships than older shoppers accustomed to seeing and touching things in a store before buying them, says Mike Levin of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners in Chicago, which estimates that more than half of all U.S. residents from 18 to 34 have Prime memberships.
Though Fortune thinks that this initiative will be a bust because "Instant Pickup puts Amazon in direct competition with convenience stores, drugstores, and on-campus vending machines," I think people truly underestimate how lazy college students are. A friend of mine who goes to school at Maryland explained that students can pick up one can of Coke if they choose, but it also provides more options than a standard vending machine would. If Instant Pickup is available within a certain proximity to where students live, and if Amazon continues to add new items that students can choose from, there will continue to be a market for such a service.
Honestly, it's probably for the best that I'm graduating soon and Rutgers hasn't jumped onto the Instant Pickup wagon yet because I have zero impulse control. When it comes to my friends and I buying cheaper impulse items, we're more likely to walk to the liquor store on the corner to see if they have Coke than we are to walk to Krauszer's a few blocks away, even though we know it'll be cheaper and definitely in stock. Ease of access trumps everything else when targeting college students who are largely drunk, high, or just too tired to go out of their way for much of anything.
According to Ripley MacDonald, director of student programs for Amazon, “As shopping behaviors continue to evolve, customers consistently tell us that they want items even faster. Whether it's a snack on-the-go, replacing a lost phone charger in the middle of a hectic day or adding Alexa to your life with an Echo, Instant Pickup saves Prime members time. While Instant Pickup is available at select pickup locations today, we're excited about bringing this experience to more customers soon."
Hopefully, if you're just as lazy as me but better at controlling your spending habits, Instant Pickup will be making its way to your campus soon.
