Amazon touts 'even faster' deliveries made to customers 'within hours'

• Amazon is pushing "even faster" deliveries to customers around cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix.
• Same-day delivery customers can now get orders "within hours," per Amazon's Q4 report.

Amazon is betting on its model of getting orders to customers sooner than ever, saying that it has ramped up the pace of same-day deliveries to customers living in and near many big cities in the US.

The e-commerce giant's same-day deliveries are now "even faster" for customers around Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, along with other busy hubs, according to its fourth-quarter earnings report, released on Thursday.

In the report, Amazon said that customers in those areas "can now receive hundreds of thousands of items within hours." Amazon Prime customers can get free same-day deliveries based on where they're located and what they're ordering, according to Amazon's website.

The retailer's emphasis of fast deliveries comes as the pace of work at Amazon has been the subject of multiple citations by federal safety regulators, who have warned that the "gamification" of work at Amazon's warehouses can lead to higher rates of injury.

But the retailer has to contend with stalled growth in its US Prime memberships. In 2022, Amazon Prime had an estimated 168 million US members, per Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. That was a decline from the 170 million US members the prior year, according to CIRP's estimate.

An Amazon representative questioned those figures at the time, telling Insider then that Prime "continues to grow" but that the company wouldn't provide "country-specific" figures for Prime membership in the US.

On Thursday, the company said that customers in Belgium also now have access to same-day delivery options.

Overall, the tech giant's report indicated a lackluster quarter with sales growing 9% and net income of just $300 million, down from $14.3 billion during the same time last year.