When I showed up to work at the crack of 9:45 last Thursday, I was greeted with a grocery bag on my desk courtesy of the people (drones?) announcing the arrival of Amazon Prime Now 1- and 2-hour delivery to Houston. The bag was filled with assorted snacks, which were quickly disposed of by our crew of appreciative interns. According to the bag, the delivery was ordered at 8 a.m. and arrived at the Houstonia office by 9, but there's something about the prompt delivery of something that I didn't order that fails to impress. I shrugged and went on with my day.

In this, I join the Luddites of the world who harrumphed at early automobiles, movies with sound and personal computers. Mea Culpa. Amazon Prime Now is the future. It has already changed my life.

On Thursday night, my fiancé wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so he downloaded the app (yay, now I have four Amazon-based apps in my phone!) to see if he could muster the $50 in goods required to earn the promotional $20 off. This was after dinner and by 10:45, just halfway into the free two-hour window, hark! An Amazon package arrived with a phone charger, a dozen of those adorable Illy coffee cans and a copy of Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

All of these things were available within a short drive, should we have needed any of them enough to go get them. We could have used TaskRabbit or Favor to arrange for someone to buy them and deliver them to us as well, or ordered them from regular old Amazon. It's the combination of showing you all the things you could want as well as the ability to get it right now that's so intoxicating. 

What does that immediacy mean? For me it meant my fiancé started reading the Kondo book Thursday night. By Friday he was halfway through it. On Saturday afternoon, after popping a can of Illy and storing his phone on the charger, he started cleaning out his closet completely unprompted. By Sunday night the living room was lined with six trash bags full of possessions that did not bring us joy and the rest of the house is as neat as its been since we moved in together. 

Would this have happened if we ordered the same things from Amazon online? Maybe, or maybe by the time the book showed up on Saturday or Monday he'd be over the impulse, and it would be set down on our overstuffed bookshelf and ignored. Did we change, or did Amazon Prime Now change us? I guess we'll never know.