Amazon Offers Free Restaurant Delivery So People Can Binge Watch Shows

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 30, 10:33PM EST · Published Apr 3, 7:05AM EDT

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Amazon Offers Free Restaurant Delivery So People Can Binge Watch Shows — © dolgachov / Getty Images

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) has a new promotion. Order in and stream your favorite movies and TV shows all month. It combines two services offered by Amazon Prime. The hook is that food delivery is free.

Amazon’s offer is another step in competing with companies that include Netflix and Walmart. A critical advantage for Amazon is its relationships with a vast number of restaurants. These relationships allow people to order food through Amazon and get discounts and free delivery. While Netflix has a movie library that matches Amazon’s, and Walmart is often described as the most massive grocery operation in America, the new Amazon deal cannot be matched by either. And Amazon is one of the American companies with the best reputations.

The way the Amazon deal works is simple. Amazon e-mails Prime customers with the offer. People who want to use the service are asked to put in a promotion code: SPRINGFREE. Amazon uses geolocation based on the customer’s address. It then offers lists of local restaurants that can be searched by type: American cuisine, Thai, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, pizza, sushi, Japanese. Customers can essentially browse by menu. Amazon offers one more incentive. “Once the promo code is entered, your discount will automatically be applied to future orders over $20 at checkout.”

The free delivery page links the customer’s location next to a “find restaurants that delivery here” section. In some large cities, the restaurant partners number into the dozens by location. In some cases, restaurants also offer additional discounts. Amazon shows what times the delivery options are available.

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While Amazon has over 100 million Prime members and a grocery business that includes Whole Foods, and it is the largest e-commerce company in America, perhaps the world, it continues to face large and growing competition. Apple has entered the streaming media business. Several other established players, like Hulu, vie with Amazon for market share. Each of these companies also has begun to invest billions of dollars in original programming to challenge what has become Amazon’s own in-house studio operation.

Can Amazon get people to watch more shows on Prime? If so, it likely reasons people who use the service most often will tend to keep it. The ability to sit and home and not leave to get food, the company reasons, is attractive. The “Get ready to order in and stream your favorite shows or movies all month with FREE delivery from Amazon Restaurants” is another chess move against a huge world of streaming media competition. For the winners, there are tens of billions of dollars in revenue at stake.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.