Amazon to sell $115 7-foot Fraser firs, per an Amazon holiday preview book, and other holiday plants, offering preorders, with some trees to have Prime shipping
and Shipping Some via Amazon Prime Marrian Zhou / CNET : Ho! Ho! Ho! Amazon will deliver real live Christmas trees starting in November Brian Heater / TechCrunch : Amazon will start selling real, large Christmas trees Tweets: John Battelle / @johnbattelle : The real question is, will Amazon take it off the curb too, or will that cost be borne by taxpayers? What's in the Amazon box? Maybe a real 7-foot Christmas tree http://apnews.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-way through Amazon's 2018 campaign to import traditional retailers' holiday playbook: weeks earlier it announced a physical holiday toy catalog for millions of US households, and by early November it had begun mailing it with QR codes while expanding free shipping to all US customers with no minimum spend. Live Christmas trees are the same strategy pointed at the most stubbornly offline category left — bulky, perishable goods people still buy from street-corner lots.
First-order effects
- Tree lots and garden centers face preorder competition from a $115 7-foot Fraser fir that can arrive via Prime, letting Amazon lock in holiday demand before Thanksgiving traffic even starts.
- Amazon's own fulfillment network takes on a new cost profile: oversized, perishable freight shipped on tight seasonal deadlines alongside the free-shipping-for-everyone commitment it made the same month.
Second-order effects
- Shipping a seven-foot tree through parcel networks makes the environmental cost of delivery choices harder to ignore — a sensitivity Amazon later showed when sources reported it nixed a "Green" delivery option to avoid alienating shoppers.
- Local sellers of trees and holiday plants get pushed toward services Amazon can't easily replicate — selection, cutting, and same-day pickup — or toward competing on price against a subsidized shipping model.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, no category is structurally safe from Amazon's logistics on grounds of size or perishability alone, and the open question John Battelle raised — who bears the cost of taking the tree off the curb afterward — points to reverse logistics and disposal as the next frontier where local incumbents still hold an edge.
The trend: Amazon is systematically absorbing the traditional retail holiday playbook — catalogs, blanket free shipping, now live goods — while stretching its delivery network into bulk and perishable categories.