Earlier today I was dismayed to receive an e-mail from Amazon informing me that the expected delivery date for five Christmas presents I had ordered was 26-30 December. Predictably, this is entirely my own fault through placing the order too late, and expecting delivery from the UK to Norway in good time. I’d already upgraded to Priority Mail service, which made no difference whatsoever, but I had kept the default option of having all my items dispatched together.

I had difficulty obtaining information on when each of the individual items in the order would be in stock, so in a last-ditch attempt to get something out of Amazon before Christmas I selected the option to dispatch each item separately as it became available.

Amazon duly split my original order of five items into one order of four items and a second order with the remaining item. To my astonishment the predicted delivery date for both orders was 20-21 December – some six days earlier and in plenty of time for Jule!

Of course, this defies all logic – unless Amazon is operating some sort of priority queue system – and I have just jumped the queue because my multiple dispatch priority mail order is more profitable to Amazon than my single dispatch priority mail order – which suggests Amazon is making a healthy profit on its shipping charge.