Amazon’s One-Hour Delivery Service Takes Off in Houston

Now, you can get toilet paper or Cheetos at the speed of light. OK, the top speed of Amazon, which isn’t anything to sneeze at, either.

Amazon’s famed one-hour delivery service expanded to Houston this week, making it available in Texas’ three major cities (Dallas and Austin also have it). It’s good time to be alive — especially if you need something “essential” fast and loathe the idea of waiting in one of those notoriously long Walmart lines.

In all seriousness, this one-hour or less Amazon Prime Now service could be a huge help to the elderly, new parents, tech lovers and stoners who just can’t move off the couch. Waiting two hours for home delivery is so yesteryear. Amazon Prime Now includes things like diapers, toilet paper, snacks, socks, certain books and electronics (including large-screen TVs).

It’s not quite the flying car that Jerry Seinfeld is still waiting for, but it’s at least a small step into a more hassle-free future. The one-hour delivery service is available to Prime Members (who pay $99 a year for free two-day shipping, on-demand video streaming, music streaming and a Kindle borrowing library). One-hour delivery runs $7.99, but you can get two-hour delivery of the same items for free. It’s available from 8 a.m. to midnight seven days a week.

Houston’s the 15th city in America to get one-hour delivery. It follows the introduction of Amazon Sunday delivery in Houston this summer.

With Google ramping up its own delivery service, Google Express, and even Walmart getting into the quick-delivery game, Amazon is trying to secure marketplaces as fast as it can. The sprawling, spread-out nature of Houston makes it one of the more challenging cities to do one-hour delivery in, and there are some zip codes (Bellaire, for example) where only two-hour delivery is available right now.

Yes, the horror of having to wait an extra 60 minutes will be real for a number of Houstonians. Amazon does plan to expand the one-hour delivery radius in Houston soon, however.

Sometimes, the future apparently arrives in waves.