Rush Calls Out Amazon for Excluding African-American ZIP Codes from Same-Day Delivery

CHICAGO, IL -- U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush sent a searing letter to the CEO of Amazon.com and called for a federal investigation to be opened in the online company’s possible “redlining” of minority neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side.

A recently published article in Bloomberg, “Amazon Doesn’t Consider the Race of Its Customers, Should It?” revealed that Amazon.com’s Prime free same-day delivery service is unavailable to residents in primarily African American ZIP codes in several U.S. cities.

“Unfortunately, though, the situation with Amazon.com is not a unique experience for people of color,” Rush said in a written statement. “Today, in 2016, too many Americans still are denied services and access to goods based off the color of their skin. Amazon.com’s assertions of impartiality and a numbers-based approach to the availability of its Prime Free Same-Day Delivery has been disparate and, seemingly, discriminatory.”

Amazon offers free, same-day-delivery service of more than one million products to Prime subscribers when available on orders over $35, according to the company.

In his letter to Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Rush takes issue with assertions made by the company’s vice president of global communications, Craig Berman, who claims in the article that the South Side ZIP codes are out of reach of the Kenosha distribution center.

“Distance matters,” Berman tells Bloomberg. “At some point, with the math involved, we can’t make it work—in time, or in cost for the carrier. There is a diminishing return on orders.”

Rush, whose 1st Illinois Congressional District covers the city’s greater South Side and south suburbs in Cook and Will Counties, tells Bezos:

“That would be understandable if not for the fact that this service is available to residents in Oak Lawn, Illinois; a community that is even further south -- and therefore a greater distance from your distribution center -- than those that are excluded.”

Rush ends his letter by calling for a meeting with Bezos to discuss “a number of questions and concerns.”

In an update to the Bloomberg article, Amazon.com announced that it would expand same-day delivery to Boston’s excluded Roxbury neighborhood, in response to protests by Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey.

Read both of Congressman Rush’s letters in their entirety.