What would make you say that? These are all large, urban places which are known to utilize Amazon.

Indianapolis is the only city that's confusing to me, but they have a warehouse there, and it is located close enough to ship to other locations within the 1 day timeframe.

No Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis, and Kansas City. Upper Midwest is conspicuously absent.

Fair point. Seems to be Amazon strategy though, after looking at their distribution center map: https://scmmsublogs.wordpress.com/scm-strategies/amazon-com-... Wouldn't be surprised to see Chicago added to the list of supported cities soon, but Houston, Minneapolis, and Kansas City are all pretty far from current/planned distribution centers.

Amazon is opening warehouses on Goose Island in Chicago and in Joliet in the near future: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-amazon-goose-islan...

Chicago might have a bit of a unique problem with traffic to and from warehouses as well. Real estate is very expensive in city limits and the infrastructure here doesn't support the model all that well. I bet they could manage, but it's got to be a significantly higher start cost here vs. other metros. This would be a city to invest in AFTER vetting out the model in cheaper cities.

There is a distribution center in Houston now: http://www.hkatexas.com/2014/06/amazon-fulfillment-houston-h...

They just started building a new distribution warehouse in the Twin Cities. I'm guessing when it's done we will have same day shipping.

I believe Indy has a big regional distribution center, so not that surprising to me. I would have expected Nashville on the list, as we also have some big warehouses located here. Hopefully soon.

My best and completely uneducated guess would be location to warehouses. Maybe even cross-referenced with typical orders in the area and Amazon's actual ability to get some amount of those typical orders to door-steps same-day.

Probably a combination, but I'd guess that proximity to their distro centers is the biggest factor.

I'm pretty sure this is the only answer. Those cities are where their warehouses are located, which is why they can offer same-day delivery from it. It's pretty unfeasible to offer the service for a city located 150mi away from a warehouse, for instance. The cost would be too high.

Note also that, at least with Boston although I assume it's the case with other cities, the area they cover with this is relatively small. Punching in a few zip codes, it looks like this covers Boston essentially inside of Route 128.