I pre-ordered 'The Transporter - Special Delivery Edition' earlier this month. It gets released on 8/30. Amazon notified me that they shipped it on the 24th, and I got it the following day on the 25th, 5 days before the street date. Pretty cool! Hope they do the same with 'Batman Begins'.

That's probably because the release date was actually August 23rd.

I did get my last Amazon pre-order for the Astaire & Rogers Collection a day before the release date. However, I don't order much anymore from Amazon since the demise of the STL program.

Seems like Amazon has been doing a little better on their free shipping lately. Maybe they are a little concerened that people might not order from them at xmas time if people think there orders wont ship until a week or longer after the release date.

I pre-ordered the "As Time Goes By" complete collection last monday (it is released tomorrow) and it hasn't been shipped yet. I'm not in any hurry, but I figured that with everyone getting fast pre-orders, I'd give it a shot. Maybe it'll ship before next week.

Glad to here some people have had good luck with free shipping. My orders a re usually take 3-4 days in processing, once they actually ship it takes 2-3 days before actual for pick-up and then 5-6 days for transit (usually media mail). Its 10-14 days from order placement to delivery.
I am afraid to actually pay for shipping because it may only speed up processing and still ship media mail for 7-10 days total delivery time.

Same here - that, combined with the shipping complaints and mostly non-competitive prices. But if the free shipping is getting back to what it used to be, I'd give them another shot IF there is something I want that they price favorably.

Well I wasn't as fortunate with my Greta Garbo box set order from Amazon. It didn't ship until Tuesday and I finally received it today (Friday). Making things worse is the outer box is very banged and bent up. Looks like I'm going to need to request a new set.