this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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I canceled my Prime membership earlier this year because of that decline in quality. I wish everyone could, but thanks to the loss of retail throughout the country many can't afford not to have it.
Prime is not a money saver. It's a money waster that tricks you into buying more stuff just because "the shipping is free" but you can often get free shipping without Prime or Amazon. Just wait until you need enough stuff to meet the store's free shipping threshold to make an order.
Exactly. We weren't using the other services much (we watched a handful of shows on Prime, but that's it), so our only reason was the faster shipping.
So we cancelled Prime and now have to wait a few more days for our package to arrive. The impact was... pretty much non-existent and we've since moved a lot of our shopping elsewhere since shipping times aren't a big draw anymore. I do kind of miss the occasional same-day or next-day deliveries (we live right next to a warehouse), but not enough to justify what we were spending on it.
At this point, Prime doesn't make sense if you want to save on shipping. It made sense because it included a lot of good stuff (video before ads, some music, shipping, games) but just for shipping, there were better options.
I basically overpaid but didn't care out of convenience - partner sometimes watched prime, I ordered occasionally, played some included games. But the changes to video were so shady that I cancelled it.
I have a feeling the big impact is going to be in other services, namely AWS. Makes me wonder if some new global outages are coming, which are always fun to deal with.
Yeah, there's going to be hilariously bad outages at AWS within like a year.
Yeah... I didn't choose it, but some of the services from my employer run there. May be a good time to make some moves, we'll see.
Not really going to be an issue I can fix obviously, but I'll be making even more backups than normal....
To where? Google? Azure? There's a reason we call them Frugal and Unsure at my side job. If AWS sucks in the next year, that'll barely bring it down to their level. Hell, if AWS sucks ALL NEXT YEAR with a clown-car style outage every week, then maybe.
Considering our use is not to the general public, we'd be better off with an entirely different strategy.
Why? Amazon seems to have built an amazing system with AWS, but does it need the same amount of staff time to maintain it that it needed to develop it?
If Amazon acknowledges that it isn't going to be developing new products to the scale it did for the past decade, it probably doesn't need the headcount it had before.
Enh, the tech space is very much innovate or die. So yeah, they could probably throw everything in maintenance mode and make a reduced headcount work, but if AWS goes stagnant it's entirely likely that Amazon goes the way of IBM and Motorol. Especially when someone (likely, Microsoft or Google) comes to take a slice of the AWS market share.
Is it still? The VC funding has started drying up and every tech company has started worrying about profitability now. I think the old innovate or die mantra has played itself out.
And IBM & Motorola diminished in part because they stuck to older industries where cost became as important as innovation and didn't lower their cost.
Yeah, my entire project lives on AWS. Fortunately, it's not my problem to keep things going, so I guess we'll just roll with whatever punches come.
My relatively poor experience with Prime I attribute to deliberate bad choices rather than lack of workers. It probably doesn't help to be sure, but even with the most awesome staff, I think Prime was going to suck no matter what. The whole economy is particularly "screw the customers over, get us money now, no need to attract or retain customers now"
Yeah. The rise of a monopoly until it starts to enshitify is interesting to watch eh? Reminds me of Walmart in the physical space. All the local options got pushed out and everyone’s quality was forced to drop due to their economic strong arming.