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I think I might cancel. I'm not watching ads and I'm not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don't know if I'd end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though....
Are other online retailers so hopelessly sucky that you can't live without Amazon over in the states? It just blows my mind because Amazon honestly sucks compared to the more local stores where I'm at in the Nordics.
For me it’s the fast shipping I can’t live without.
I recently moved into a new apartment and needed to run a network cord from our router to the other side of the apartment to put an access point so we’d have good WiFi coverage. I went online to several other retailers for the few things I needed (cat6, crimp tool, and a few other things), but all of them wanted me to pay ~$25 or more for their slowest shipping option of 5-7 business days.
Meanwhile, Amazon had everything at my door the next day with free shipping. I tried to avoid Bezos, but I couldn’t. :(
But it's not complely free shipping. It's $140/year free shipping. So depending on how often you need something tomorrow, you could come out ahead even without Prime. That's what I'm weighing now. Streaming is close to a solved problem, it's the shipping I'm on the fence about.
This is also a fair point, but it only takes a handful of one-day deliveries to “cover” the cost of prime with what most places are charging for fast shipping. And then that’s not including the many products I’ve never found a decent alternative seller for.
I haven't had Prime for years but still shop on Amazon a bit. You get free shipping on orders over... $25 or $35? So group a few non urgent things and you're good to go. I pay for quicker shipping maybe once or twice a year, and pay for shipping in other sites maybe a half dozen times a year.
I quit Prime a while ago. Since then, most of the time I pay for next day, they miss the window and I get a refund for the full shipping fee. Yeah, it means I got my stuff a day "late" but I ended up with free 2 day shipping.
You bring up good point. But, for example, I tried another company for pieces and parts for several projects. The only other US alternative to Amazon for such things is NewEgg. Where items cost nearly quadruple what they are on Amazon. Not including the shipping times (24 hours instead of 5-7 days).
I guess what I'm getting at, is Amazon is the largest monopoly in history, IMO. There's no way for anyone to compete. Even the $140 a year is pennies in the grand scheme of things. If you require items that can't be acquired locally...
You can still get free Amazon shipping without Prime, and they generally beat the week or so that they say they'll do for me.
"Couldn't"
It's very obvious that consumers are completely unable to "vote with their wallets" for anything but convenience and low prices. Workers rights, equality, morals you name it are for the vast majority waaaaaay down the scale compared to price and convenience.
This is a case study on why regulation is very much needed, even though we really should be able to do with out.
I mean fine; you’re right. I could have sat on my thumbs for 5 days with no WiFi in my living room while I waited for someone else to send what I needed, but why should I have to? Is it completely impossible for a company to provide that convenience without also being a bag of dicks? (Or is that what you meant by regulation?)
Yes it absolutely is impossible (even though it shouldn't be) so regulation is needed to make being a bag of dicks illegal or disadvantaged (like say the safety labeling on cigarettes, they're legal if they're labeled but no company would willingly label out that their product is dangerous).
Amazon can provide better prices and fuck over their sellers because they're being major douchebags in ways that shouldn't be legal and if it wasn't competing with them would be much more feasible because you wouldn't have to be just as much of a shitstain to compete.
But. Around the world people aren't really voting for regulations either, it's generally neck and neck between forces that wants far less regulation and more power to business and the ones that want more regulation and to reign in companies. So what I state here as obvious and needed is a hot topic for debate which blows my mind. We're callous fucking beings.
EDIT:
To answer your initial question, because it's the morally right thing to do to show solidarity with people that are effectively forced to work in shitty conditions in Amazon warehouses and to stop them killing smaller stores and retailers that provide far more jobs, spread wealth far more evenly and generally is vastly better for both the country and the world even though it might cost you 10-60% more on average and will be less convenient to you.
EDIT2 electric bugallo:
Also to clarify I'm not saying you're a bad person, you're absolutely not from what I can tell. You're just human like everyone. I'm not without fault and buy shit I really shouldn't as well, like stuff out of china when bespoke alternatives exist far closer. It's just painfully obvious with your story that we, the people, can't self regulate for the benefit of our fellow humans and the planet we all depend upon. Sorry for ranting towards you, and for any ill feelings I bestowed upon you.
I hate Amazon but there are several reasons I use them. Wide selection, free shipping, easy returns, and typically low prices. Every time I have tried avoiding Amazon for everything, I've run into annoying issues before long.
Also, sadly there are a lot of less common products that aren't super available elsewhere. And even when they are, I feel like it's a risk buying from some random website I've not dealt with before.
I wish others could/would compete with these advantages but most don't. And no I don't buy everything from Amazon but it is a safe fallback for the items I can't get at better retailers.
I feel the only thing they do well in my area is provide safer access to random bits and bobs that I buy from AliExpress. But that business is not what makes them rich, of course. It's people buying everything from them, but that that is even compelling is mind blowing to me due to how atrocious their website and shopping experience is. And I work in e-Commerce as well...
Most people want the question free returns, that's really the thing keeping amazon afloat compared to say eBay or aliexpress. Sure you can get the stuff directly from China in most cases, but you have to wait for a month for it to arrive and hope you don't need to return it.
As for local stores, they always cost more because of the cost of doing business, which is why Amazon is cheaper and faster to deliver.
All that said, as long as you can wait a few days, there is no need to pay for Prime, you can still get all the stuff shipped for free if you just wait until you have 45 bucks of stuff to buy.
News broke on this a few months ago, and I jumped ship. Their failed music app is another reason I ditched their ecosystem. Kept crashing; music would pause mid-song; couldn't play downloaded music offline without a data connection.
Video service had such poor title coverage and nothing compelling for the price. As many others have said, the value proposition didn't work. Enshittification is in full swing. Sail the high seas.
An already overpriced subscription service wants more money 🤣
And I continue adding primevideo's content to my Jellyfin server
Announced just after Christmas, a time when I assume a lot of people sign up for Prime so they can save shipping on presents.
Seems like that would backfire as people recently remember signing up.
What the hell do people watch on prime? I got it for Thursday night football. There’s nothing interesting on there and half the content is “rent/buy”
“rent/buy”
You mean rent for x amount of time, or rent for an undetermined amount of time.
We don't do 'buy' anymore, that's just rent without knowing when your rental is over.
Physical media is the only "buy". And that's hard to come by. Unfortunately.
prime has some really good shows (invincible, the boys, and good omens are the ones i've watched) but ultimately it is WAY too expensive
If they need more money, they can just take about $2,000 USD per second from Bezos' money. He makes over $3,000 USD per second.
I forgot to mention. over 99% of all online sales go through amazon. They don't need to raise their prices.
This and the rising costs plus adding ads to 'basic' tiers and attempting to create limitations (resolutions, "screens", offline downloads) is what might push me to build a nice, large NAS. We don't want Cable again.
Jellyfin + Synology NAS was a great investment for me! ;)
Wouldn’t go back.
We won't get cable again. Video streaming is already much worse and declining rapidly.
I canceled Prime in 2021. The expedited shipping is nice and all but it really just felt like paying rent to someone I don't like nor want or have to pay rent to.
I wish I could just get Prime shipping and drop the video service. I may still drop the whole thing.
Nothing quite like paying an annual fee to ensure that stuff you can’t be bothered to go to the store for are handled by a multitude of people who are systematically abused by their employer.
I don't know where you live, but around here stores only carry what most people buy. If you want something other than plain vanilla, you have to find it online.
Bait and switch.
I’m ditching it. The convenience has gone and content has gone. I built a wish list which is now mostly unavailable.
I need to up my game in terms of automating my torrenting and making it family - accessible.
Man I just moved to the arr's I'm a Usenet guy.. but torrents are the same deal.. I added overseerr on top of that and all I do now is "request" it on overseerr and blamonit appears on my Plex server.
For example if you wanted to download all of the seasons of say... SpongeBob. With overseerr it's literally 1. search for the show 2. click request and wait.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience Check out trash guides and overseerr.dev
I run all of mine in docker with docker compose.
Also I gave my mil and fil link to overseerr which Plex authenticates... They can request what ever and it appears.
Tbh i just have prime and pirat the stuff i want anyway, even if i technically have access to ot the "legal" way, because its just way easier to find what i want on the piracy site of my choice than on prime...
(i need the one day shipping pretty regularly so the money isn't wasted)
Scamazon
All of their ads that said "there's more to prime!" are what planted the seed in my mind that I should cancel. I don't use any of the "more" stuff, but we were paying for it anyway.
I don't miss Prime at all. You still get free shipping as long as you let you wait until you have $35 of stuff in your cart.
Regarding the shipping cost:
Just collect things to buy until you are over the treshold.
Helped me with overbuying stuff I don't even really need.
If you are moatly in it for the shipping: Just stop. You give them more money through that than paying for shipping.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
Living in a major city where we have a Amazon warehouse, I cancelled prime because they failed their promise on two day shipping. 2021-2023, I started seeing packages take as long as 5 days. Now, half my orders take that long. What is the point of that's the whole ad pitch?
Everything worth seeing can be torrented anyway. I canceled a year ago and haven’t noticed a loss of anything as long as any orders are over $35 for free shipping.
I'd already decided to cancel Prime when they cancelled The Peripheral after renewing it. Had I not, this decision would have made the choice for me.
The people on your man o' war
Are treated worse than scum
I'm no flogging captain
And by God I've sailed with some
Come with me to Barbary
We'll ply there up and down
Not quite exactly
In the service of the Crown
To lay with pretty women
To drink Madeira wine
To hear the rollers thunder
On a shore that isn't mine
-- Mr. Knofler Privateering
Hearing about this got me to reevaluate whether I needed Prime and I ended up cancelling altogether. Just a heads up, if you cancel mid-subscription (I was on the yearly plan) you get the option to cancel service immediately and refund what you didn't use. I was supposed to re-up in May and ended up getting $63 refunded.
Guess I'll be putting Helluva Boss on my Plex server.
Meh.
My prime was already cancelled because they billed me in early January, when that extra $100 could be used on Christmas gifts, so it always snuck up on me.
I didn't use it enough to justify it anyway.