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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Amazon put a lot of effort over the years into establishing themselves as the best place to buy nearly everything online. Now they seem bound and determined to throw that title away. Between rising prices, add-on items, confusing marketplace sellers, a refusal to sell certain products that compete with Amazon branded products, and now this ridiculous Prime tie-in, I find it more and more difficult to find a reason to buy stuff from them.

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Trying to shove "subscribe & save" in my face 3-4 times during the process of choosing and purchasing a product is annoying, too.

Yes, I get it, you make more money in the long term when people subscribe.

I wish there was a global opt-out for it.

I've never noticed this actually. Example of a product that does this? I tried Sub&Save for Tide a while back but the one I wanted kept getting cancelled and I was offered an alternative so I stopped trying and went with buying it at LocalStore,Inc.

Yep. This has made Subscribe & Save nearly useless for me. The convenience factor is entirely wiped out when I run out of laundry detergent because I missed the e-mail stating the product is now no longer eligible.

Amazon became a killer app for me (and most, I presume) due too the UIx. You clicked a button and you generally got pretty-close-to-cheapest priced product delivered very quickly.

Now it's just getting complicated, and you have to expend energy to ensure you're not getting actively ripped off by looking at only Prime items/etc.

Completely agree. I was an original Prime member when it first came out which was before price increases, add on items, restrictions and bullshit. After learning about how they treat their workers as well as them adding sales tax on to things that were previously untaxed (state law). I look elsewhere for a lot of things and if I can't find something other than on Amazon I buy from the 3rd party retailer. Paying for the shipping is still cheaper adding shit I don't need/want to meet the $35 threshold and faster.

When you factor in the well-documented pattern of how badly they treat their employees (both warehouse and corporate) it gets even harder to justify.

Oh please - I've read the NYT article, but I haven't seen anything otherwise that corroborates it. White collar friends that work there are very happy. Wage workers there have gripes but nothing abnormal for the industry.

The beauty of Amazon is that if you want to buy product X, produced in America, for a living wage, you can. You can also purchase it from a different seller where it was made in China and pay less for it. It's not the responsibility of Amazon to determine what is right for you. YOU make the choice, they just deliver product to you.

Whether or not Amazon is the best place to buy something depends on your sensitivity to price. You can almost always find a better price somewhere else, and that's been true for many years. Amazon's selling points are convenience and selection.

This Prime thing and the blocking of Chromecast and Apple TV are extremely anti-customer. At least pricing and add-on items make some sort of sense.

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