Why it's hard to quit Amazon Prime, even if maybe you should
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is true, and the Post's Geoff Fowler documents it well. But in this time-starved world, there's only so much energy that most of us can devote to being "strategic" about life's minor routines. In the past six months, I've become "strategic" about getting refunds from United when the in-flight wi-fi doesn't work. I've become "strategic" about squabbling with Public Storage when they raise monthly rental rates far faster than they promised me the last time we spoke. I've become "strategic" about storing passwords, being careful about coffee-shop wifi, etc., etc.
Shoot me, but there's only so much of life's minor routines that can be handled "strategically" before I've got no ability to enjoy family, pick fun/gutsy new professional goals, travel with gusto, etc. If Amazon Prime lets me make semi-okay shopping choices without having to top up $17.98 shopping carts to $20, hey, that's a welcome way of clearing out the clutter. It creates more time to be "strategic" about things that really are strategic.
Time for me to run to target: at least 70 minutes round trip.
Times amazon has leaked my credit cards, last 5 years: 0. Times other sites have idioted their way into a giant hassle for me, last 5 years: 8. Time spent arguing with the morons at my gym because I forgot to update my stolen credit card and they wanted to fine me $30: almost 40 minutes. Amount I resent having to deal with all of the above: a lot.
I love Amazon … but the quality issues lately have been somewhat problematic.
We can get a new one for free in a few days, we have many spare lines of credit, and we will not be responsible for any fraudulent charges
Just the other day, I read about how someone managed to pick up over a thousand dollars in overdraft fees when he was struggling to make ends meet and now he never had that problem because he has access to credit cards (that he can afford to pay off in full every month so it doesn't cost him much extra).
This, but not for the reasons you think. In America, it is stupidly easy to get credit in general, and credit cards have high limits. Europe is much, much more conservative in that regard.
However, the thief? once they get that credit card? they use it with a merchant to buy a thing.
For example, last time my card was stolen, I saw a charge for some expensive jewelry from a Florida jeweler on my account. I called my credit card company and they refunded the money to my account... so who is left holding the bag? that jewler in Florda.
When I had a merchant account (selling VPSs) I had a few customers like that; the credit card company simply takes the money back, and it's up to you, the merchant, to try to get back what you just sold to the customer... something that is usually impossible.
Oh, nm, you meant that businesses that unknowingly accept stolen cards get screwed. They certainly do.
But imagine a business had to write a $50 check to each and every cardholder whose card they leaked. I bet there would be a miracle, and systems would become securable.
The best way to solve the problem, I think, is to quit using shared secrets across minimally trusted parties. Public key cryptography is... I'm not going to say unbreakable, but it's pretty good. it's fairly secure. We need to enforce that on all physical card readers, which will make 'skimming' rather a lot more difficult, and then after that we need to figure out a card reader users can use on their computers and cellphones.
The technology is mostly there; most of my cellphones support some kind of secure wireless public key stuff, and most of my phones do too. We need to make this ecosystem work well, solve the software problems, and then make it so that your credit card number is just an identifier, not an authentication token.
Also, Americans are richer and have bigger credit lines so the cards are worth more on the black market.
Yes, yes, in America, our credit cards now have chips, too... but they also have the old magstripe, and everyone buys things from the internet anyhow, so we're giving that number out to everyone.
The other side of this is that the laws in the US are heavily in the customer's favor. It's a pain in the ass, you have to complain about the charges, but it's very rare that we are actually responsible for any of the charges. (The merchant who accepted the stolen credit card is left holding that particular bag.)
Because of this? Personally, I don't worry too much about it. I figure any one of my cards might be out of commission at any point of time, and periodically I'll just call my credit card company and tell them to give me a new credit card number, just so I have a fresh one that isn't floating around all the darknet sites. I figure a credit card being compromised every five years or so is 'normal'
But... it sounds like I'm wrong.
I write this from the airport lounge after getting off a $260 flight, which I paid mostly with a $200 certificate with the last flight's issue, and landed to a new $175 certificate for broken wifi. I'm up to over $5000 in such compensation in the past couple years.
One thing worth being strategic about.
Add to that, a chef made your food in a restaurant, broken WiFi on a plane isn't exactly the same kind of hand-crafted experience.
If a flight delay causes me to miss a connection, then I paid for a service (getting me from location A to location B by a certain time) that I did not actually get. Same if the Wi-Fi is out of service.
There is no implicit promise at a restaurant that you'll like your dinner.
- The restaurant is a near-monopoly at which I have to either eat at or go hungry.
- The reason I "don't like my meal", as you say, is because it was served to me multiple days late, during which time I was unable to leave and re-enter the restaurant without having to pay again (and this restaurant charges a premium).
- When I pay for food at the restaurant, I often receive an empty plate instead. The restaurant refers to this as my "not liking my meal", and chalks it up to personal preference unless I raise a stink.
- The restaurant is somewhere I am forced to eat by my employer, and my employer will not refund me when they fail to provide food.
- The restaurant has a reputation for being mismanaged and implementing policies that torment patrons--sometimes by physically beating them.
- The restaurant has slowly but surely increased prices while visibly decreasing portion sizes.
And so on. For a lot of people "just don't fly" doesn't work (people with overseas family or travel for work). And for those same people, mega-airlines like United are often the only feasible choice or one of a very few equivalently-shitty choices.
Also, complaining by email decreases (doesn't eliminate, but decreases) the annoyance caused by antagonizing an in-person employee of the airline with your grievances. The person whose day you might ruin by interrupting them is not the problem--their employer is--but it's very hard for many people to refrain from acting as if that person is responsible when they confront someone. The person whose job it is to read the complaint emails probably isn't having a great time either, but at least they can (hopefully) take a smoke break if they need to.
The more services you have, the more the desire to strategize. A different solution is simply not to utilize so many services in your life. Do you really need all of them? I've never had wifi on a flight, and life is not miserable. Ditto for purchases. How much have you bought in the last year that you did not properly utilize and is sitting around the house that you intend to get to one day?
When you spend less time altogether shopping, then you suddenly have more time to be strategic about the things you do buy.
I've also moved most of my shopping off Amazon altogether as well, and it was surprisingly easy. Just a few searches to see who's got the best price on [x] right now. It's surprisingly often not Amazon.
When you start having kids, it often becomes a hell of a lot trickier to thread this needle, based off of what I've heard. Sure, for some stuff you can play this game, but school supplies for example?
Though many of us likely can still try
On the whole, I think this will lead to a much needed sanitisation of our buying habits for the coming year. We had gotten so used to buying things basically on a whim. It's good to be more thoughtful about our consumption.
That's definitely not "no energy" and is kind of exactly the OP's point. Amazon might not be the cheapest but they'll still be very close, and you save time by just defaulting to them.
I would very much dispute the "very close" claim. I find they're very close or the cheapest for fairly pricey items. For not-so-common items, or for regular supplies, they are often not even close.
I bought a steamer rack from them for over $15. It's a very popular item, made from a well known brand and with over 1000 reviews. Just last week I was in a local grocery store and found a very similar steamer for less than $7. Looking at similar steamers in Amazon, they are all above $10 if I order Prime. I do see one which is about $8, but I have to specially select the non-default non-Prime option for that listing. On a search result, it shows up as $11, not $8. Note that I am not a Prime member, yet those are the prices I see when I search.
If you do a lot of "regular" shopping, those deltas really add up.
1.) With more of my movie and book buying shifting to digital, I actually don't have a lot of things sitting in my wishlist any longer waiting to be popped into my shopping cart to round up a purchase
2.) Especially, as someone who travels a lot, I really (unexpectedly) found that being able to get orders fairly deterministically in a couple of days (aka less time than I'd have probably have taken to go to the store anyway) is hugely valuable.
The main downside is that, if I'm being honest, I do make some impulse purchases I probably wouldn't have made had I left things sit for a a few weeks but that's mostly another type of mental load. The buyer's regret items are both few and fairly low value.
Seriously, this is one of the wonders of the modern world. Going elsewhere means not only wondering when an item will arrive, it means wondering whether the item will arrive at all. A 5% difference in price just isn't worth the necessary contingency planning.
A couple of times now when shopping elsewhere I've had orders deliberately delayed so that I would call and they could attempt to upsell me because they weren't making a good enough commission on the price as advertised. Life is way too short for these sort of shenanigans.
Also, once you are used to real time "in stock/out of stock" status, shopping at a physical store is an exercise in pure frustration. There are only so many times you'll buy crappy alternatives to what you actually want so that you don't "waste the trip" before you stop making the trip.
On a similar note I remember this really poignant example came during prep for my wedding where me and the wife did all these crazy craft projects and I really stretched to buy the minimal fancy paper to get everything to work out just right. I wound up blowing the small margin budget by not taking into consideration the printing fees which was being paid per page rather than per item. When I bought all these small cardstocks the cardstock savings was exhausted because I could not maximize the items rendered per print. If I instead had paid for the full sheet I would be able to print multiple items at once later cutting them up.
A tangential experience in this space too came in owning fruit trees where anyone whose owned one knows you get this downpour of a harvest. It's hard not to waste it and avoid fallen fruit and I was struck at how "wasteful" nature can be, it just hits you with an abundance that really threw me for a loop in trying to use so much effort to eat it all. At some point I really switched teams to just enjoying what I can and not getting all worked up about the lost potential. I guess the point of it all is that harvesting of any potential is not without effort, which may not be trivial or fit into our overall effort budget.
"harvesting potential is not without effort" - I love this, it's all about balancing inputs and outputs. Once you have an established tree, it will produce apples as an output with little human input. The harvest and preservation of this output requires a lot of human input.
The thing is you can use the apples in other ways, "the problem is the solution". Instead of trying to eat an apple a day and bake pies and make cider which are all human intensive tasks, you could allow something else to work on the extra apple output. For examples, pigs and goats love apples and could make short work over excess. They in turn they produce values outputs (meat, milk, poop). Don't want to be bothered owning animals.
I've largely solved that problem by not buying things.
It seems like a smart career move to criticize Amazon as a tech reporter at WaPo. Since Bezos now owns the newspaper, if you're laid off or fired, you could point to your critical articles of Amazon as proof of journalistic wrongdoing. He's unfireable!
That said, if there WAS a cynical motive, it's "let us prove that we're independent as a newsroom." Overcompensating for bias, essentially.
We don't have Walmart in my part of the world, but what I can say is that Amazon is the preference not just for the fast delivery, but for the security. If I get delivered a crap product that's not as described, I know Amazon won't argue with me. I dread taking anything back to any other retailer I've dealt with. There's only so many times you can be told some variant of "oh we can't help you because you broke the seal that you needed to break to open the box". I'll vote with my wallet, and if it means hegemony, then Amazon's competitors should have started giving a rats behind years ago.
It's still worth shopping around - occasionally Amazon can be far more expensive than the alternatives - but if the price is close, _knowing_ that Amazon will sort an issue even if it doesn't show up for a year plus without even questioning is useful to know.
My experiences have been vastly different than your own - the CRA helps, certainly - but I've found retailers don't really abide the law as much as like to be forced kicking and screaming into adhering to it.
Even retailers who boast having their reputation for support at the core of their business. I've had hellish experiences getting John Lewis to deal with failed electronics, even a DOA laptop. You have the right to take a retailer to court of course, but most know you won't bother with the hassle and give up. Again, only my experience. One I've never had with Amazon.
And when they do that, it's basically a life sentence. And they also ban your spouse just to be sure.
I've become cautious of returning stuff to Amazon after they sent me a friendly email asking about the "unusually high number of returns" I've had.
I stopped shopping at Wal-Market around 2009 (I think). I realize Target, Bi-lo and others have adopted a lot of the same practices WM used in order to simply stay competitive and especially with stores like Target, they know customers may pay a premium just not to shop at the mega store.
So it might be symbolic at this point, you can't really vote with your dollars, but I have the money and save plenty, so I might as well try and do what I can.
I rarely shoped at Amazon and quit shopping there entirely after moving back to the US in 2016, to Seattle, and seeing Amazon as nothing more but the new Wal-Mart, not just for retail, but for server hosting as well.
That said, the "buffer" they provide can sometimes be nice.
People who sell FBA on Amazon make good money because people who have Prime usually only buy Prime-eligible products. You can get a book + shipping for, say, $10 if you are willing to forego 2 day shipping. But the lowest prime-eligible price may be $20. These are not hypothetical prices. I've sold stuff using Amazon FBA where many of the cheapest sellers are selling under $10, and I list it at, say, $25 for Prime users, and I still sell it. A lot of Prime users simply filter for Prime options and never consider the cheaper options on the same page.
They gave me a free subscription for 6 months. A couple orders was enough to decide never again. So much garbage and packaging. Unconscionable to me.
The alternative is having everyone drive to retail stores which is super carbon intensive and then you still end up with the same packaging minus the cardboard box (which is recycled anyways).
Sounds like you are the one being unconscionable to me
That doesn't hold true everywhere. Recycling for me is easy. The city gives me a trash can for paper products, and another for plastic. But in the states, it was always spotty. I lived in a little town with no curbside recycling, and I didn't have a car. There was never a real push for recycling most places I lived in the states, and most states offer zero cash back for empty bottles and cans (it greatly increases the number of them recycled). Here (Norway) I can simply put them into a machine in the grocery stores, though some aren't accepted.
On top of that, commercial trash is quite a bit different. City dwellers usually pay for trash removal through taxes. The businesses, though, pay for it themselves. Most are motivated to recycle their cardboard because the company pays them to pick up trash. (plastic and other similar things just go in the trash).
Now, lets consider Amazon. They have a bit more in common with a factory than a brick and morter. Some of their stuff isn't in their control to recycle, though they could offer returnable packages. The rest, though, is doable. After all, some factories send absolutely nothing to a landfill (Subaru in Lafayette, Indiana is one of those). I'm pretty sure something similar can happen at Amazon if they had the right incentive. They'd already have the trash incentive brick and mortar stores have.
Even if a high percentage of Amazon packaging gets recycled, that's more wasteful than just not using it for shipping, right? Then, we get into the relative carbon footprint of people driving to the store, and as others have pointed out, that could be marginally low when you consider they are already at the store, or are out and about for other reasons.
I think it's fair to say that Amazon promotes consumption, and lots of places in the world just consume too much.
For regular household items (soap, supplies, etc) - which many buy using Amazon Prime, you're really not saving gas by buying on Amazon, as you likely go to these stores anyway to buy groceries, etc.
Amazon is also great if I want to send someone a gift. No more long waits in line at the post office.
I also absolutely love Amazon's customer service: in my experience they're 100% no-questions-asked no matter what, as long as you return within 30 days. And if it's a small enough item that's not worth the return shipping cost, I don't even have to go through the hassle of shipping it back. With nearly any other retailer I would dread having to attempt a return.
My issue with Wal-Mart is their site can be a real mess at times and filtering to my local store only oddly doesn't work all the time. They also have a shipping issue where they have split an order and both arrived the same day so how they don't lose money I don't know; one arrived Fed Ex in the morning and then another as Fed Ex Home at night - they were multiples of the same item from the same location!
Now I have watched some Amazon Prime video and I use it to get stuff my parents want faster and have it delivered to my house. Yet one are the Post missed is their partnership with Twitch, now I can support a single streamer for free each month where that used to cost me 4.99 a month.
Also, Prime is a godsend for those who cannot get out of house either from infirmities, medical (think IBS), or simply not comfortable in crowds.
Have you tried their mobile app? It seems to be a lot better at showing local inventory than the web site (at least the iOS version...I've not tried the Android version).
I order about 30 things a year from amazon. $3 an order for faster shipping is not worth it for me.
I think more people need to reevaluate themselves.
Still better than network television though.
I don't, despite having Prime, because it doesn't work with Chromecast.
What I do buy is significantly cheaper to just buy at target anyway during grocery runs.
I also never use the other services even though they are available. Amazon music isn't as good as spotify, the tv offering isn't that interesting, etc.
So I buy a lot less from Bezosmart these days. Can't say it is much of a loss for me.
You don't have argue with Amazon. You press the "where's my stuff" button and send a message. They'll ship a replacement right away.
If you live in a sketchy area, don't order things. Similarly, I live in a cottage behind a big house. I can't hear or see delivery trucks, so I avoid any orders that require a signature.
Amazon has been using their own delivery service here for quite a few of my orders, and they don't always know what they are doing. I would wager this is why the parent was facing problems.
I've actually had to contact Amazon about this several times after we moved to this location. To the extent where I was seriously annoyed that I couldn't find a customer service option right on the order page and instead had to click separately through their customer service flow, only to find that the agent has no idea what order I'm concerned about, and that I have to go through the whole rigmarole of telling them my name (if you have an uncommon name like mine, this quickly becomes a chore), address, order, etc.
To Amazon's credit, they've always made it right with me, but I shouldn't have to contact them every week about this issue. That's at least partly the reason I canceled our membership.
The degree of professionalism here is lacking, compared to USPS or UPS.
In one particular instance I spent 20 minutes looking for a package, checking with neighbors, etc. The Amazon app said "delivered to mailroom" but I live in a single family home.
Turned out the driver just chucked the package out their window while driving by, and left the package in a pile of leaves along the street.
Not even a friendly note thru the mail slot to say “we put your package in the bin”.
Luckily my wife happened to find it.
Yes, because I dont care for the shipping cost but the guaranteed overnight shipping for pretty much everything I need.
The argument, that you get cheaper delivery is moot if that isnt the reason why you use amazon prime.
What I miss most is Amazon caring about me as a customer. I don't think I am the only one who finds that as a non-prime customer my packages take a really long time to ship.
I often have to contact Amazon to get them to actually ship my infrequent orders.
Once you are out, you are really out.
This is precisely why I refuse to even try Prime. It feels like a protection racket. It's not unusual for them to take a week or two to even dispatch an item. If I don't like it, I'm welcome to pay their protection money.
It's saving me plenty though. Most the stuff I get from Amazon, I can get from China at a fraction of the price. Now that amazon isn't neccessarily faster than China (yes, let that sink in!), I may as well order it from China.
(and note I'm talking about time to dispatch here. I'm not complaining I get default shipping rather than 2-day shipping. I'm complaining it takes them a week or two to pull the item off a shelf)
I don’t know why I stick around.
8.25/MRC is way less than my Netflix subscription.
The coverage is pretty good and very wide.
Count that against the 40 mile drive into town that I only make once every other week -- even if they took a week to get to me it would be sooner then if I went to the store (plus all the gas savings for myself).
And I'll bet your nearest Amazon Fulfilment Center is a lot farther away than those. But hardly relevant, either, when you can go to walmart.com or target.com and order the same items, often also for free two-day delivery.
It is fascinating in these comments to see the reductio ad absurdum that Prime membership seems to invoke. People arguing that if they didn't have Prime they'd have to walk to a store.
Amazon wasn't the first online e-tailer, it isn't the only one and surprisingly it isn't the biggest in many countries.
It's not hard to quit amazon prime. I only sign up for amazon prime once a year during christmas and then cancel the membership at the end of the month. Takes me a few seconds.
Wish HN was more technology centric like it used to be rather than peddling silly washingtonpost and nytimes articles.
Trampling workers rights, unloading externalities onto taxpayers, establishing dangerous dominance in many sectors, wiping your ass with user privacy, hugely increasing pollution to deliver packages a day earlier, just a few examples of what it costs to ship you packets of cheap crap within 2 days. Dismissing all that because you appreciate the convenience of free 2-day delivery is the purest expression of first-world privilege.