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Comment by yesUgotit | Hacker News Reader

Amazon subscribe and save is the same thing.

I use it for toiletries and other routine consumables at home. Amazon trucks are going to be on the road anyway; may as well save my car trips for actually interesting trips.

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I don't trust Subscribe & Save because of Amazon's dynamic pricing. The discount doesn't matter if the base piece tripled because of Amazon pricing shenanigans.

Has this ever actually happened?

What? Amazon changing prices? It happens every single day. I had something like 25 items in my Saved for Later and every time I logged in at least one and usually 3 or 4 of them had changed price.

No, I'm asking about the situation you described: Do you know of a situation where somebody started a subscription and had the base price triple. I'm not talking about the price of a box of tide pods going up by $1, I mean the situation you're describing where somebody effectively gets bait-and-switched with a 3x price increase.

I don't trust Subscribe & Save because of how they've tried to dupe me into it for products that clearly aren't subscription-worthy, and how it's pre-selected on items. I can't recall what I was purchasing one time that had "subscribe & save" preselected, but it was something absurd like a dog bed or a nose-hair clipper.

On the flip side when they do that, can't you just take the discount and then cancel the subscription? I think I've done that before.

That's a totally valid concern, but Amazon gives you a bunch of opportunity to avoid surprises. They send an email a few days before finalizing your upcoming deliveries, and you can review the price to see if it changed, and either skip a delivery, skip a single product in a delivery, or cancel a subscription entirely.

As a real example: my subscriptions are on a 2 month cycle, and get delivered roughly on the 3rd, which gives me until the 26th of the preceding month to make changes. On the 24th they send an email with all the prices that will be charged if I don't change anything. With almost no friction, I can change or cancel anything up until the 26th.

I have had the price change between the review day and the shipment day. It was less than $2, so I never bothered trying to get the old price. I've since canceled my Prime for a number of reasons, so it's all irrelevant now

Yup, at first it seems wasteful to order delivery, but if you go shopping yourself you still end up driving.

I drive car wagon with a large spacious rear area. I limit my shopping trips, I buy in bulk.

You have to be very disciplined to get as efficient with Amazon. It's probably not really possible.

Amazon day is probably similar. There's a designated day of the week where they deliver everything I've ordered that week. I don't have hard data, but it makes sense that if more than one person in my building/block/etc does the same (thus sharing the same delivery vehicle), it's probably less driving/gas overall.

I have 6 neighbors in my cul-de-sac. The Amazon truck probably visits 5 out of 7 days a week. I never worried about whether my Amazon purchases were wasteful based on trucks and fuel. They were quite wasteful in the sense that I bought a lot of cheap crap I didn't actually need.

This is the worst thing about it. Holding something and deciding if it's worth your money is a much longer process than clicking "buy now", and you've probably don't even remember doing it when the goods show up in front of your door.

Just shop with a list and don't break the rule of not buying anything not on the list.

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