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Comment by anon223345 | Hacker News Reader

I actually cancelled prime because Amazon products these days suck, it’s become literally flea market shit

I probably would use Amazon cell phone service, but would be good if I could just buy that, not all of prime

What do you mean by "literally flea market shit"?

The last 3 items I ordered were obviously dirty used items missing parts, thrown loose in boxes without the factory packaging, and no padding. Like you said, it seems they are selling things that were found in the garbage, or at thrift stores/garage sales as new items.

At this point I am willing to pay 2x for an item I can trust from anyone but Amazon.

If they can take over my monthly phone bill that’s a huge gap. Prime is what $150? What almost 10x cheaper than my phone bill. Of course, the odds that it will offer an equivalent feature set is probably minimal so there will be a switching cost.

Your phone bill is approaching $1500 annually? What are your parameters? Unless that’s unlimited data lines for a family with lots of added devices, that’s a ton of money.

$1.5k is pretty much the going rate for two phones with unlimited and non-terrible tethering.

It’s really not that huge a jump. For a single phone line with tethering, ATT will run you $1200 annually. My budget provider with deprioritized service but on a similar plan is $540. A Prime membership covers a household, but anyway you measure it, $150 is close enough to “one order of magnitude less” to be useful as an approximation.

$240 Annum for 15GB mint mobile.

Plus another $24 or so in fees.

I seem to remember there not being any fees the first time I signed up, which was over two years ago but they were there 18 months ago. I’m assuming they didn’t charge them at the start to make the price more attractive.

AT&T 4 lines (2 adults 2 kids) x $40 each + taxes = ~$200 per month, $2400 per year. This is unlimited data, text, minutes - we used to have a data cap, but the worry about the kids exceeding it when out and about was not worth the savings. We could probably ditch the unlimited minutes for at least the kids lines. We also sometimes have an upgraded phone on the bill at 0% interest over 24 months - there is generally a pretty significant discount compared to the device vendor, with the downside that AT&T does lock the device to its network for those 24 months (unless you pay off the discount you got).

How is your phone bill $125 - month? I have usage based billing and it's between $25 and $80 depending on my usage.

Prime is $150/yr

$100+ monthly phone bills often include the cost of the device, not just the service.

Yea but in this case it's not a good comparison since Prime Mobile is presumably not including a phone too. But maybe it will.

My AT&T bill is over $100/month. My dad's on the plan too but it's a good $100/month just for the service in any case.

I buy the most expensive retail ATT plan and it is $50 per line and it goes lower per line as you add lines. See “unlimited premium”:

https://www.att.com/plans/wireless/

With signature program and multi line discount, I pay $40 per line excluding all taxes, and $45 per line including taxes for 4 lines. When I had 5 lines, it was $5 cheaper.

My experience with AT&T is that even though the cost may be listed as $45 per line for multi-line (and notably $75 for Signature single line), that after taxes and fees it comes out to $90 for a single line on signature. Came out to an additional $15 per line back when I was paying for multi line, too.

These days I go with post-tax/fee calculated provider costs (in my case, Visible (Verizon) at $45 for deprioritized service). So I guess some qualifying customers like yourself can manage that…

Maybe price discrimination, but only applies after fees?

I was mistaken about the price for ATT. Looks like the pre tax prices are drastically higher for fewer lines than mine.

1 line is $85 per line

2 lines is $75 per line

3 lines is $60 per line

4 lines is $50 per line

5 lines is $45 per line

and after that, you have to open a new ATT account and start at 1 line.

So I can see paying near $100 for an individual ATT line. It actually looks like Verizon is cheaper now? You can get 1 line for $65 per month plus tax for 3 years if you switch to Verizon (I cannot tell what the price is if you are already on Verizon).

Mine is $280/mo, but has 6 phones and 4 other devices. So ~$30/device is good? No phone cost in there, just service.

https://www.cnbc.com/select/how-to-cut-your-cell-phone-bill-...

> In fact, JD Power told CNBC that the average cell phone bill is now $144.

If you are on a typical american post-paid plan I guess that is what you get.

that bill is probably for multiple phone lines in a household, and include extra for paying off device loans.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here rolling my eyes at the description of "free or $10/month" as my mobile bill is already less than $10/mo. I'm sure adding cell plans to Sunk Cost Fallacy would be a great business move for Amazon though. The more things they can tie to it, the harder it is to cancel.

> it’s become literally flea market shit

the funny thing is that one of the reasons I keep my prime is because it's a flea market where I can find stuff that I have an extremely hard time finding locally or need to pay exorbitant shipping, for 5-7 days delivery, from others.

What good quality products aren’t you able to get on Amazon anymore that you used to?

The best example is my iPhone charging cords. It was $5, and didn’t work. It was so cheap that rather than the dog and pony show of doin g a return, I ordered another one from another vendor that also didn’t work

I then ordered official apple one that worked

And the HDMI splitter I bought sings to me

And the baby toys, it’s almost comically bad grammar on the box, and the kids songs are Chinese accents

My $100 battery charger, takes half a day to charge

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