If you live in a ZIP code full of congressional staffers, sitcom writers or stock market analysts you get 1 day shipping with Prime. If you’re not so lucky (say you live in the same ZIP code as the warehouse) it could be 5 days.
I just ordered the lens that I need to shoot volleyball games, a famous camera store can get it to me one day sooner than AMZN can despite being closed for a Jewish holiday. AMZN would sell me a ‘refreshed’ lens but the last one of those I bought from them failed in six months.
All the time I see something on the shelf at Target for $45 that is $65 on AMZN. The chattering classes who are bought off with 1 day shipping wax about AMZN’s logistics network (always seems to use USPS, UPS and FedEx to reach me, maybe they get a better deal because they threaten to leave…) or payments (hmmm… Visa, Mastercard, American Express, …) but it is gaslighting end-to-end.
Once a store gets one of those membership programs they quit thinking straight (how do I make money off sales?) and wind up thinking crooked (line goes up…)
The only thing harder than canceling your Prime is making an order without being signed up for a “trial” subscription which is one more reason to shop elsewhere.
Amazon was a pretty decent bookstore once, then a pretty decent "everything" store, then they just enshittified the hell out of everything. While it's good that anti-trust actions are finally being taken, it would have been even better if the practice of predatory pricing sustained by VC money (not just at Amazon) had been nipped in the bud long ago.
Such a price comparison service needs a large team manually curating categories and most of all: the product metadatas. So much manual work. Yet it all made sense, even in a country of just 10M people. (The company is called Prisjakt and is now starting to go to shit for unrelated reasons.)