There was no way I was going to keep paying a subscription to get 5-day shipping when ever other e-tailer gets me packages in 1 to 3 days.
I don’t plan to pay for ad-free Prime, and am hoping it just ends up being pre-roll so that I can load a show, ignore for a little while, and then watch the show. If the ads are interspersed every 20 mins I’m guessing I’ll just stop watching for the most part.
If you’re in one of the cultural capitals of the US you get 1-day shipping. I mean, if they had 5-day shipping in Hollywood it would be a running joke on sitcoms that Amazon Prime was slow. If Jim Cramer got 5-day shipping you’d never hear the end of it on CNBC. If my Congressman got 5-day shipping in Washington, DC he’d know that I get 5-day shipping.
I live in a rural area that is a few hours from NYC by bus and just two hours from a huge AMZN warehouse. It’s notorious though that people in the same zip codes as those warehouses sometimes get 5 day shipping.
I get that it would be annoying to keep having to call/chat Amazon for every order. But if they pay up consistently it would amount to 5-25% off your Amazon purchases (based on my experience, it’s usually around 10-15%). That’s not a terrible tradeoff for slower shipping. In most cases, I’d take the trade!
I got numerous long winded emails about the "benefits" of Prime after I canceled and they hardly said anything about shipping as a benefit.
It makes a big difference when compared with alternatives because of this: if I absolutely have to get something right away I can drop what I am doing and drive to the store and get it sooner than AMZN. That's a hassle though. If it takes 5 days then it is not hard to get to the store because I am probably going somewhere close. 2 days is roughly the crossover where shopping online is more convenient to going to the store.
Since AMZN doesn't care if I have a smile on my face I'm going to shop at a store that invests in my community whenever I can.
In principle AMZN has the advantage of having a bigger catalog but in practice that bigger catalog is mostly spam product listings that I don't want to waste my time looking at.
My biggest behavior change since ditching Prime is that I am much less likely to order used books on AMZN but I am more likely to buy e-Books from platforms other than Amazon like Kobo (e.g. they had a Humble Bundle last week where you could get almost all of the Discworld books for $25) or get books through the fast interlibrary loan service at my uni.
So when you are going to order something it shows 5 days, even though it’s designated as Prime? I had that happen a couple times and was still able to get credits when I tried, based on the fact that anything that is Prime should have 2-day shipping. I understand it is a hassle though, and it’s good to frequent brick-and-mortar shops to keep them strong.
I'm in a suburb right outside Portland, OR. Prime is nearly always 2 days. Sometimes it's next day, even on weekends. Meanwhile, anybody else is at least a week, even when shipping from California.
But I trust they'll get the message when viewership drops enough.
Funnily enough, the first order I made AFTER cancelling my subscription was free delivery for some reason, and actually got delivered in 1 day.