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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

For the first time in many years my family cancelled our Amazon Prime subscription. We did it for a lot of reasons, but one of them was the (somewhat obvious) realization that free shipping isn't free, it's just prepaid and subsidized.

A quick look at eBay auctions for a given item will reveal (quite quickly) an interesting phenomenon: eBay Sellers will list the same item several times over with different prices, and different shipping costs. They often add up to the same total cost, but clearly buyers have different tolerance thresholds for what they'll pay for shipping vs what they'll pay for a product.

Much like with anything else that's "free", it's not free. Someone else is just paying for it (and sometimes that someone is just you)

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Another realization is that "Prime" doesn't even give you free shipping. Rather, Amazon generally has free shipping and Prime just removes the order minimum and stops them from spitefully delaying your order by a week.

I believe the rise of "free" shipping had a lot to do with manufacturer minimum price fixing. Personally I'd prefer to have the shipping cost be explicit, but also be paying less per product. But something tells me if this narrative gains legs and retailers are able to claw back "free shipping", they won't be removing that margin from the individual products.

As for the article, the moralizing about being an "asshole" is completely unjustified. The big retailers are playing constant pricing games through dynamic pricing, sales, coupons, etc to extract as much money possible from people. I'm not going to feel guilty about following the rules they've created to save a few bucks by doing things like returning items that I preemptively ordered to take advantage of a sale, without thinking about whether I actually want them or not. They're hoping "free returns" will induce me to buy crap I don't want, I mitigate that by batching my buying sprees and putting the due date on my calendar. "What's right" has left the dynamic a long time ago.

Between that and the introduction of ads on Prime Video, I’m tempted to cancel as well. I probably won’t yet, but it’s no longer a no-brainer to renew.

Somehow, I've managed to get one of my systems to consistently skip those ads. The screen will go black for a moment like it's trying to load or play an ad but then the video will just resume. This happens with both the freevee stuff, and the regular prime video that now has ads.

Pretty sure it's some rule I added to ublock but I haven't spent the time figuring out which exactly. But seems it's still possible to block those ads.

Eh, ads can be blocked. 5% cash back on travel alone on the other hand makes it continue to be a no-brainer. (And Whole Foods if you shop there).

Everyone understands that you still pay for free shipping. That’s not the point though. If you have prime your stuff ships first. If you don’t — you pay for shipping and/or have to wait longer. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not.

And then there is a massive list of other affiliate services prime members can use - each one another reason to use prime, if you happen to use those services.

I’m actually surprised how cheap prime is considering its value.

Is there a ceiling on cash back? Some spends $20000 travel gets $1k back vs $400 on traditional cash rewards. That would be competitive but most high rewards have caps?

For me, the credit card points more than outweigh the cost of Prime. However, as soon as I heard the writing was on the wall with streaming video, the diminishing willingness of companies to pay for advertisements, inflation, and the dopamine-driven hunt for new content, I switched to physical media.

Note you have to spend $7,000/yr to break even on the additional CC points considering the price of Prime. I have spent way, way under that the last few years.

With the addition of ads to their streaming service, I am out. They don’t offer enough to be worth it anymore.

With an Amazon card at 5% on Amazon purchases (up to $120k) all you need to spend is < $4000/year and it breaks even. There are reasons that make sense to stop using prime, but not for the money, it’s still a steal.

I dont think you are quite right. To the best of my knowledge, you get 3% back on the Amazon branded cards. If you have prime, then you get 2 more percentage to a total of 5%. So to make up for the difference of $139, the price of prime in terms of cash back, you have to spend $6950 (or ~7000 as the OP said) to break even.

Now if you have Discover or Chase Freedom, they run the 5% quarterly bonus (for the first $1500 spent on the bonus category) at least once a year, so your break even point is even more than what I mentioned earlier (closer to $10K).

Ali Express does the same thing now, with different sellers offering apparently different prices but compensating with shipping costs. Which is reasonable; what's not so great is that you get listings that advertise "Free Shipping" but aren't, and that often the picture you see is of item A but the price shown is for a lesser item B in the same listing.

> often the picture you see is of item A but the price shown is for a lesser item B in the same listing

Many large eBay sellers do this. For example, they may offer phone cases for £5 each and a screen cleaning kit for £1, all as different variants of the same listing, so that their listing appears alongside other £1 items in a search for phone cases. It is technically a violation of eBay's listing policy,[1] but is widespread as the rule is not enforced in practice.

1. https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/listing-policies/search...

When buying from a traditional retailer, the amount refunded for a return is a factor — shipping costs are not reimbursed so you are carrying more risk if quality/sizing isn’t as expected.

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