Why would you cancel your Prime Subscription to begin with? As someone who gets more than the price of Prime on shipping items alone, all these additional services are just bonuses to what is already an insanely cost-effective subscription.
Lock-in is always an issue to consider regardless of how shiny those golden handcuffs are, end of the day they are still handcuffs.
What's been bothering me is that the 2 day shipping has started to turn into 3 or 4 days, and the deliveries have started mysteriously getting statuses such as "customer refused delivery" or "unable to deliver" even when I'm home all day. This is entirely anecdotal, but I'm wondering if there isn't some sort of effect going on with drivers who have started to see more Amazon packages and interpreted as not being as serious as a delivery as other expedited shipments.
Anybody else had similar experiences?
Sometimes people still don't understand Sunday delivery and don't look for it or expect it.
USPS get ~$1.50 per parcel from Prime. (trying to recall redacted pdf with that figure). EDIT orig reversed
True story> Because 100% prime delivery is required, after checking the nightly report and found one amazon not delivered, a supervisor had to knock on a customer's door after 8pm and ask if he could scan the package. The package was already in the garbage and had to be given to the sup. [This is an extreme case but it does reflect the "emergency" hyper nature given to Prime parcels.]
If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or "unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock") or most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put the parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't want wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave them on a wet set of stairs);
Unfortunately that's simply not true. I live in an apartment building that doesn't allow pets, and we have dedicated spots for mail to be delivered, particularly for USPS.
Also, this opens the door to amazon tapping into multiple-prime-accounts-per-household, which would be a nice benefit for them.
More recently, however, Google Shopping Express has taken the bulk of my non-perishable purchases - the pricing on Amazon is no longer favorable compared to GSX or my local store. This pricing issue is magnified when looking at small quantities (i.e., 1 unit, that's not ). Often GSX items (or similar items) will be on sale at one store or another. Also finding the reviews on GSX to be less gamed.
If Google started charging per-delivery for GSX, I would still use it (but less often).
- I couldn't care less about the video offer - and it is mandatory, useless, unusable and increases the price
- I don't care about 'bonus' features I didn't sign up for. I signed up for (mostly) free shipping
Given that, I am happy to leave that service behind and if shipping becomes to expensive I might reconsider the default 'go to Amazon and check there' behavior.
This move by Amazon is absolutely about lock-in. Get their tentacles into as much unrelated to commerce as possible and you will likely keep your commerce with them too.