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Amazon Allowance

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126 pointslouhong71 comments

I applaud the effort Amazon is making to expand its influence, and giving kids an Amazon allowance would lock them in because it doesn't look too easy to convert that money back to real cash.

But I don't think this one will stick around for very long. Prepaid cash/debit cards and automated deposits are an older and more proven way of doing this (not to mention just handing your kids $20 in cash every week). By giving them something that is accepted everywhere, you teach them how to handle limited amounts of money and how to resist temptations -- if I drop $5 on gas station snacks, I've just burned up a sizeable chunk of my allowance on something that will be gone in 10 minutes. Giving an allowance is great to teach young teenagers how to handle money before they get their own job, but I don't see Amazon breaking into this and locking kids into buying only from Amazon.

Kids? I'm pretty sure the real market here is camgirls and other internet personalities that people want to buy presents for.

You can already send Amazon gift cards or buy things off someone's Amazon wishlist.

Patreon's innovation was the "monthly recurring donation." That's basically what this is as well. So one could say it's a direct competitor.

Yeah, that's the first thing I thought of ... seekingarrangement.com sorts of deals.

and stream hunnies.

not sure I even wanna know the difference between a cam girl and a 'stream hunny' O.o

Stream hunnies are cam girls for geeks. They pretend to stream games while flirting with teenage boys ans soliciting donations.

Groupies for the modern times we live in, if you wish.

Jeff Bezos, the world's newest, and wealthiest, pimp.

This is an interesting payments case b/c with kiddos in the United States you need to deal with the Children's Online Privacy Act (ie the reason for the "are you 13 years or older" checkbox question)

One firm that's was trying to do kid payments was Virtual Piggy (now Oink): http://www.oink.com

> the reason for the "are you 13 years or older" checkbox question

I thought all the age-of-13 stuff, specifically, was because you can't legally enter yourself into a contract when you're younger than 13. Which is to say, you can't accept EULAs or Terms of Service (or you can, but they'll have no legal force.)

Obviously it depends on the jurisdiction, but typically minors cannot enter legally binding contracts. Some form of source:

http://www.lawchek.com/Library1/_books/contract/qanda/legala...

One interesting feature I wasn't aware of is that this does not generally apply to "necessities" or employment contracts.

It's COPPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

Some people even consider COPPA to be a form of censorship. It creates such a huge legal burden on websites if they allow < 13 year olds, that most websites have to ban them, thus limiting their right to speech.

I think kids away at college, especially for freshman year could be another use case. Parents know they are smart enough they probably could make the right financial choices, but just being a freshman in college means they probably won't.

If you give teenagers cash, they can't spend it online. Thanks to KYC rules and bank policies, you have to be 18 to get anything that looks like a credit card.

Best plan for teenagers is a joint checking account (dedicated to the child's use) at your bank, with a debit card they can use for day-to-day spending. You can do allowance, etc with transfers, and most bankd will play ball as long as one person on the account (the parent) is 18.

> If you give teenagers cash, they can't spend it online. Thanks to KYC rules and bank policies, you have to be 18 to get anything that looks like a credit card.

What about those prepaid cards you can buy for cash at B&M stores? I'm pretty sure you can use those online.

sometimes those cards don't work for some online stores because there is no address associated with the card, so card verification systems may fail.

many online stores i've seen/used actively block those cards due to fraud/chargeback/etc reasons

Every time I've bought one of those cards, it has me go to a website to register/activate it (set a PIN, associate it with my email address+password, and most importantly, assign it an address and phone number) before it'll work.

That's what I used in high school, but they're not very good value. You'd often need to pay a few bucks in fees just to use a $20 prepaid Visa card.

Activation requires you to (pretend to) be 18, AFAIK. Also they have quite hefty fees; a checking accout is free as long as you don't overdraft.

Checking account are free? Well, chequing accounts are not :(

Among the downsides of being in Canada is paying higher prices for anything that is not health care.

Sucks to be you. My checking account even gives me interest!

Look at your local credit union - many (not all, sadly) offer a free chequing account.

In the US most bank checking accounts have a monthly fee which is waived if you meet certain conditions, like maintain a minimum balance (I think mine was $1000) or get an automatic direct deposit at least 2 times per month of $250 or more - these would be hard to meet for a childs account. Credit unions are usually free though.

There is usually a "relationship waiver" that eliminates the fees on all the accounts you're party to as long as you have enough total wealth parked with that bank.

Are people also not technically allowed to use a prepaid credit card registered in someone else's name? A parent could activate the card and then give it to the child.

You could, but then you're still paying fees designed to exploit the unbanked. If the parent is financially secure, they can use that fact to get a free checking account for their child.

I had a debit card linked to a bank account well before I was 18, which I used to buy all sorts of things from the internet. Prior to that, when I purchased my first domain and paid shared web hosting in early high school, I remember buying a prepaid gift card which I used to make the purchase.

Why can't you use the debit card online? I had a debit card at 14 that I could use online (UK)

Wells Fargo gave me an account incl. debit card at 16.

In EU you can have a visa debit/mastercard debit card when you are 13 upwards.

Life lessons aside, it's alot harder to spend your $20/week on weed or booze or gambling when it's an Amazon credit.

you can always sell it for 80%+ of it's value for cash or bitcoins... or ask your dealer what he needs from Amazon

I wonder if it's solving for my problem where my kids buy a lot of video on demand. I'd like to cap that for each of them each month. It wouldn't hurt if it also was funds they could then use to replace the iPhone charger they break or lose each month.

This seems like a great way to give employees a bit of a perk. An allowance could be used for technical books, and or other learning materials.

This is Amazon we're talking about. The company that doesn't give employees prime, free hardware to take home, or a real employee discount.

Amazons margins are so narrow an employee discount without some sort of cap would be ridiculous.

There is no veil here, and no reason to pretend there is something legitimate preventing Amazon from treating people like human beings. I'm not going to argue with you, unless you tell me you've worked there. Then at least I will attempt to understand why you believed such treatment is acceptable.

Indeed that may be true. But it's still pretty pitiful that they only let you apply your discount to $1000 worth of products a year. That means you save.. $100 each year!

Parent mean that Amazon's customers could use this is a book budget perk.

I think they mean any company for their employees, not specifically amazon - I think Buffer give their employees Amazon gift cards for their Kindles - something like that

What is a non-real employee discount?

10% off up to $100 per year. So about 1/4 day off. Why bother?

Doesn't that essentially mean free prime?

Also... it beats the discount I got back when I worked fast food. Not saying some places don't do better, but I do fear the entitlement of my peers here.

Agreed on the feeling of entitlement. When I first moved into the industry I found it striking too.

It is healthy for the industry for people to have and share this information though. Employees in every industry talk about how they and their peers are compensated, and share scuttlebutt about which companies have better pay and benefits than others as a way of ensuring that they're getting a competitive wage.

> Doesn't that mean free prime?

Based on what they are charging for it, basically yes. They must lose money on it though. My friend ordered a fridge on Amazon prime. I bet 48 hour shipping on a fridge is pretty close to the cost of amazon prime.

No, prime has music, instant video, free shipping, discounts, etc. It is a loss leader that can costs Amazon way more than $100 per member. Otherwise Amazon would scrap the 10% and give all its employees prime.

On entitlement, It's not entitlement. If Amazon can't compete or doesn't want to compete on perks, that is their preprogative. Entitlement is not in Amazon's vocabulary. They have no concept of entitlement. When Amazon employees are forced to wake up at 3am to fix something it's not because Amazon feels entitled to their sleep time. It's because Amazon has devolved into barbarianism and raw power to force people to do things is all that matters there. There is no concept of entitlement because entitlement would mean some rule of law exists. The only reason a discount probably exists is because there is some small psychological benefit to the company that is greater than the (tiny) cost. So when someone feels they should get something more from an employer in that environment it is simply reciprocal hostility.

Previous poster meant that the dollars saved via the discount could be used to purchase prime.

Yes if you buy $1000 of merchandise, you will end up spending $900 and then you can buy prime with the $100 you saved. However, you have to buy the $1000 of merchandise first. In reality that $100 is eaten by sales tax since if you work at Amazon you are going to be in a state where they have tax nexus.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I applaud you for not treating $1,000 in merchandise as a given. On the other... this just feels like an entitlement argument. It is just $100 we are talking about. For benefits that, if you use them, are almost certainly worth more than that.

On one hand, $100 is small potatoes and employees shouldn't care that much.

On the other hand, people are often irrational and do care that much. Which makes it kind of weird that Amazon doesn't provide free Prime to their employees, because that $100 value (and what's their actual cost?) probably buys a lot more than $100 of employee satisfaction.

So while I certainly wouldn't say that Amazon is somehow mistreating their workers by not giving them this stuff, I do think it's kind of weird that they don't.

Ridiculously well put and I feel you hit a bullseye. I still don't understand it. But I do think you hit right on the money.

I want this for something like Fiverr.

Instead of my kids accumulating more junk, they learn the skills of hiring and delegating.

Don't want to mow the lawn in this heat? Use your allowance to somebody else to do it. As long as the job is done they will earn their allowance.

I just need a way to make sure they're not outsourcing their homework or paying somebody buy them alcohol.

I find this disturbing in a way I can't quite quantify. Kids should do things, not just appear to do things because they're clever about outsourcing to someone worse off.

Hiring and managing someone else, while being the point-of-contact with your clients, is doing a thing; it's a very useful life-skill, in fact. There are other useful life-skills they might be better off not delegating away the learning opportunities for, of course, but usually "chores" are less learning experiences and more "I used to do this thing, but now you're old enough to take the load off me."

Of course, if there's no life-lesson, why not just cut out the middle-man and have a local chore marketplace where kids from all around the neighbourhood can directly bid on the contract to mow your lawn. (Mostly kidding, but that'd be somewhat interesting for people who don't have kids, and don't need a full-on gardener.)

Here's a little life lesson that was kicked down to me:

"Don't ever ask/command/order someone to do something that you would not do yourself."

Interpret how you like, but to me it means, "Get your hands dirty and appreciate what it takes to do a job before you delegate."

I tend to think that doing physical work, understanding what's involved, is educational, informative, and motivating. A significant part of the world does work with their body. It's important in having empathy for other "classes" (assuming your kid gets an "information worker" job). Related or not, it's important to also learn how to do a job you may not like well, to pursue excellence in one's work.

Lesson learnt by kid: Money is all that matter. Never bother with anything else.

This would be fantastic for use with AWS, give developers a monthly balance to spin up their choice of environments. Could be pretty awesome.

Especially since rollover is built in.

I like the idea, but I would really like to see a bank or another finical institution offer some services that I can use as a modern introduction to banking for my kids. When I was a kid I had a savings account, and a savings book that I took to the bank to do all my banking. All my deposits and withdrawls were printed into the book by the teller and it was easy enough for me to fill out deposit slips for the checks and cash my family gave me or I earned doing jobs around the neighborhood.

Let my kids have a debit card and let them use ATM's and smart phone apps just like I do, even better if its designed to be useable by children to encourage good banking behaviors.

AKA the Amazon Reverse Microloan program.

Simple paypal alternative that is free .... Could not find any fee info, so should be free...

Then this could easily be used for accepting payments for services or sales. Since I anyways spend on amazon, better accept payments this way without any fee...

Will be interesting if this can be expanded to workers for office supplies and whatnot.

Check out Amazon Business, which appears to allow you to set up multiple users in a hierarchy (including at least some sort of a custom "approvals" system), set thresholds, etc...

http://www.amazon.com/b?node=11261610011

Not sure if it's new or not, recently got a call about getting into it though we declined as we're a small shop & already happy with the level of service we get via Prime.

How about teaching them about saving? It'd be nice if this was interest-bearing.

Cool idea, I think they might have trouble reaching their target audience though.

I don't understand how Amazon can afford to maintain so many projects given their revenue is so low (https://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMZN&annual). Someone care to explain?

90 billion is low? Or are you talking about income? They can afford so many projects because they're making an enormous amount of money and shoveling it all back into these projects.

great product landing page. Loads quick and lots of information. Works great on mobile. 10/10

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