Amazon Prime is a remarkable success but also dystopian. It has made convenience and speed the norm, habituating consumers to buy more products. Prime’s flywheel effect - where more customers lead to more data and scale which attracts more customers - has fueled Amazon’s dominance. Prime subscribers spend twice as much and Amazon’s value has multiplied 97 times since 2005. While canceling Prime may not hurt Amazon, it can benefit local businesses by gaining a new customer. However, Prime has rewired how people think about what is possible to obtain and how fast, making a Prime-free life unimaginable for many.
Here are the things that constantly bring me back to using prime.
Customer service - I can get a rep on the phone quickly, and chat is actually functional. And rarely do i even need these because returns are super easy to self-service.
Logistics - I do not live in a big city. Most things take a minimum of 2 days to get to me. Amazon included, because they have to always go through the larger city near me (a few hundred miles away) and then go through local sorting. That said Amazon, is about 85% on the 2 day delivery, where most others are…5-7 days, even if i do in store pickup for some of the big box stores that ARE in town.
Site functionality - They 100% have dark patterns. And they 100% track what sells well and then copy it into their “amazon essentials” catalogue to siphon off profits from third parties. But their site is functional, search works, I can usually find what I need.
I still often seek out alternatives. Especially local and small shops. But when my choices become Amazon vs BestBuy or Amazon vs Cabelas/Academy/Dicks/Walmart or something similar, I usually choose based on ancillary policies like speed of delivery and least amount of time wasting with returns. Amazon often wins out there.
I live outside of a tiny country town in Australia, and local shops literally do not carry many of the sorts of items I need or, yes, want.
I work from home and rarely go into town, so paying twice as much and taking a day out of my life just isn’t my bag.
If I can get local and it’s not urgent, I will put together a consolidated list and go in some weekend when I have enough to make it worthwhile.
Sure, it probably makes me the devil, but unless I go move to a cabin in the woods and life a self-sustainable lifestyle, I can’t realistically avoid supporting some amount of evil just by existing under capitalism.
I try to make good choices where I can, and vote for people who, ideally, could effect real change.
I was a buyer for a chain of high end bike shops for many years. Amazon really only sells junk products. Any real quality brands of niche products can’t support amazon and the typical brick and mortar business inventory structure. Like, I spent between $100k-$500k in preseason bike brand commitments for 3 stores. If any of those brands decided to allow sales on Amazon I would drop them immediately. Multiply this by every bike shop that exists. This is more than Amazon could compete with by a long shot. The issue is that every Buyer in a shop knows what they are able to sell effectively and buys accordingly. I tailored my orders for every shop independently. It would be impossible for Amazon to predict and fund high end bikes at this scale.
“So what,” you say, “it’s just bikes.” No it is not. The bike brands are usually part of a group of brands that include several parts, clothing, and accessory products. These are part of preseason commitments with the bike brands too. So all of these are not sold on Amazon either. This is the case with most things, the best or even decent stuff is not sold on Amazon.
The worst thing with amazon is that they aggregate all identical products in their warehouses. This makes it trivial for a seller to insert fake goods into a product pool and it is completely untraceable back to them.
I only have prime because it’s VERY cheap in poland - it costs ~ $10/YEAR.
I don’t even really buy stuff on amazon, it’s just for prime video and the gaming rewards.
Buying stuff online is just modern life. Might as well get fast shipping and discounts. Prime is no different than any other pay-to-join shopping club.
You can order from somewhere else online. Most of Amazon is cheap crap from aliexpress now anyway. They don’t even have the best prices most of the time anymore.
My point was not to buy things that are just shitty crap from aliexpress. Or that cheap crap from aliexpress is unappealing junk that nobody would want to buy, the equivalent of email spam. In fact, the complaint I tend to hear people make the most often about Amazon is how hard it is to find anything on there that isn’t cheap chinese junk from AliExpress.
Perhaps people use Amazon differently than I do. I mostly buy niche items that you simply can’t buy at stores, or if you do find them at stores they are astronomically expensive.
Which is not to say I don’t switch things up. I order from Best Buy, Walmart, a whole bunch of different places. But on balance, I’m happy with the Prime subscription and use it frequently.
I look at it from an energy standpoint. If there’s an Amazon truck driving down my block every day, sometimes twice, and I need a thing, may as well put that thing on the truck. The alternative is me driving around, which is wasteful.
Maybe it’s because it’s been over 10 years since you’ve ordered from there, but it’s nothing like eBay in that regard. Avoiding the cheap, misleading junk on Amazon is pretty trivial. That stuff is there, sure, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been “tricked” in the way I have with eBay.
Not a fan of the corporation, but free next day (sometimes even same day) delivery is hard to turn down.
I cancelled Prime around that time and my Amazon spending dropped significantly. I still shop there occasionally when I need something, but I’ll usually throw the stuff I need, but not immediately in my cart and wait until I qualify for free shipping. Also, they’ve given me like 5 free month trials, which I use when I DO need something ASAP. Just gotta be sure to cancel before it auto-renews.
And buy from where? Retailers these days, insofar as they exist at all, have ridiculously limited inventory. If I want something that’s even slightly uncommon, the only place I can find it is online, and since there’s no telling whether any given website will steal from me, welp, Amazon it is.
You can still buy from Amazon as needed without Prime. The free shipping is still usually relatively fast, and they’ll give you a free or heavily discounted Prime trial fairly often. I try to avoid buying stuff on Amazon these days, but a lot of things simply aren’t available elsewhere or would be significantly more difficult to acquire. I haven’t had a steady Prime sub in at least a couple years, but they end up offering me a trial probably every few months. Hell, they gave me a full month for free a week ago (probably to try to drive up Prime Day sales).
This. Trying to find anything in a brick and mortar store in the last decade has been such a godawful experience that I don’t feel the least bit sorry for them. Groceries are largely delivered (not using Instacart, but the store’s own delivery or pickup service), tech stuff is all aliexpress or amazon, clothing I still largely go in to buy, but don’t buy very often. Appliances? Research the shit out of it online and usually order online from a local retailer with a decent website. Heck, even hardware is online through Home Depot and auto stuff is either rockauto or similar.
I’ve been using eBay since 2007. I just don’t see any benefits to using Amazon over them.
However, I did use Amazon back in the day when they only sold books and I couldn’t find what I was looking for in local bookstores. But Amazon has changed for the worse since those bygone days.
i haven’t had prime in years and am doing just fine. spoiler alert: you still get free shipping from amazon without prime. you just don’t get 2 day shipping, which is an unnecessary luxury.
I’m shocked at the amount of people in the replies here whose response to this is basically “no, I won’t, because its convenient”.
It is widely known that this convenience comes at the price of poor working conditions for Amazon workers. Our consuming habits have a very real and tangible impact. The article linked covers this briefly:
Amazon warehouse workers spend their days picking and packing in million-square-foot warehouses where they face punishing productivity expectations, constant surveillance, high turnover, and serious injuries, for a starting wage of $15 an hour.
Of course there are many other negative impacts caused by this convenience which are also covered in the linked article.
I would rather inconvenience myself than buy something from Amazon at all if I can avoid it. I understand for a non-zero number of people, Amazon is their only option, but for those of us who have a choice I would encourage you to reconsider your consumption habits.
For real, the amount of people acting like the choices here are Amazon Prime or driving over to the B&M is ridiculous. It is like people forgot how to shop online. There are many other choices for online shopping. It is so incredibly lazy to just throw your hands up and say “Whelp, the local store doesn’t have what I need, guess I need to use Amazon Prime.”
Everyone who thinks people should cancel their prime account because of horrible working conditions should first look at their phone… then their tv… then any other random electronics they have… then look at their shoes and their clothes and everything else they have made cheaply in a factory that abuses human labor. Then find a dictionary and look up the word hypocrite.
Living under capitalism is living under the yoke of devils. You cannot escape them, and you sometimes make deals with them, whether because you have to, or you think the deal will work out for you. But that doesn’t mean you should love the devils, and if you can get away from them you should.
Yeah, most people’s phones or shoes or whatever probably have some dirty pasts, but that doesn’t mean we should just give up on making any kind of good or moral choices. We’re locked into capitalism, and we will have blood on our hands whether we are aware or not, but using that as an excuse to give up on trying to do better is not a coherent moral position.
I think there’s a significant difference between “any shoe I try to buy is shady, and if a wholesome option even exists it is incredibly hard to find/buy/pricey”, and “sure Amazon workers literally die in warehouses, but next day shipping on my random knickknacks is soooo convenient!”
There exists real and valid use-cases for prime, as several other people in this thread have expressed. But just shrugging and saying “eg whatever” because you want to save $1 on random junk isn’t one of them.
You realize that the alternatives to Amazon all do the same thing, right? Working in a warehouse supplying brick-and-mortar shop isn’t exactly a cushy or well-paid job, either.
It isn’t hard to be better than the worst. My SO worked in a non-amazon warehouse before moving in with me and it is no walk in the park but it is still far better than Amazon. They even started trying to recruit people from her warehouse and everyone who jumped ship to Amazon regretted it quickly.
What are people buying that they need same-day arrival from Prime instead of waiting 5-7 days? Do people get their medicine and groceries off of Amazon? Or is it just convenience?
Of course, I’m able to say this because I never got Prime in the first place so I never acclimated to same-day shipping and thus never got attached to it. When I had to order off Amazon, just wait and bundle with other items for free shipping anyways, no extra money sent off to get Prime. And they were never important enough that I needed them right now. I could wait.
I’m extremely motivated by convenience, so I’m no better, I just so happen to be able to say “no” to Amazon now because I never let it too far into my life in the first place.
Do you need Prime for that? I’m not in your same situation, but I used to be very reliant on Prime shipping. Since I cancelled Prime, I still sometimes buy stuff from Amazon, but I realized I don’t have a need to get things so rapidly. Free shipping is still an option on most items, it just takes a few more days. When they’re small items that don’t qualify for free shipping, then I just add it to my cart and wait until I have something else to add that makes it cross that free shipping threshold. And I also generally don’t feel the need to use Amazon as much since so many other companies offer free shipping these days.
In my circle, I’ve seen that people are just so expectant of rapid shipping, but they don’t actually need it. I’ve learned how instant gratification isn’t actually valuable to me, but I know that’s difficult for a lot of people to accept.
Our conversation on a different post made me check your post history. And now this post has me considering canceling Amazon Prime. Ripple effects are weird.
I live in a rural area and gave up Amazon shortly before the pandemic. I switched to ordering items directly from the manufacturers’ websites. Giving up Amazon doesn’t mean giving up the rest of the internet, though admittedly some manufacturers link you right back to Amazon instead of running their own separate storefront, so I have to look for another.
Not happening. The returns process is the best thing about buying from Amazon. No need to deal with restocking fees or things breaking after 3 months either.
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Here are the things that constantly bring me back to using prime.
Customer service - I can get a rep on the phone quickly, and chat is actually functional. And rarely do i even need these because returns are super easy to self-service.
Logistics - I do not live in a big city. Most things take a minimum of 2 days to get to me. Amazon included, because they have to always go through the larger city near me (a few hundred miles away) and then go through local sorting. That said Amazon, is about 85% on the 2 day delivery, where most others are…5-7 days, even if i do in store pickup for some of the big box stores that ARE in town.
Site functionality - They 100% have dark patterns. And they 100% track what sells well and then copy it into their “amazon essentials” catalogue to siphon off profits from third parties. But their site is functional, search works, I can usually find what I need.
I still often seek out alternatives. Especially local and small shops. But when my choices become Amazon vs BestBuy or Amazon vs Cabelas/Academy/Dicks/Walmart or something similar, I usually choose based on ancillary policies like speed of delivery and least amount of time wasting with returns. Amazon often wins out there.
I live outside of a tiny country town in Australia, and local shops literally do not carry many of the sorts of items I need or, yes, want.
I work from home and rarely go into town, so paying twice as much and taking a day out of my life just isn’t my bag.
If I can get local and it’s not urgent, I will put together a consolidated list and go in some weekend when I have enough to make it worthwhile.
Sure, it probably makes me the devil, but unless I go move to a cabin in the woods and life a self-sustainable lifestyle, I can’t realistically avoid supporting some amount of evil just by existing under capitalism.
I try to make good choices where I can, and vote for people who, ideally, could effect real change.
I was a buyer for a chain of high end bike shops for many years. Amazon really only sells junk products. Any real quality brands of niche products can’t support amazon and the typical brick and mortar business inventory structure. Like, I spent between $100k-$500k in preseason bike brand commitments for 3 stores. If any of those brands decided to allow sales on Amazon I would drop them immediately. Multiply this by every bike shop that exists. This is more than Amazon could compete with by a long shot. The issue is that every Buyer in a shop knows what they are able to sell effectively and buys accordingly. I tailored my orders for every shop independently. It would be impossible for Amazon to predict and fund high end bikes at this scale.
“So what,” you say, “it’s just bikes.” No it is not. The bike brands are usually part of a group of brands that include several parts, clothing, and accessory products. These are part of preseason commitments with the bike brands too. So all of these are not sold on Amazon either. This is the case with most things, the best or even decent stuff is not sold on Amazon.
The worst thing with amazon is that they aggregate all identical products in their warehouses. This makes it trivial for a seller to insert fake goods into a product pool and it is completely untraceable back to them.
I only have prime because it’s VERY cheap in poland - it costs ~ $10/YEAR. I don’t even really buy stuff on amazon, it’s just for prime video and the gaming rewards.
Bundled with my phone plan.
Buying stuff online is just modern life. Might as well get fast shipping and discounts. Prime is no different than any other pay-to-join shopping club.
You can order from somewhere else online. Most of Amazon is cheap crap from aliexpress now anyway. They don’t even have the best prices most of the time anymore.
Sure, if I can wait 2-5 weeks I’ll check AliExpress.
My point was not to buy things that are just shitty crap from aliexpress. Or that cheap crap from aliexpress is unappealing junk that nobody would want to buy, the equivalent of email spam. In fact, the complaint I tend to hear people make the most often about Amazon is how hard it is to find anything on there that isn’t cheap chinese junk from AliExpress.
Perhaps people use Amazon differently than I do. I mostly buy niche items that you simply can’t buy at stores, or if you do find them at stores they are astronomically expensive.
Which is not to say I don’t switch things up. I order from Best Buy, Walmart, a whole bunch of different places. But on balance, I’m happy with the Prime subscription and use it frequently.
I look at it from an energy standpoint. If there’s an Amazon truck driving down my block every day, sometimes twice, and I need a thing, may as well put that thing on the truck. The alternative is me driving around, which is wasteful.
There are other stores on the internet…
I can think of at least one other truck going to everyone’s house once a day too.
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A girl can dream
The post office was going to be your bank too. That bill died.
I’d be kinda down for this
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Maybe it’s because it’s been over 10 years since you’ve ordered from there, but it’s nothing like eBay in that regard. Avoiding the cheap, misleading junk on Amazon is pretty trivial. That stuff is there, sure, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been “tricked” in the way I have with eBay.
Not a fan of the corporation, but free next day (sometimes even same day) delivery is hard to turn down.
I cancelled Prime around that time and my Amazon spending dropped significantly. I still shop there occasionally when I need something, but I’ll usually throw the stuff I need, but not immediately in my cart and wait until I qualify for free shipping. Also, they’ve given me like 5 free month trials, which I use when I DO need something ASAP. Just gotta be sure to cancel before it auto-renews.
Less consumerism is always better.
And buy from where? Retailers these days, insofar as they exist at all, have ridiculously limited inventory. If I want something that’s even slightly uncommon, the only place I can find it is online, and since there’s no telling whether any given website will steal from me, welp, Amazon it is.
You can still buy from Amazon as needed without Prime. The free shipping is still usually relatively fast, and they’ll give you a free or heavily discounted Prime trial fairly often. I try to avoid buying stuff on Amazon these days, but a lot of things simply aren’t available elsewhere or would be significantly more difficult to acquire. I haven’t had a steady Prime sub in at least a couple years, but they end up offering me a trial probably every few months. Hell, they gave me a full month for free a week ago (probably to try to drive up Prime Day sales).
This. Trying to find anything in a brick and mortar store in the last decade has been such a godawful experience that I don’t feel the least bit sorry for them. Groceries are largely delivered (not using Instacart, but the store’s own delivery or pickup service), tech stuff is all aliexpress or amazon, clothing I still largely go in to buy, but don’t buy very often. Appliances? Research the shit out of it online and usually order online from a local retailer with a decent website. Heck, even hardware is online through Home Depot and auto stuff is either rockauto or similar.
The amount of times I’ve made the effort to look in a brick and mortar and not found the thing I’ve needed is too high.
I’ve been using eBay since 2007. I just don’t see any benefits to using Amazon over them.
However, I did use Amazon back in the day when they only sold books and I couldn’t find what I was looking for in local bookstores. But Amazon has changed for the worse since those bygone days.
I support you doing this, but I have physical impairments and no car, so I’m choosing between dystopias already.
i haven’t had prime in years and am doing just fine. spoiler alert: you still get free shipping from amazon without prime. you just don’t get 2 day shipping, which is an unnecessary luxury.
One day
I’m shocked at the amount of people in the replies here whose response to this is basically “no, I won’t, because its convenient”.
It is widely known that this convenience comes at the price of poor working conditions for Amazon workers. Our consuming habits have a very real and tangible impact. The article linked covers this briefly:
Of course there are many other negative impacts caused by this convenience which are also covered in the linked article.
I would rather inconvenience myself than buy something from Amazon at all if I can avoid it. I understand for a non-zero number of people, Amazon is their only option, but for those of us who have a choice I would encourage you to reconsider your consumption habits.
Edit: Adding clarity in some statements.
Many people don’t think about stuff like that, they would rather ignore or stay unaware and keep buying 2€ shirts
The only way to hit those price points is with slavery or “child labor” aka slavery kids edition
For real, the amount of people acting like the choices here are Amazon Prime or driving over to the B&M is ridiculous. It is like people forgot how to shop online. There are many other choices for online shopping. It is so incredibly lazy to just throw your hands up and say “Whelp, the local store doesn’t have what I need, guess I need to use Amazon Prime.”
Amazon and B&Ms won’t steal your credit card. A lot of other websites will.
I’ve literally never had this happen to me. Plus, you are never on the hook for it anyway with a credit card. Also, privacy.com
Everyone who thinks people should cancel their prime account because of horrible working conditions should first look at their phone… then their tv… then any other random electronics they have… then look at their shoes and their clothes and everything else they have made cheaply in a factory that abuses human labor. Then find a dictionary and look up the word hypocrite.
Living under capitalism is living under the yoke of devils. You cannot escape them, and you sometimes make deals with them, whether because you have to, or you think the deal will work out for you. But that doesn’t mean you should love the devils, and if you can get away from them you should.
Yeah, most people’s phones or shoes or whatever probably have some dirty pasts, but that doesn’t mean we should just give up on making any kind of good or moral choices. We’re locked into capitalism, and we will have blood on our hands whether we are aware or not, but using that as an excuse to give up on trying to do better is not a coherent moral position.
I think there’s a significant difference between “any shoe I try to buy is shady, and if a wholesome option even exists it is incredibly hard to find/buy/pricey”, and “sure Amazon workers literally die in warehouses, but next day shipping on my random knickknacks is soooo convenient!”
There exists real and valid use-cases for prime, as several other people in this thread have expressed. But just shrugging and saying “eg whatever” because you want to save $1 on random junk isn’t one of them.
You realize that the alternatives to Amazon all do the same thing, right? Working in a warehouse supplying brick-and-mortar shop isn’t exactly a cushy or well-paid job, either.
It isn’t hard to be better than the worst. My SO worked in a non-amazon warehouse before moving in with me and it is no walk in the park but it is still far better than Amazon. They even started trying to recruit people from her warehouse and everyone who jumped ship to Amazon regretted it quickly.
What are people buying that they need same-day arrival from Prime instead of waiting 5-7 days? Do people get their medicine and groceries off of Amazon? Or is it just convenience?
Of course, I’m able to say this because I never got Prime in the first place so I never acclimated to same-day shipping and thus never got attached to it. When I had to order off Amazon, just wait and bundle with other items for free shipping anyways, no extra money sent off to get Prime. And they were never important enough that I needed them right now. I could wait.
I’m extremely motivated by convenience, so I’m no better, I just so happen to be able to say “no” to Amazon now because I never let it too far into my life in the first place.
Nah, it’s too convenient and I don’t live in a big city so the things I need aren’t sold here.
Do you need Prime for that? I’m not in your same situation, but I used to be very reliant on Prime shipping. Since I cancelled Prime, I still sometimes buy stuff from Amazon, but I realized I don’t have a need to get things so rapidly. Free shipping is still an option on most items, it just takes a few more days. When they’re small items that don’t qualify for free shipping, then I just add it to my cart and wait until I have something else to add that makes it cross that free shipping threshold. And I also generally don’t feel the need to use Amazon as much since so many other companies offer free shipping these days.
In my circle, I’ve seen that people are just so expectant of rapid shipping, but they don’t actually need it. I’ve learned how instant gratification isn’t actually valuable to me, but I know that’s difficult for a lot of people to accept.
Our conversation on a different post made me check your post history. And now this post has me considering canceling Amazon Prime. Ripple effects are weird.
I live in a rural area and gave up Amazon shortly before the pandemic. I switched to ordering items directly from the manufacturers’ websites. Giving up Amazon doesn’t mean giving up the rest of the internet, though admittedly some manufacturers link you right back to Amazon instead of running their own separate storefront, so I have to look for another.
Not happening. The returns process is the best thing about buying from Amazon. No need to deal with restocking fees or things breaking after 3 months either.
Thanks, was thinking of cancelling, and this was a good reminder. Membership canceled.