I think I might cancel. I’m not watching ads and I’m not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don’t know if I’d end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though…
Are other online retailers so hopelessly sucky that you can’t live without Amazon over in the states? It just blows my mind because Amazon honestly sucks compared to the more local stores where I’m at in the Nordics.
For me it’s the fast shipping I can’t live without.
I recently moved into a new apartment and needed to run a network cord from our router to the other side of the apartment to put an access point so we’d have good WiFi coverage. I went online to several other retailers for the few things I needed (cat6, crimp tool, and a few other things), but all of them wanted me to pay ~$25 or more for their slowest shipping option of 5-7 business days.
Meanwhile, Amazon had everything at my door the next day with free shipping. I tried to avoid Bezos, but I couldn’t. :(
But it’s not complely free shipping. It’s $140/year free shipping. So depending on how often you need something tomorrow, you could come out ahead even without Prime. That’s what I’m weighing now. Streaming is close to a solved problem, it’s the shipping I’m on the fence about.
This is also a fair point, but it only takes a handful of one-day deliveries to “cover” the cost of prime with what most places are charging for fast shipping. And then that’s not including the many products I’ve never found a decent alternative seller for.
I haven’t had Prime for years but still shop on Amazon a bit. You get free shipping on orders over… $25 or $35? So group a few non urgent things and you’re good to go. I pay for quicker shipping maybe once or twice a year, and pay for shipping in other sites maybe a half dozen times a year.
I quit Prime a while ago. Since then, most of the time I pay for next day, they miss the window and I get a refund for the full shipping fee. Yeah, it means I got my stuff a day “late” but I ended up with free 2 day shipping.
You bring up good point. But, for example, I tried another company for pieces and parts for several projects. The only other US alternative to Amazon for such things is NewEgg. Where items cost nearly quadruple what they are on Amazon. Not including the shipping times (24 hours instead of 5-7 days).
I guess what I’m getting at, is Amazon is the largest monopoly in history, IMO. There’s no way for anyone to compete. Even the $140 a year is pennies in the grand scheme of things. If you require items that can’t be acquired locally…
You can still get free Amazon shipping without Prime, and they generally beat the week or so that they say they’ll do for me.
And I frequently find that items with Prime shipping cost a bit more. At least on the amazon.ca site I use.
But it’s not complely free shipping. It’s $140/year free shipping.
That’s the thing. The more expensive Prime gets the more people who do pay for it feel locked in.
People end up feeling like they need to do more and more shopping on Amazon in order to justify that steep yearly subscription cost. Dumping Amazon completely is more effort than simply shifting more of your shopping over to Amazon. This causes people to get more and more locked in and comfortable with using Amazon for the vast majority of their online shopping.
The other side of that coin is once you do drop Amazon Prime you realize that Amazon isn’t irreplaceable. It’s fairly easy to avoid them if you are willing to compromise a little.
I never pay for faster shipping for other online retailers. That was one reason why I stopped paying for Prime years ago and that was the only perk I was really using.
“Couldn’t”
It’s very obvious that consumers are completely unable to “vote with their wallets” for anything but convenience and low prices. Workers rights, equality, morals you name it are for the vast majority waaaaaay down the scale compared to price and convenience.
This is a case study on why regulation is very much needed, even though we really should be able to do with out.
I mean fine; you’re right. I could have sat on my thumbs for 5 days with no WiFi in my living room while I waited for someone else to send what I needed, but why should I have to? Is it completely impossible for a company to provide that convenience without also being a bag of dicks? (Or is that what you meant by regulation?)
Yes it absolutely is impossible (even though it shouldn’t be) so regulation is needed to make being a bag of dicks illegal or disadvantaged (like say the safety labeling on cigarettes, they’re legal if they’re labeled but no company would willingly label out that their product is dangerous).
Amazon can provide better prices and fuck over their sellers because they’re being major douchebags in ways that shouldn’t be legal and if it wasn’t competing with them would be much more feasible because you wouldn’t have to be just as much of a shitstain to compete.
But. Around the world people aren’t really voting for regulations either, it’s generally neck and neck between forces that wants far less regulation and more power to business and the ones that want more regulation and to reign in companies. So what I state here as obvious and needed is a hot topic for debate which blows my mind. We’re callous fucking beings.
EDIT:
To answer your initial question, because it’s the morally right thing to do to show solidarity with people that are effectively forced to work in shitty conditions in Amazon warehouses and to stop them killing smaller stores and retailers that provide far more jobs, spread wealth far more evenly and generally is vastly better for both the country and the world even though it might cost you 10-60% more on average and will be less convenient to you.
EDIT2 electric bugallo:
Also to clarify I’m not saying you’re a bad person, you’re absolutely not from what I can tell. You’re just human like everyone. I’m not without fault and buy shit I really shouldn’t as well, like stuff out of china when bespoke alternatives exist far closer. It’s just painfully obvious with your story that we, the people, can’t self regulate for the benefit of our fellow humans and the planet we all depend upon. Sorry for ranting towards you, and for any ill feelings I bestowed upon you.
Sorry for ranting towards you, and for any I’ll feelings I bestowed upon you.
Not at all! I’ve enjoyed the conversation!
What about going to brick and mortar to make your purchase?
I couldn’t find anywhere within an hour’s commute of me that sold what I needed at reasonable prices.
I mean, usually when I need something immediately I just walk 5 minutes to the physical store and buy it.
I don’t even remember a time where I needed to get something I needed immediately from Amazon. In fact, if I am getting anything from amazon it’s probably because it wasn’t possible to find it elsewhere and that’s usually not something so important it needs same/next-day delivery.
I can’t live without a crimp tool either, oh the humanity
I hate Amazon but there are several reasons I use them. Wide selection, free shipping, easy returns, and typically low prices. Every time I have tried avoiding Amazon for everything, I’ve run into annoying issues before long.
Also, sadly there are a lot of less common products that aren’t super available elsewhere. And even when they are, I feel like it’s a risk buying from some random website I’ve not dealt with before.
I wish others could/would compete with these advantages but most don’t. And no I don’t buy everything from Amazon but it is a safe fallback for the items I can’t get at better retailers.
I feel the only thing they do well in my area is provide safer access to random bits and bobs that I buy from AliExpress. But that business is not what makes them rich, of course. It’s people buying everything from them, but that that is even compelling is mind blowing to me due to how atrocious their website and shopping experience is. And I work in e-Commerce as well…
I’ve found Walmart+ and Sam’s+ to be better for my needs lately. I only have prime when I can get it for free for a month. I only care about free shipping. I can give a crap about anything else that comes with prime
“I could care less” is ignorance, “I can give a crap” is a whole new level of stupidity 😂
Go lick windows
Most people want the question free returns, that’s really the thing keeping amazon afloat compared to say eBay or aliexpress. Sure you can get the stuff directly from China in most cases, but you have to wait for a month for it to arrive and hope you don’t need to return it.
As for local stores, they always cost more because of the cost of doing business, which is why Amazon is cheaper and faster to deliver.
All that said, as long as you can wait a few days, there is no need to pay for Prime, you can still get all the stuff shipped for free if you just wait until you have 45 bucks of stuff to buy.
Sure, but the question free returns are a big part of why no (well, very few) decent brands can be found on Amazon anymore.
Anyone with actually good products doesn’t have the profit margins to be forced into accepting obviously unacceptable returns. (eg customer returns item they clearly broke, gets full refund, retailer is stuck with it). They also have good enough products that they don’t have to put up with Amazon to reach the masses, they can sell anywhere else.
You’re speaking like there literally aren’t any online retailers in the US, is that really accurate? And question free returns are literally the law here…
Question free returns as in even if you’re clearly in the wrong; purchased an item, throughly destroyed it, returned for a full refund. The seller gets to shut up and eat that cost because amazon already gave the customer their money back and isn’t interested in hearing your claim as a seller.
This is why you can only find random ass bramd names you’ve never heard of throughout 99% of Amazon. Seller’s refuse to be treated this way. (or at least anyone with anything actually worth purchasing)
Yup. I tried selling on Amazon and ended up back on ebay because perfectly working stuff was being returned and I had to eat the cost of shipping both ways.
Hey, at least it came back working. :/
There are some others, bhphoto being a good one, but many of the online retailers do not have free shipping and many also have return fees. That’s where Amazon saw a way to steal customers away.
Is their completely automatic online store still closed on Sundays?
Of course there are thousands upon thousands.
question free returns are literally the law here…
Which is a privilege that I hope you appreciate. America would never do something as reasonable tbh
I’m in the UK but I’m largely housebound. Prime is life changing for disabled people like myself. I won’t cancel my subscription but I’ll probably pirate anything I want to watch on prime video in future, which isn’t much now they don’t have the tennis rights in the UK.
Some products are only available on Amazon, altough there’s always an alternative on another shop.
I try to avoid Amazon because of how many bad products are on their platform. Other shops also list third-party sellers, but by avoiding those platforms and only buying on proper non-marketplace shops the products usually meet a minimum quality. At least my experience with shops that actually specialize in a specific categorie (pc hardware -> mindfactory.de, electronics -> reichelt.de, …) is generally better.
Ebay for stuff, because you are usually dealing with a person that has some care for your order. Ebay doesnt wait 2 weeks to ship my stuff. Amazon now waits to ship so they can combine my orders. So in the past few months my ebay use is way up and my amazon use is way down. As far as content goes, piracy is still an awesome thing. I pay for physical books and music from bandcamp, the rest is acquired. I think people get lazier and dumber the closer you get to the equator. Thanks for your comment. a guy at 59.9n.
News broke on this a few months ago, and I jumped ship. Their failed music app is another reason I ditched their ecosystem. Kept crashing; music would pause mid-song; couldn’t play downloaded music offline without a data connection.
Video service had such poor title coverage and nothing compelling for the price. As many others have said, the value proposition didn’t work. Enshittification is in full swing. Sail the high seas.
Hey they have Monk
It’s a fairly niche sport, but Amazon had the tennis rights here in the UK. They’ve gone to sky now and the very minimum you’d need to pay is £30 p/m for much less choice in the way you watch matches. As for prime music, they have a good amount of ad-free podcasts, including everything from wondery. I only have prime for the free next day shipping and free returns by collection, but the tennis and podcasts were a really great extra.
The real trick is you cancel AND shop elsewhere. We get most of our necessities locally now at normal retail and I’ll occasionally put an Amazon order together when I need something specific and I’ll spend enough for free shipping.
I missed shopping there at first, but so much of their inventory is junk now; I feel like I actually get better quality from traditional retail. The $140/yr for Prime feels like free shipping but it obviously isn’t.
It really depends on where you live.
Between living in a smaller town and never ending supply chain/distribution issues: If I need something I can’t get at the local store, it is a bare minimum two hour ordeal. I can usually justify that on a weekend but if my mouse dies and I need one now? Suddenly I need to figure out what else I can grab to get free shipping or if I need to just eat the costs and overnight it.
I have been doing the math and will likely stick with amazon prime. Admittedly, I increasingly don’t bother to even watch the amazon shows I like (the boys and reacher) because I have increasingly become spoiled by a proper blu ray or UHD (… ripped to my plex).
Oh, your computer mouse. Anyway, I just paused my membership in the hopes that my spending habits improve. We’ll see how “emergencies” get handled without the shipping benefits.
140$? Why is this so expensive in the us? We pay 90€ (~100$) in Germany. So brake even is with like 20x 5€ shipping orders per year. Which I sadly do pretty easily. Getting the stuff I need locally is sadly not that easy.
Don’t forget their tax.
Base is 139.99 (140) + tax on top.So even more expensive.
An already overpriced subscription service wants more money 🤣
If they need more money, they can just take about $2,000 USD per second from Bezos’ money. He makes over $3,000 USD per second.
I forgot to mention. over 99% of all online sales go through amazon. They don’t need to raise their prices.
Unthinkable!! How will Jeffey-Bear survive without his nightly molten gold enema?
Gold? He’s not some dirty plebian that accepts gold, he wants Iridium dusted with rubies, emeralds, blood-diamonds, sapphires and war-orphan tears…but only war orphan tears from the wars he’s profiting from. And after he gets the enema, he kills 100 puppies and earns a single penny by doing it.
And I continue adding primevideo’s content to my Jellyfin server
This is such a weird way of announcing/implementing a $3/month increase for Prime video by Amazon, and a lot more destructive PR-wise too.
Right? For how much companies seem to love bubblewrapping anything they do in PR, they sure do suck at it sometimes…
Lol needlessly downgrading all the customers instead of increasing their price. Can we just make subscriptions track inflation metrics so I at least know how fucked I am on average?
Lemmy needs a DataIsBeautiful community, they’d make that graph.
Right? If it just went up a bit I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Ads on something I (technically my dear husband) already pay for just pisses me off. It feels like they’re holding ad-free viewing hostage
I wish I could just get Prime shipping and drop the video service. I may still drop the whole thing.
This is essentially what’s happening, but instead of them lowering the prime fee and removing videos, they’re adding the additional fee to remove ads from the video service
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Oooo good call. Thanks.
deleted by creator
Announced just after Christmas, a time when I assume a lot of people sign up for Prime so they can save shipping on presents.
Seems like that would backfire as people recently remember signing up.
Depends on whether or not they signed up for monthly or annual, and many get it in November so things they order show up in time before the xmas postal hell.
It seems like it would work because people wouldn’t think they got their value out of their prime membership yet and are reluctant to cancel after such a short time.
What the hell do people watch on prime? I got it for Thursday night football. There’s nothing interesting on there and half the content is “rent/buy”
“rent/buy”
You mean rent for x amount of time, or rent for an undetermined amount of time.
We don’t do ‘buy’ anymore, that’s just rent without knowing when your rental is over.
Physical media is the only “buy”. And that’s hard to come by. Unfortunately.
You could say that lately the trend has been “bye bye buy”
Get out. ->
Edited
prime has some really good shows (invincible, the boys, and good omens are the ones i’ve watched) but ultimately it is WAY too expensive
The Boys, Expanse, Invincible, Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, Fleabag, Good Omens, Man in the High Tower and Reached come to mind. Admittedly, I haven’t watched a few of those.
It still has a better selection than Netflix.
And Usenet has a better selection than both combined, for cheaper and a better experience.
Half? That’s optimistic.
I canceled Prime in 2021. The expedited shipping is nice and all but it really just felt like paying rent to someone I don’t like nor want or have to pay rent to.
Same here
Regarding the shipping cost:
Just collect things to buy until you are over the treshold. Helped me with overbuying stuff I don’t even really need.
If you are moatly in it for the shipping: Just stop. You give them more money through that than paying for shipping.Bait and switch.
I’m ditching it. The convenience has gone and content has gone. I built a wish list which is now mostly unavailable.
I need to up my game in terms of automating my torrenting and making it family - accessible.
Man I just moved to the arr’s I’m a Usenet guy… but torrents are the same deal… I added overseerr on top of that and all I do now is “request” it on overseerr and blamonit appears on my Plex server.
For example if you wanted to download all of the seasons of say… SpongeBob. With overseerr it’s literally 1. search for the show 2. click request and wait.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience Check out trash guides and overseerr.dev
I run all of mine in docker with docker compose.
Also I gave my mil and fil link to overseerr which Plex authenticates… They can request what ever and it appears.
I’ve got a Sinology nas I could use for this. I might have to hit you up for some pointers.
Sure no worries!! Good luck!
Is there an idiot guide how to do this? I’ve never pirated and I don’t currently have a VPN. I use my Xbox for streaming straight to my TV using HDMI. I see posts like yours with various words like Plex, overseerr, docker, jellyfin, etc., and I don’t know where to even start. I could Google it, but among the hundreds of results, I don’t know which things are reputable, functional, and not malware.
Trash guides is a great place to go.
Thanks
I have some room to optimize my torrenting setup but it’ll never be as good as watching the trailer for a show and immediately with one button push, watching the show itself. I mean, fiddling on my phone and waiting 10 mins is the best it’s gonna get, but that’s still better than going over to my always-on, old laptop whose only job it is to torrent, finding the one I want, waiting for it to download, then moving it over to my Plex server.
Might I introduce you to https://movie-web.app/ It’s a great in between while you wait for stuff to download
Is there a Google tv app?
No app, just the website as far as I know. But you can cast from your phone.
Tbh i just have prime and pirat the stuff i want anyway, even if i technically have access to ot the “legal” way, because its just way easier to find what i want on the piracy site of my choice than on prime…
(i need the one day shipping pretty regularly so the money isn’t wasted)
Same, I have a handful of streaming services (mostly split with other households) because it’s easier to watch something right now than in 10 mins at the absolute minimum, or tomorrow, depending on the current status of high seas shipping lanes. But I’m not fucking watching ads. I’m paying for the service, fuck your ads.
I just wish they’d split off streaming from shipping.
No one needs one day shipping. And the human toll that Amazon and their prime service takes on their workers should be enough for anyone to stop using their services wholesale.
When i say i need it than it is like that. And in my country its not that bad regarding their worker treatment, shure its not perfect but nothing compared to USA because there are laws here…
I don’t know where you live, but this year for Black Friday Amazon workers from over 30 different countries protested over inhuman working contditions. Countries included Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, South Africa, Turkey and the U.K.
And anyway, even if they were treated well, you are still supporting a horrible company that exploits people globally.
Yes black Friday. But that’s a shitshow in all imaginable ways anyway, besides that its not that bad.
And yes i “support” it until i can find some else that can supply me small quantities of very specific things for a reasonable price in short time.
I don’t like Amazon, but they aren’t the worst either. Also, you use their stuff as well, Amazon isn’t just the web-shop, its also server hosting and other IT solutions, most stuff you use has some Amazon In it.
Yes I’m forced to used Amazon because AWS hosts a lot of the internet. I literally have no choice. If I had a choice I would avoid it.
But I don’t contribute to their horrible work conditions in their warehouses. And it’s disingenuous to say the protest is only about Black Friday. The protests were on Black Friday because that’s when it would have the biggest impact on Amazon.
Too bad that people always let small personal inconveniences get in the way of human rights.
