zlacker

I stopped being a Prime member after losing the student status. Guess what -- I discovered that I really don't need it. Most of the time I don't need items delivered in two days, so I can plan ahead and bundle them in an order that exceeds minimum free shipping threshold. These days I order from Amazon barely more than once a month and I am not missing out on anything.

>>d3w4s9+(OP)
thanks i had no idea you could get free shipping without prime.

i'll likely cancel soon

>>elif+J2
Practically every order I ever get has free shipping by just ordering enough stuff (doesn't take much, but more than a single $10 item) and being willing to wait a couple more days. Stuff comes fast enough regardless because as someone else pointed out, they aren't set up to specially slow your order down while still delivering all others fast. It would actually cost them more to take an order and then sit on it for a while rather than process and dispose of it as fast as possible. Now that I think about that...it means the entire scheme of paying for faster shipping is really a huge scam, getting everyone to pay extra for something they already would do for their own reasons anyway.

Anyway, as a user, if I need something today, I find a retailer and drive to them. If it's weird enough that there is no retailer I can drive to, then I wouldn't have got in in a day or two even from Amazon anyway, since it won't be in a local Amazon warehouse any more than it was in a local Walmart or AutoZone or PC Richards etc.

And these days, you no longer even get a good search result to find the right things, you just get pages and pages of no-name chinese crap versions of things. The selection used to be the one real killer feature of Amazon, but now you effectively don't even get that any more.

There is really hardly any reason to use them any more. I'm actually pretty suprised they allowed that to happen. Even when they were being evil in the sense of taking over the world, they were doing it by making sure their product was irresistable, maybe by unfair means, but still the case never the less. Like them or not you could not deny that. Now, it's no longer true. Their value proposition is actually gone. I never would have thought that would happen, but I'm glad it is starting to.

>>Brian_+65
It's odd, since presumably if everyone stopped paying for Prime for the fast shipping, Amazon probably would go back to shipping things slower since it's almost definitely pretty expensive to do so, but since so many people pay for Prime to get the fast shipping, everyone else nearly gets it for free because the system has to be optimized enough to cover the demands of Prime customers.

>>d3w4s9+(OP)
Honestly, at least in my area, 2-day shipping stopped being accurate or meaningful the second they introduced free 2-day shipping with prime. It actually worked and expedited things before then. It doesn't now.

>>noirbo+W6
Amazon ships fast to retain customers over brick and mortar competitors. At this point, logistics costs are baked in to seller fees (ie item price).

Prime fees were always a free money stream for Amazon to direct in to risky bets/build-outs rather than ongoing operations, iirc multiple billion USD per month.

>>d3w4s9+(OP)
I just add stuff to my cart whenever I think about it, and order once the total is high enough for free shipping. Works fine, I’m not often on a hurry anyway.