Ropes Pierre

to me if they want to act like Costco and charge me to shop there, they better give me some free Rocher chocolate and an occasional thimble of Naked Juice. Maybe prime would make sense for me if i had a Fire or something.

there are plenty of ways to watch all the tv i could ever want online, and i have so much unopened crap from them already i don't really need to be buying too much anymore I see my future and it is named Alan Smithee.

Why So Blu?

Hmm, outside of the tangible goods Amazon offers - the bonus shit like Prime Music/Video, etc., it's all digital. There's no clutter there. Believe me, you don't have to be Alan Smithee in order to enjoy the spoils of Prime. I get it's a personal choice and that's fine, too.

kd5

In 2015 I placed 26 orders for the entire year, most of them were between $5 and $20 because I lucked into a deal for Prime where I only paid $60 for the year - don't remember the deal particulars so don't ask. Wanted it in particular for BF.

In 2014 I placed 21 orders for the entire year.

If I pay $99 for Prime it will take me quite awhile just to break even before I actually start to save anything. By that time the year is up and it's time to shell out another $99. And so on and so forth.

Just because you order 1000's of $$$ worth of merchandise from Amazon every year doesn't mean everyone does.

davidh777

Amazon's mobile app is... interesting.

-A backordered item shows as "Delivered" in my order history right along with all my items that were really delivered (those show as "Delivered on [date]" so there is a difference in display). I was so confused I had to click through to the order just to make sure it was still backordered as I thought, and sure enough they can't even give me a date estimate yet.

-I got a notification this morning that an order was going to be delayed... even though it arrived yesterday.

thetao

I wanted to share this, but wasn't sure where it should go.

I noticed that Amazon had the "Hats off to Dr. Seuss" Blu-Ray collection on sale for their cheapest price ever, $23.99...but I wasn't keen on spending $49 for free shipping, so I called Wal-Mart to price match. All seemed well until they left me on hold for nearly half an hour (maybe they do that when they don't want to honor the price, lol) and noticed that Deep Discount had it for $17.98. Theirs is out of stock, but I have little doubt it will be back soon. Added two reasonably-priced CD's and I'm a happy camper.

This brings my Deep Discount buys over the last 30 days to roughly $200, which is unprecedented. I'm sure Amazon is still good for some things, but I'm fast getting over them.

thetao

My two cents, as I haven't posted on this yet.

To get me on the Prime bandwagon, Amazon would have to offer something that I would actually pay for in real life. I live in an area where Comcast is the only source of unlimited high-speed Internet, and I hate Comcast with such a passion that I won't do business with them. So offering me a streaming service is pointless, because I don't stream. I don't need my merchandise tomorrow (or the day after that) so offering me free two-day shipping is also pointless. Something like this might be helpful around Christmas, but that's it. I either meet their free shipping minimum, buy from somebody else, or don't buy anything. Now what might entice me is a lesser fee in exchange for a discount on Marketplace purchases...but Amazon's execs either haven't thought of this yet, or don't want to steer too many people to their Marketplace. Until they come up with something that's actually enticing, I'll spend my next $99 on tangible goods.

But to each their own.

PhantomStranger

If I was a casual collector, the $99 would be hard for me to swallow. It would be different if Amazon was routinely the cheapest seller for any given product, but that hasn't been true in virtually any category since 2010.

jjcool

Weird. I use the Amazon app quite a bit and haven't run into any of this weirdness. Just checked and the one item I have on backorder, still shwos as backordered. I also have a subscribe and save order that is about to ship, and that shows "Shipping soon".
Notifications for me have been accurate. I am using the ios app.

zyzzle

That's an excellent point, and very true. And 2010 is around the last time that I comparison-shopped at Amazon, and they would sometimes actually have the lowest price on items back then. No more.

PhantomStranger

It was around 2010 that Amazon shifted strategies from being a pure Internet retail play.

zyzzle

What does that mean?

It seems like something drastic happened to Amazon around 2010 where they changed strategies from being competitive to being cavalier, arrogant and "too big for their britches."

fumanstan

Amazon still generally has the lowest prices (comparatively with local retail stores) on a large number of goods that I buy; they may no longer be a couple dollars cheaper with home media on release day, but it's usually the misc items that I need that are still priced better then going to Target/Walmart. Whether it's grabbing a misc cable, a random gift, some books, home appliance, dog food, etc. It's these items that help make my Prime membership worth it more then buying blu-rays or dvds now.

DVD Polizei

Well, I went ahead and got Prime today. It's just too expensive to try and find something to fill the $49 threshold. At that threshold, I figured I would have paid for $100 worth of stuff I didn't need in only 3 orders, making Prime an obvious choice.

davidh777

I don't think that's what he meant, but thanks for being reliable.

What I think he meant is that Amazon jumped more heavily into non-retail activities: Their storage hosting, building their own e-devices, Prime video streaming, video content creation, etc. Sort of like Google becoming more than a search engine.

zyzzle

Makes sense. So around that time is when prices across the board were raised, in order to pay for their increased overhead and expense that moving into that space required... Other ways of "absorbing" that increased overhead followed, like charging sales tax, increasing shipping of media items to $3.99, now $4.99, and increasing the free shipping threshold.

davidh777

I don't think it's a cut-and-dried causal relationship, but as we've discussed many times here, Amazon made a decision to not be a price leader in media categories that we care about. That's not really the same thing as "raising prices across the board." And charging sales tax hits the customer's wallet, but it doesn't help Amazon's bottom line. And I don't think moves like increasing the free-shipping threshold were designed to help the bottom line as much as they were to push Prime subscriptions. But I know you think Prime is 95% pure profit to Amazon so I'm not going to argue that point any further.

MLBFan24

Amazon doesn't need to offer the lowest prices anymore because they offer value - and that value is convenience. One stop shop for thousands of items (SKUs) and prime shipping. From a business standpoint, it's smart.

From my consumer standpoint, I like to shop around for the best price (at reputable merchants).

zyzzle

And that, dear friend, is why society's values are so warped today: convenience is far too highly valued. Companies like Amazon and its irk think they can run a business by offering "convenience." While it may work for those pesky Millenials, soccer moms, and those who have tons and tons of disposable income, it simply doesn't work for me.

I'll take value every time over convenience because I don't have a two-second attention span, am not OCD, am patient, and don't mind going out of my way a little for things. No wonder everybody seems to be walking on eggshells these days scampering and scampering like little ants... Corporate America actually encourages us to do so with their God being convenience.

Trevor

Amazon doesn't offer value? I order stuff that is the lowest price there all the time. Do I sometimes pay a little more because of convenience? Of course! Everyone does! Do you drive to 6 different grocery stores to buy what is cheapest at each? That's not a good use of time and gas in my opinion.

Alan Smithee

"Convenience" to me does not mean waiting for something to arrive in the mail.

DVD Polizei

Yeah, I'm not sure why convenience wouldn't translate into money being saved.

Best Buy has lost most of my business. They are now charging $4.99 for shipping for one item, unless you do the $35 minimum now or something. They certainly don't have the selection of products Amazon has, and their Elite Membership was nice way back when but for whatever reason, the rules became less of a savings, and a lot of my purchases, which were at the stores...disappeared due to such a wide variation in sales and coupon application (for example, I don't like being told I'm a thief at one store...then another store tells me I found an awesome deal and would more than be delighted to help me out?).

zyzzle

Agreed, when you live out in the boonies, Amazon's very convenient, and has lots of value, even considering their shipping charges...

When you live in a major city and / or suburbia and have 10 grocery stores and probably 5-6 hardware stores within a mile's radius of your home, as I do, the value simply isn't there for Amazon. Nor is Amazon's "convenience" (ie, waiting for item delivery via mail). It isn't that inconvenient, or does it take much more time to stop at 2 or 3 grocery stores. Hell, I've often *walked* to two or three -- no gas expense there. No outrageous shipping prices, *and* I'm shopping locally, which to me is a good thing. And, bingo, I'm saving money over Amazon's "low" prices to boot!

fumanstan

Depending on the product, I get value and convenience out of Amazon and i'm in the epitome of suburbia in Orange County, CA so that generalization just isn't true for everyone

Using real life examples of my recent orders - The Microsoft bluetooth mouse I just ordered is $10 cheaper then Best Buy or Fry's. The Natural Balance dog food I order is generally $7-8 cheaper then Petco and Petsmart, which I need to buy about every month. A Blu-ray of the TV show Rick and Morty I caught on sale for $10, which is $15 cheaper then the retail price at Best Buy right now and the lowest i've ever seen it. I bought a 3DS video game that was an extra 20% off because of Prime, making it $4 cheaper then the MSRP at Best Buy or Target. And finally, a stuffed monkey as a newborn baby gift that I couldn't find at Target, Walmart, or Babies R Us. All items that would have fallen below the previous free shipping threshold as well.

Again, maybe Amazon and their pricing doesn't work out for the products you buy and I know you have a well known and wild dislike for the company, but acting like only soccer moms, millennials, or people in the boonies get value out of Amazon is silly. I'm tech savvy, hunt for bargains, and somewhat cheap and picky when buying items and Amazon can easily offer value and convenience.

Trevor

As fumanstan points out, you're absolutely ridiculous and add a lot of humor to the forum.

zyzzle

Well then, at least I add value to the forum, if not to Amazon. Much obliged!