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....
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
No Home Depot or similar near you? You could have got same day service.
Home Depot prices were 5x the online retailers for the cat6 cabling. (Not an exaggeration. They wanted over $100 for 250ft vs the ~$35 I paid online.)
Also, fuck Bernie Marcus, trumpist shithead. He doesn’t need my money.
Have you seen the price of data related items at HD?
Marked up to wazoo; the only people buying them are stupid contractors.
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.
Which is a privilege that I hope you appreciate. America would never do something as reasonable tbh
This is annectdotal but I twice tried branching out recently to other retailers, both times they said they delivered my package and they did not. Trying to get help from them is like pulling teeth.
I rarely have a problem with Amazon and the few times I did I was given a refund pretty much immediately.
It makes it hard to switch when the difference in service is so drastic =/
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.