this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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"Subscribe and save" is a scam.
They advertise that you will save 5% by using subscribe and save, but then the price of the item you are buying just happens to go up by 30% on the day they decide to use as the basis for your order, which is not the day you ordered it or the day they pulled it off the shelf. It will occasionally go back down to a normal-ish price, but there will also be random months where it goes up 50% or 100%. I've seen $15 case of paper towels go up to $45 some months.
Then they keep prodding you to add more items to get 10% off your entire subscribe and save. I added some items a few weeks ago, got the extra discount percentage, but when they priced my order a few weeks later, the cat food I've been getting from them at a pretty stable price suddenly went up in price by the exact amount the extra discount was saving me.
Amazon essentially took the "four square" concept that car dealers use to shift higher costs to an area of the transaction where you are less likely to notice it.
The subscribe and save price reflects the listing price at the time your order is fulfilled.
As a seller, the number of subscriptions evaporates if I increase the price on an item.
What you are describing is not a tactic any business is intentionally employing. It's more likely born of incompetence.
That may be the case, but I have to admit, assuming malice is a lot more fun!
That's why I micromanage my subscriptions way before the last day to edit when further change are impossible:
Usually I manage to get 7+ different items every month with additional coupons and multibuy rebates (5 for -5%, buy 3 for 6$, etc.).
Last month, surprisingly I somehow managed to combine 60+ items over 14 differents subscription orders all combined and shipped within 5 boxes (3 of them were too heavy to carry alone).
However, this month a can't seem to find and assemble more than 2 subscription order of regular thing I actualy need. Hence, I may entirely skip November's delivery.
On top of that, I don't have/use Prime most of the time. I only pay 2$ for a week of prime whenever a big sale day is upcoming or that there is a exclusive prime only rebates (prime day, black friday, boxing day). Or take the free 30 days trial when available.
Prime is more of a headache for me because Amazon always tries to rush deliver the package with any courrier services they can without ever trying to combine orders. Therefore, we end up having to track multiple different deliveries through multiple different tracking service. Unfortunately, some courriers are regularly terrible at delivering.
In contrast, without Prime, orders tend to take in average over 4+ days before shipping. Enough time to usually combine 3 or more orders in 1 package. And delivered by Amazon's own delivery truck.