Amazon Prime is a remarkable success but also dystopian. It has made convenience and speed the norm, habituating consumers to buy more products. Prime’s flywheel effect - where more customers lead to more data and scale which attracts more customers - has fueled Amazon’s dominance. Prime subscribers spend twice as much and Amazon’s value has multiplied 97 times since 2005. While canceling Prime may not hurt Amazon, it can benefit local businesses by gaining a new customer. However, Prime has rewired how people think about what is possible to obtain and how fast, making a Prime-free life unimaginable for many.
I don’t think I’ve ordered anything from Amazon in close to ten years or so?
My decision was as much about Amazon being a crappy company as it was about it becoming increasinglt impossible to find stuff on there that wasn’t just cheap tat.
It has the same problem as ebay where people have set up these storefronts that don’t actually have a person behind them, but literally are just a facade that forwards your orders back to some store in Shenzhen or wherever. I may as well be ordering off Ali Express at that point.
Maybe it’s because it’s been over 10 years since you’ve ordered from there, but it’s nothing like eBay in that regard. Avoiding the cheap, misleading junk on Amazon is pretty trivial. That stuff is there, sure, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been “tricked” in the way I have with eBay.
Not a fan of the corporation, but free next day (sometimes even same day) delivery is hard to turn down.