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.
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And buy from where? Retailers these days, insofar as they exist at all, have ridiculously limited inventory. If I want something that’s even slightly uncommon, the only place I can find it is online, and since there’s no telling whether any given website will steal from me, welp, Amazon it is.
This. Trying to find anything in a brick and mortar store in the last decade has been such a godawful experience that I don’t feel the least bit sorry for them. Groceries are largely delivered (not using Instacart, but the store’s own delivery or pickup service), tech stuff is all aliexpress or amazon, clothing I still largely go in to buy, but don’t buy very often. Appliances? Research the shit out of it online and usually order online from a local retailer with a decent website. Heck, even hardware is online through Home Depot and auto stuff is either rockauto or similar.
The amount of times I’ve made the effort to look in a brick and mortar and not found the thing I’ve needed is too high.
Nah, it’s too convenient and I don’t live in a big city so the things I need aren’t sold here.
Do you need Prime for that? I’m not in your same situation, but I used to be very reliant on Prime shipping. Since I cancelled Prime, I still sometimes buy stuff from Amazon, but I realized I don’t have a need to get things so rapidly. Free shipping is still an option on most items, it just takes a few more days. When they’re small items that don’t qualify for free shipping, then I just add it to my cart and wait until I have something else to add that makes it cross that free shipping threshold. And I also generally don’t feel the need to use Amazon as much since so many other companies offer free shipping these days.
In my circle, I’ve seen that people are just so expectant of rapid shipping, but they don’t actually need it. I’ve learned how instant gratification isn’t actually valuable to me, but I know that’s difficult for a lot of people to accept.
Our conversation on a different post made me check your post history. And now this post has me considering canceling Amazon Prime. Ripple effects are weird.
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For real, the amount of people acting like the choices here are Amazon Prime or driving over to the B&M is ridiculous. It is like people forgot how to shop online. There are many other choices for online shopping. It is so incredibly lazy to just throw your hands up and say “Whelp, the local store doesn’t have what I need, guess I need to use Amazon Prime.”
Amazon and B&Ms won’t steal your credit card. A lot of other websites will.
I’ve literally never had this happen to me. Plus, you are never on the hook for it anyway with a credit card. Also, privacy.com
