Does anyone without Prime really miss it? Or did you cancel and regret it? Mine is up for renewal at the end of this month, fairly certain I'm not going to renew regardless of a price hike.
There is no way I could not renew. I use it way too much. I easily save that much in gas and probably 10x that in valuable personal time not having to go to walmart/best buy/etc
Walmart has their “Plus” offering that is $99 and gives the same kind of free shipping as Prime. If you’re okay with it, you can also get free grocery delivery from your local store.
I don't miss it. Just watch out that they select automatically the non free option for shipping even if there is a free option with the same expected delivery. (This is for > $25 orders.) I'm located far from a distribution center so that might make a difference.
Canceled 5 years ago and don't miss it at all. Sometimes I will have to spend 10 minutes longer looking for a supplier online, but I can get all the same things for a similar price and I haven't had any of the issues I used to with Prime like receiving fake shampoo (with brand names misspelled), I get equal or better product quality, and I feel better supporting local businesses.
Added bonus is I found myself impulsively ordering less useless crap since it requires more thought to order and isn't delivered immediately.
Not him, but I miss when search results weren't clogged up with 80 copies of the same piece of shit from the same Chinese factory branded as 80 different items, and rampantly astroturfed reviews. The website used to lead faster and was smoother to use, customer service was much better, less amazon pushing air fryers and rice cookers and other flavor of the month useless shit.
This. I’ll also add that the reviews themselves were a great resource when researching the a product space — 10 years back I’d use Amazon rather than google for learning before buying. Now both are garbage; I get some value out of restricting search results to Reddit and then filtering by time (past month, year, etc), but Reddit will inevitably destroy that once they have shareholders to appease. Sigh.
It probably depends on how you use it. Many of my relatives have cancelled it without a problem.
I buy all sorts of one day/same day items that I would need to go to a store for otherwise (virtually anything that isn’t fresh food that you might want same day like toothpaste or soap or bandages), so I could never give it up.
Just earlier today, I was looking to buy some isopropyl alcohol spray. There was one that was listed as "Get by Sun Feb 6". Out of curiosity, I applied that filter.
Now that item had disappeared. And a much smaller list of items where none of them were actually available tomorrow, and in fact, most were a week slower than the first I found.
What do you mean "up for renewal"? You can cancel Prime at any time, there's no contract term.
(Personally I keep Prime mostly for Prime Video, and a few other perks. I typically only buy a few things from Amazon each month, so the free fast shipping is a bonus for me, not a must-have).
OK, seems like they changed their policy at some point and it no longer mentions pro-rated refunds:
"Paid members who haven't used their benefits are eligible for a full refund of the current membership period. We'll process the refund in three to five business days."
This is a manufactured argument. 99% of their question was "do you value prime enough to keep paying for it", it was nice of the person to let them know that you can quit anytime and get a prorated return of money for the annual subscription price but really wasn't the main point of the question.
Similar experience here. I also found that Wal-Mart has a similar selection (lower prices for some items) to Amazon. It shares the same price threshold for free shipping, and also arrives sooner (reliably two to three days from Wal-Mart in my area, versus five to seven from Amazon without Prime).
Cancelling has made me more deliberate about my purchases, which I think has been a net positive. There's a reason why every retailer wants to decrease friction in purchases and sometimes that little bit of friction is a good thing for your wallet.
We cancelled once for about 6 months. We missed it. You never realize how many little things you buy are only available on the internet, and a couple of bad customer service experiences made me really appreciate Amazon.
Only 22 orders placed in 2021, and a spot check of ~15 of the items would ship "free" anyways. I don't care enough to check every single item, but of the ones I checked I could not find a single one that would have an added shipping cost.
The "2 day guarantee" doesn't really exist anymore, so I have to ask - what am I paying for?
Yes, small purchases through Amazon (enabled by Prime due to no price minimum for 'free' shipping). I picked up a tip on Hacker News to avoid small ~$20 USD purchases because it adds up, and this habit has saved me a lot of money.
Have cancelled mine a few years back as I realized the only thing I was using is 2-day shipping but I have been just ordering multiple items which exceed $25 to leverage FREE shipping and usually they ship fast. So no need for Prime for me!
It's easy enough to get free shipping without Prime (just wait until there are enough items in the cart to get free shipping). But I'm still getting value out of Prime streaming so I'm keeping Prime until that changes.
tried prime 10 years ago and it wasn't anything worth writing about. i dont order that many products from them anyway and if i do i would just batch them up to get free shipping