[browningstreet]

I've wanted to quit Prime a bunch of times, but my recent experiences in the Bay Area:

* Sometimes I want my order on my Prime day, but they insist on delivering it to me 3 hours from when I ordered it.

* When my son got COVID, we ran around town looking for COVID tests. Target was out of them entirely. So I ordered them on Prime and they showed up later that day. A bunch of them. And 3x cheaper than the COVID+FLU tests I found at CVS later that day.

* Yeah, ads on Prime suck. But I'm rewatching a 90s show and ponied up $3/mo for no ads.

Screw Jeff Bezos, but then again.. I got COVID tests when I needed them.

[al_borland]

> Yeah, ads on Prime suck. But I'm rewatching a 90s show and ponied up $3/mo for no ads.

The $3/month for no ads felt like they were nickel-and-diming the customers.

I was paying something like $129/year for Prime. The idea of paying $3/month on top of the $129/year I was paying for Prime felt so petty.

Had they just raised the price of Prime, I probably would have shrugged and carried on. But adding a monthly charge on top of a yearly charge, nope. I was done.

This of course was on top of allowing the store to be flooded with low quality junk being resold from Alibaba, counterfeit products all over the place, pushing to send shipments in their retail boxes, review gaming, them ripping off popular products to sell through their own private labels, and other such practices that have eroded my view and trust of Amazon over the years.

I ordered some headphones from Amazon a month ago, because the company that makes them was sold out in the color I wanted. I felt the need to lookup how to tell authentic from counterfeit headphones while I was waiting for the shipment, so I could validate what I received was real. I’ve received counterfeit goods before from Amazon. I heard they keep everything in the same bin, so it’s luck of the draw when picked (I have no way to validate that). No other store makes me worry about things like this, just Amazon. If brick-and-mortar stores were like this they’d be out of business in a week.

[browningstreet]

I get it -- I go through the same calculus every year. I also have the associated credit card, and.. well.. it all ends up paying for itself in the end.

I'll move to a secondary tier Amazon market where boring retail isn't quite as compromised as the bay area and the equation will probably change for me, but I'm also likely to end up in a rural mountain area and it might be a lifeline for me.

I haven't had issues with Alibaba stuff, and there have been just enough instances where Amazon delivered where local or alts couldn't. Like the light bulbs in my bathroom.. Ace Hardware doesn't stock my item, I couldn't order them elsewhere, but Amazon connected me to a vendor who fulfilled in about 2 weeks. And yes, I went without light in my bathroom for 2 weeks and was looking the whole time.