Amazon Primeless
Posted on 12/08/2018 in misc
I let my Amazon Prime membership expire in late November. I honestly expected to miss it. I haven't. It turns out some of the regular health and beauty type stuff we had on auto ship with Prime is actually cheaper from Walmart.com. I managed to complete my Christmas shopping without buying anything from Amazon. Did I pay a little more to buy books from the local bookstore? Yes. Am I OK with that? Yes I am. I can afford to spend a few extra bucks to support a local store. If you can't that is fine too.
But the real issue with Prime for me is the constant attempt to remove all friction from purchasing. If I really ever needed something in one hour I wouldn't trust Amazon anyway, I'd run it out and buy it myself. And the reality is I never bought anything from Amazon that I absolutely needed in 2 days. Again, if time was that critical I bought it myself locally. So the 2-day shipping was really not that big of a deal - more of a convenience I didn't need, but made it too easy to buy stuff on impulse that I really didn't need.
I'm not one of those Amazon is evil people. I mean, they are evil, but so are most publicly traded companies. The current incarnation of capitalism in the US pretty much requires corporations to put short term profit above all else. Which is kind of an ironic statement as Amazon achieved their market dominance by ignoring profit for many years while investing in growth above all else.
I will continue to buy Kindle books because I'm totally locked into the Kindle ecosystem for ebooks at this point. However, I know how to use Calibre so my ebooks are not locked into the Kindle format. Even if I used a non-Kindle e-reader I'd probably buy most of my e-books from Amazon because the $2.99 sales are frequent, and I frequently find stuff in those sales that I want.
The real challenge will be when the next season of The Expanse hits Prime Video.
This is entry #8 in my attempt at 31 days of blogging for December 2018. I've haven't posted here daily since about 2007, so this should be interesting.