Technology

Just wait till you need to buy enough stuff to hit the $35 minimum for free delivery. It takes a maximum 4-5 days for stuff to arrive but sometimes they can arrive as early as 2 days. I never went on prime after my free trial.

I had amazon prime for free for 10 years. It was free for students back then. Then i finished uni and they never bothered to check. This went on for a very long time. Only 2 years ago they killed the subscription and i never subscribed again.

Prime video just isn’t all that good and it sounds like ads are coming and shipping is still free over like $25.

Only reason to have prime is if you also have their credit card and order a decent amount of stuff there and/or shop at whole foods a lot for the 5% back. Otherwise it does add up at all.

'Please allow 6-8 weeks shipping from Pueblo, Colorado...'

I had prime for maybe a year or something, but it just seems daft to pay more to avoid shipping charges when half the things ship free anyhow. Buying things remotely through the mail or whatever used to take weeks to get to you and there was no tracking to sit there monitoring the arrival in real time. It sucked, so people would buy things from the store nearby and skip all that. Now take your amazonian primates and get off my lawn...

One of the final nails in the coffin for me was when I tried to specify the delivery date to a day I would actually be in, and they completely ignored the instruction and delivered immediately. Like, I pay for that option, and you're not delivering the service.

I've also been getting free trials for Prime every so often, so I still get the benefits when I might need them (eg before Christmas). They did make it very hard to cancel, though, half the links didn't work and the instructions were out of date and didn't match the pages.

The only time I use Amazon is when I'm shopping for PC parts and they've got the best deal (maybe one part every 3 years) or if they're the only source for something like an obscure PCB or whatever. Aside from that, it's really not helpful. People who have their regular weekly shipments are wild to me. So much easier to just get everything you need at the grocery store in one fell swoop every week. Don't even get me started on Prime shipping when I live in the same city as a distribution center. Prime Video is aids.

A lot of companies now offer two day shipping for free (if you spend enough of course), and it’s just as good. Hell, I bought some batteries for a UPS that died on Monday from a battery wholesale site, and they arrived today. And that’s with the shipping saying it could be at least a week. The competitive advantage of Amazon doesn’t seem like it’s there any more.

Another thing you realize when you quit Amazon is that you don’t really need to be ordering so much junk. You just don’t. I promise. And when you do need something, I feel like I’m more confident buying the jacket or whatever from the company that makes it instead of sitting through a thousand knock offs and hoping I picked the right one among all the AI written reviews and titles.

I could kinda understand this if you live in a rural area and have had it for years...but still, first world problems, my god.

I've noticed that without prime you can still get free shipping if you just have a big enough order, so as long as you don't buy a ton of small purchases individually but instead save up what you need for bigger purchases then the only advantage prime has is the shorter shipping time. Which I've also noticed sometimes that the shipping without prime will often arrive a day or two earlier then it's original estimate, probably cause Amazon has optimized for that shorter 2 day shipping. It's still not usually 2 days but for most stuff it's either a week or less which is usually plenty fast for anything I get on Amazon.

As someone who lives in a country where there's no amazon...

yes.

you can live without amazon subscription and you dont have to pay them a single dime

I get the 1 month free trial every 9 months or so lol

I've never had prime and never felt the need to get it. I don't order frequently from them so, when I do, I can hit the free shipping minimum easily. I have no problem waiting a bit extra for shipping. When they do get around to shipping my stuff, it usually takes just a day or two to get here.

I get gift cards for Amazon because I used survey apps that pay me money and I have made quite a bit. So Amazon stuff is always free stuff for me basically. But Prime is worthless. Prime Video has absolutely nothing worth watching, and last week I ordered hair dye on my husband's Prime account on Saturday and it didn't arrive until Thursday, so what's the point?

My family holds a prime membership and recently I've been seeing how long I could go for without needing to use it. Most things I was able to purchase on eBay. Most recently, I decided to buy pen stuff and JetPens was a good option. However they needed like $50 or something for free shipping so I splurged a little. The one pen ink refill I needed (Jetstream Prime SXR 600 0.5) was way too expensive on both jetpens and ebay so I had to purchase it on Amazon. Nonetheless, I think you can still buy on amazon without a membership so maybe deal with the longer shipping times but that's no biggie.