From Prime to Grade Blech
For years I've had to do math to find a reason to keep my Amazon Prime account alive. When I first signed up I also got the prime store card with 5% cash back. Along with the two day shipping the perks of the card easily made it the go to for shopping. Keeping it paid off made sure that I was always getting my money's worth out of the service. Being in a hub city also made it easy to rationalize that purchases from amazon was supporting local employers. It became even easier to rationalize when they were a competitor to Grubhub and Instacart. As those services trickled away, became more expensive, and two day delivery was no longer an option, the addition of Amazon Smile is what kept me shopping there. I was able to support Deaf Dogs of Oregon with very little effort, and without taking a hit to a very tight budget during graduate school.
Slowly the stories of how the warehouse workers were being treated trickled out and I wandered back into the real world for a lot of purchases. At this point there was very little keeping me with Amazon, then covid-19 hit. I was able to keep away from their delivery services for most of the time, but I discovered Twitch Prime! The value makes for easy math since every prime sub gets the streamer around $2.50 per month, so that made an instant return of about $30 per year. There were always other offers, like the $15 cash bonus to start using photos, but there’s enough free cloud storage that prime makes little sense for such things.
Other offerings, like first reads were rarely if ever used, and I found that reading through book descriptions becomes a bit of a chore every month. As for the highly vaunted Prime TV, the movie and TV selection pales in comparison to most of the other services, and Prime Originals are anything but. Not to mention most other streaming services have partners that make their basic subscription tier free! Prime clothing was an even bigger joke with their already lax return policy. The ammonia in prime’s meat for me came when I got an e-mail listing all the services that were available and I didn’t use. I barely glanced at it to see what I was missing. The math was done for the year and Amazon has been downgraded.
I made the right decision at the right time. Twitch made some changes to how payouts are done and Amazon Smile will soon be gone. They are going to take on big pharma! I'm not looking forward to seeing how many prescriptions are pilfered. At this point there isn’t much difference between Amazon Prime and Wal-Mart for shopping. Everything else can be had at a better quality for less.
