I think I might cancel. I’m not watching ads and I’m not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don’t know if I’d end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though…
Are other online retailers so hopelessly sucky that you can’t live without Amazon over in the states? It just blows my mind because Amazon honestly sucks compared to the more local stores where I’m at in the Nordics.
For me it’s the fast shipping I can’t live without.
I recently moved into a new apartment and needed to run a network cord from our router to the other side of the apartment to put an access point so we’d have good WiFi coverage. I went online to several other retailers for the few things I needed (cat6, crimp tool, and a few other things), but all of them wanted me to pay ~$25 or more for their slowest shipping option of 5-7 business days.
Meanwhile, Amazon had everything at my door the next day with free shipping. I tried to avoid Bezos, but I couldn’t. :(
But it’s not complely free shipping. It’s $140/year free shipping. So depending on how often you need something tomorrow, you could come out ahead even without Prime. That’s what I’m weighing now. Streaming is close to a solved problem, it’s the shipping I’m on the fence about.
This is also a fair point, but it only takes a handful of one-day deliveries to “cover” the cost of prime with what most places are charging for fast shipping. And then that’s not including the many products I’ve never found a decent alternative seller for.
I haven’t had Prime for years but still shop on Amazon a bit. You get free shipping on orders over… $25 or $35? So group a few non urgent things and you’re good to go. I pay for quicker shipping maybe once or twice a year, and pay for shipping in other sites maybe a half dozen times a year.
I quit Prime a while ago. Since then, most of the time I pay for next day, they miss the window and I get a refund for the full shipping fee. Yeah, it means I got my stuff a day “late” but I ended up with free 2 day shipping.
You bring up good point. But, for example, I tried another company for pieces and parts for several projects. The only other US alternative to Amazon for such things is NewEgg. Where items cost nearly quadruple what they are on Amazon. Not including the shipping times (24 hours instead of 5-7 days).
I guess what I’m getting at, is Amazon is the largest monopoly in history, IMO. There’s no way for anyone to compete. Even the $140 a year is pennies in the grand scheme of things. If you require items that can’t be acquired locally…
You can still get free Amazon shipping without Prime, and they generally beat the week or so that they say they’ll do for me.
And I frequently find that items with Prime shipping cost a bit more. At least on the amazon.ca site I use.
I never pay for faster shipping for other online retailers. That was one reason why I stopped paying for Prime years ago and that was the only perk I was really using.
But it’s not complely free shipping. It’s $140/year free shipping.
That’s the thing. The more expensive Prime gets the more people who do pay for it feel locked in.
People end up feeling like they need to do more and more shopping on Amazon in order to justify that steep yearly subscription cost. Dumping Amazon completely is more effort than simply shifting more of your shopping over to Amazon. This causes people to get more and more locked in and comfortable with using Amazon for the vast majority of their online shopping.
The other side of that coin is once you do drop Amazon Prime you realize that Amazon isn’t irreplaceable. It’s fairly easy to avoid them if you are willing to compromise a little.
“Couldn’t”
It’s very obvious that consumers are completely unable to “vote with their wallets” for anything but convenience and low prices. Workers rights, equality, morals you name it are for the vast majority waaaaaay down the scale compared to price and convenience.
This is a case study on why regulation is very much needed, even though we really should be able to do with out.
I mean fine; you’re right. I could have sat on my thumbs for 5 days with no WiFi in my living room while I waited for someone else to send what I needed, but why should I have to? Is it completely impossible for a company to provide that convenience without also being a bag of dicks? (Or is that what you meant by regulation?)
Yes it absolutely is impossible (even though it shouldn’t be) so regulation is needed to make being a bag of dicks illegal or disadvantaged (like say the safety labeling on cigarettes, they’re legal if they’re labeled but no company would willingly label out that their product is dangerous).
Amazon can provide better prices and fuck over their sellers because they’re being major douchebags in ways that shouldn’t be legal and if it wasn’t competing with them would be much more feasible because you wouldn’t have to be just as much of a shitstain to compete.
But. Around the world people aren’t really voting for regulations either, it’s generally neck and neck between forces that wants far less regulation and more power to business and the ones that want more regulation and to reign in companies. So what I state here as obvious and needed is a hot topic for debate which blows my mind. We’re callous fucking beings.
EDIT:
To answer your initial question, because it’s the morally right thing to do to show solidarity with people that are effectively forced to work in shitty conditions in Amazon warehouses and to stop them killing smaller stores and retailers that provide far more jobs, spread wealth far more evenly and generally is vastly better for both the country and the world even though it might cost you 10-60% more on average and will be less convenient to you.
EDIT2 electric bugallo:
Also to clarify I’m not saying you’re a bad person, you’re absolutely not from what I can tell. You’re just human like everyone. I’m not without fault and buy shit I really shouldn’t as well, like stuff out of china when bespoke alternatives exist far closer. It’s just painfully obvious with your story that we, the people, can’t self regulate for the benefit of our fellow humans and the planet we all depend upon. Sorry for ranting towards you, and for any ill feelings I bestowed upon you.
Sorry for ranting towards you, and for any I’ll feelings I bestowed upon you.
Not at all! I’ve enjoyed the conversation!
What about going to brick and mortar to make your purchase?
I couldn’t find anywhere within an hour’s commute of me that sold what I needed at reasonable prices.
I mean, usually when I need something immediately I just walk 5 minutes to the physical store and buy it.
I don’t even remember a time where I needed to get something I needed immediately from Amazon. In fact, if I am getting anything from amazon it’s probably because it wasn’t possible to find it elsewhere and that’s usually not something so important it needs same/next-day delivery.
No Home Depot or similar near you? You could have got same day service.
Home Depot prices were 5x the online retailers for the cat6 cabling. (Not an exaggeration. They wanted over $100 for 250ft vs the ~$35 I paid online.)
Also, fuck Bernie Marcus, trumpist shithead. He doesn’t need my money.
Have you seen the price of data related items at HD?
Marked up to wazoo; the only people buying them are stupid contractors.
I can’t live without a crimp tool either, oh the humanity
I hate Amazon but there are several reasons I use them. Wide selection, free shipping, easy returns, and typically low prices. Every time I have tried avoiding Amazon for everything, I’ve run into annoying issues before long.
Also, sadly there are a lot of less common products that aren’t super available elsewhere. And even when they are, I feel like it’s a risk buying from some random website I’ve not dealt with before.
I wish others could/would compete with these advantages but most don’t. And no I don’t buy everything from Amazon but it is a safe fallback for the items I can’t get at better retailers.
I feel the only thing they do well in my area is provide safer access to random bits and bobs that I buy from AliExpress. But that business is not what makes them rich, of course. It’s people buying everything from them, but that that is even compelling is mind blowing to me due to how atrocious their website and shopping experience is. And I work in e-Commerce as well…
I’ve found Walmart+ and Sam’s+ to be better for my needs lately. I only have prime when I can get it for free for a month. I only care about free shipping. I can give a crap about anything else that comes with prime
“I could care less” is ignorance, “I can give a crap” is a whole new level of stupidity 😂
Go lick windows
Most people want the question free returns, that’s really the thing keeping amazon afloat compared to say eBay or aliexpress. Sure you can get the stuff directly from China in most cases, but you have to wait for a month for it to arrive and hope you don’t need to return it.
As for local stores, they always cost more because of the cost of doing business, which is why Amazon is cheaper and faster to deliver.
All that said, as long as you can wait a few days, there is no need to pay for Prime, you can still get all the stuff shipped for free if you just wait until you have 45 bucks of stuff to buy.
Sure, but the question free returns are a big part of why no (well, very few) decent brands can be found on Amazon anymore.
Anyone with actually good products doesn’t have the profit margins to be forced into accepting obviously unacceptable returns. (eg customer returns item they clearly broke, gets full refund, retailer is stuck with it). They also have good enough products that they don’t have to put up with Amazon to reach the masses, they can sell anywhere else.
You’re speaking like there literally aren’t any online retailers in the US, is that really accurate? And question free returns are literally the law here…
Question free returns as in even if you’re clearly in the wrong; purchased an item, throughly destroyed it, returned for a full refund. The seller gets to shut up and eat that cost because amazon already gave the customer their money back and isn’t interested in hearing your claim as a seller.
This is why you can only find random ass bramd names you’ve never heard of throughout 99% of Amazon. Seller’s refuse to be treated this way. (or at least anyone with anything actually worth purchasing)
Yup. I tried selling on Amazon and ended up back on ebay because perfectly working stuff was being returned and I had to eat the cost of shipping both ways.
Hey, at least it came back working. :/
Of course there are thousands upon thousands.
question free returns are literally the law here…
Which is a privilege that I hope you appreciate. America would never do something as reasonable tbh
There are some others, bhphoto being a good one, but many of the online retailers do not have free shipping and many also have return fees. That’s where Amazon saw a way to steal customers away.
Is their completely automatic online store still closed on Sundays?
This is annectdotal but I twice tried branching out recently to other retailers, both times they said they delivered my package and they did not. Trying to get help from them is like pulling teeth.
I rarely have a problem with Amazon and the few times I did I was given a refund pretty much immediately.
It makes it hard to switch when the difference in service is so drastic =/
I’m in the UK but I’m largely housebound. Prime is life changing for disabled people like myself. I won’t cancel my subscription but I’ll probably pirate anything I want to watch on prime video in future, which isn’t much now they don’t have the tennis rights in the UK.
Some products are only available on Amazon, altough there’s always an alternative on another shop.
I try to avoid Amazon because of how many bad products are on their platform. Other shops also list third-party sellers, but by avoiding those platforms and only buying on proper non-marketplace shops the products usually meet a minimum quality. At least my experience with shops that actually specialize in a specific categorie (pc hardware -> mindfactory.de, electronics -> reichelt.de, …) is generally better.
Ebay for stuff, because you are usually dealing with a person that has some care for your order. Ebay doesnt wait 2 weeks to ship my stuff. Amazon now waits to ship so they can combine my orders. So in the past few months my ebay use is way up and my amazon use is way down. As far as content goes, piracy is still an awesome thing. I pay for physical books and music from bandcamp, the rest is acquired. I think people get lazier and dumber the closer you get to the equator. Thanks for your comment. a guy at 59.9n.
News broke on this a few months ago, and I jumped ship. Their failed music app is another reason I ditched their ecosystem. Kept crashing; music would pause mid-song; couldn’t play downloaded music offline without a data connection.
Video service had such poor title coverage and nothing compelling for the price. As many others have said, the value proposition didn’t work. Enshittification is in full swing. Sail the high seas.
Hey they have Monk
It’s a fairly niche sport, but Amazon had the tennis rights here in the UK. They’ve gone to sky now and the very minimum you’d need to pay is £30 p/m for much less choice in the way you watch matches. As for prime music, they have a good amount of ad-free podcasts, including everything from wondery. I only have prime for the free next day shipping and free returns by collection, but the tennis and podcasts were a really great extra.
The real trick is you cancel AND shop elsewhere. We get most of our necessities locally now at normal retail and I’ll occasionally put an Amazon order together when I need something specific and I’ll spend enough for free shipping.
I missed shopping there at first, but so much of their inventory is junk now; I feel like I actually get better quality from traditional retail. The $140/yr for Prime feels like free shipping but it obviously isn’t.
It really depends on where you live.
Between living in a smaller town and never ending supply chain/distribution issues: If I need something I can’t get at the local store, it is a bare minimum two hour ordeal. I can usually justify that on a weekend but if my mouse dies and I need one now? Suddenly I need to figure out what else I can grab to get free shipping or if I need to just eat the costs and overnight it.
I have been doing the math and will likely stick with amazon prime. Admittedly, I increasingly don’t bother to even watch the amazon shows I like (the boys and reacher) because I have increasingly become spoiled by a proper blu ray or UHD (… ripped to my plex).
Oh, your computer mouse. Anyway, I just paused my membership in the hopes that my spending habits improve. We’ll see how “emergencies” get handled without the shipping benefits.
140$? Why is this so expensive in the us? We pay 90€ (~100$) in Germany. So brake even is with like 20x 5€ shipping orders per year. Which I sadly do pretty easily. Getting the stuff I need locally is sadly not that easy.
Don’t forget their tax.
Base is 139.99 (140) + tax on top.So even more expensive.
Same here
An already overpriced subscription service wants more money 🤣
If they need more money, they can just take about $2,000 USD per second from Bezos’ money. He makes over $3,000 USD per second.
I forgot to mention. over 99% of all online sales go through amazon. They don’t need to raise their prices.
Unthinkable!! How will Jeffey-Bear survive without his nightly molten gold enema?
Gold? He’s not some dirty plebian that accepts gold, he wants Iridium dusted with rubies, emeralds, blood-diamonds, sapphires and war-orphan tears…but only war orphan tears from the wars he’s profiting from. And after he gets the enema, he kills 100 puppies and earns a single penny by doing it.
This is such a weird way of announcing/implementing a $3/month increase for Prime video by Amazon, and a lot more destructive PR-wise too.
Right? For how much companies seem to love bubblewrapping anything they do in PR, they sure do suck at it sometimes…
Lol needlessly downgrading all the customers instead of increasing their price. Can we just make subscriptions track inflation metrics so I at least know how fucked I am on average?
Lemmy needs a DataIsBeautiful community, they’d make that graph.
Right? If it just went up a bit I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Ads on something I (technically my dear husband) already pay for just pisses me off. It feels like they’re holding ad-free viewing hostage
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Oooo good call. Thanks.
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This and the rising costs plus adding ads to ‘basic’ tiers and attempting to create limitations (resolutions, “screens”, offline downloads) is what might push me to build a nice, large NAS. We don’t want Cable again.
Jellyfin + Synology NAS was a great investment for me! ;)
Wouldn’t go back.
I appreciate the advice! I am thinking of Synology or perhaps DIY with either TrueNAS (Scale likely) or Unraid. Synology would be cheap, small, easy on power and thermals too though and I’ve been looking at the latest and previous gen DS2XX lines.
Also I appreciate the Jellyfin mention. I’ve been using Plex so long and was thinking about something else like Jellyfin especially but I’ve never worked with it before.
The nice thing about Jellyfin is that you can point Jellyfin and Plex to the same media folders and both will work, to try it out.
I would get a Synology with intel Quicksync if you go the Synology route for hardware transcoding. Unfortunately, a lot of the new models don’t have it.
I just have a 220+ but would maybe get a 4 bay model if I did it again.
i do this with jellyfin and kodi. the media library is standalone. they both get read-only access to all the metadata which i manage with a different tool (mediaelch)
I went the DIY route a month and a half ago and it’s been great. I opted for a larger case so I could add a bunch of HDDs and not be limited to the 2 or 4 that’s the standard in a syno, and I’ll keep adding more over time. I got carried away with the CPU and went with ddr5 so it’s been quite more expensive than it should have been and it cost about 700 euro without the spinning disks, but it’s been great with proxmox + a truenas VM (plus a bunch of extra vms for the arrs, tinkering, media servers, web stuff, pihole, nginx, some game servers…)
Pretty much sounds exactly like I was thinking of doing for the DIY. miniATX/ATX for all the expansion potential + SATA ports + large case to handle it + a CPU with 6 to 8 cores at least. Case would probably be a rack form factor but it doesn’t really matter. Probably 32 GB of RAM + a Quadro GPU/Some cheap AMD GPU or something cheapish like that strictly for encoding + Proxmox + TrueNAS or perhaps just unraid. Probably no desktop environments unless something really needs it for some reason. Not sure if I’ll go with a motherboard with an ILO/IPMI with its own NIC + vlan or not.
I was going to mix SSD/NVME for performance (if I mix these two, it’d be two separate performance tiers) and HDDs for capacity. Probably two 1+ Gbps NICs bonded and maybe a LACP port channel down the line. VPN with killswitch of course.
I could def. go cheaper on the hardware if I just wanted to use docker/podman mostly but I want VMs too. I’ll probably manage updates and backups of what I really care about off network via ansible + rclone + restic repos. I might would use zram + lz4 for most of my VMs because why not.
Yeah, sounds good. My proxmox is installed in a couple of raid0 SSD for redundancy and the VMs are in a 1tb nvme. All the remaining data (media, files, Arma/other game mods, backups…) is stored in spinning HDDs. I’m using an Intel CPU so I didn’t bother with a dedicated GPU and it’s working without a problem, but I still have to stress test jellyfin when transcoding multiple streams.
If I was to do it again I’d downgrade to ddr4 and get much more RAM though, 32gb it’s not that much when factoring in truenas, VMs and a couple of gameservers.
To add to this. Look in to the Arr apps. Sonarr Radarr and prowlarr work all nicely together.
We won’t get cable again. Video streaming is already much worse and declining rapidly.
I wish I could just get Prime shipping and drop the video service. I may still drop the whole thing.
Nothing quite like paying an annual fee to ensure that stuff you can’t be bothered to go to the store for are handled by a multitude of people who are systematically abused by their employer.
I don’t know where you live, but around here stores only carry what most people buy. If you want something other than plain vanilla, you have to find it online.
Then take a look at the manufacturers website and see what retailers they use.
Many stores will also let you order items for pickup that they don’t normally stock at your local location. Ask a clerk or again, check their site.
Have you ever actually even tried to do this? All you can tell from the manufacturers website is where you can find a company that carries any of their products. Oh, you want that specific scent of antiperspirant? Good luck on calling all this retail stores that don’t actually have staff anymore. If you’re truly lucky you can search walmart.com for it and then target.com for it maybe you’ll find it. Honestlywalmart.com is about their only competition but pricing there is completely at the whim of their own privateers.
I have actually, quite a bit. Finding products and store’s that sell them really isn’t that hard.
The only thing I use amazon for is a general catalogue of items; once I find something I’d like, I buy it elsewhere.
You got hit with a bunch of down votes but it’s not incredibly hard to avoid Amazon, it’s just a little less convenient. Of course, it’s going to depend and vary based on where you are located.
Amazon – If you get a pee bottle your order is free!
This is essentially what’s happening, but instead of them lowering the prime fee and removing videos, they’re adding the additional fee to remove ads from the video service
And I continue adding primevideo’s content to my Jellyfin server
Announced just after Christmas, a time when I assume a lot of people sign up for Prime so they can save shipping on presents.
Seems like that would backfire as people recently remember signing up.
Depends on whether or not they signed up for monthly or annual, and many get it in November so things they order show up in time before the xmas postal hell.
It seems like it would work because people wouldn’t think they got their value out of their prime membership yet and are reluctant to cancel after such a short time.
What the hell do people watch on prime? I got it for Thursday night football. There’s nothing interesting on there and half the content is “rent/buy”
“rent/buy”
You mean rent for x amount of time, or rent for an undetermined amount of time.
We don’t do ‘buy’ anymore, that’s just rent without knowing when your rental is over.
Physical media is the only “buy”. And that’s hard to come by. Unfortunately.
You could say that lately the trend has been “bye bye buy”
Get out. ->
Edited
prime has some really good shows (invincible, the boys, and good omens are the ones i’ve watched) but ultimately it is WAY too expensive
The Boys, Expanse, Invincible, Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, Fleabag, Good Omens, Man in the High Tower and Reached come to mind. Admittedly, I haven’t watched a few of those.
Half? That’s optimistic.
It still has a better selection than Netflix.
And Usenet has a better selection than both combined, for cheaper and a better experience.
Regarding the shipping cost:
Just collect things to buy until you are over the treshold. Helped me with overbuying stuff I don’t even really need.
If you are moatly in it for the shipping: Just stop. You give them more money through that than paying for shipping.I canceled Prime in 2021. The expedited shipping is nice and all but it really just felt like paying rent to someone I don’t like nor want or have to pay rent to.
Same here
Scamazon
