It’s November… What does that mean? Well for me, it means it’s time to renew my Amazon Prime membership. And you know what? I’m not going to do it. I’m dropping out of Amazon Prime, and what’s more I am earnestly going to attempt to stop shopping at Amazon entirely.
I have been contemplating ending my Prime membership anyways. And there are a few reasons for this. Amazon raised their price, and I’ll be honest, my budget could use the extra money so there is that. But really, once I started hearing rumors that Amazon has been contemplating opening a bank and starting their own UPS competitor, I started to realize that Amazon has become the modern day Wal-Mart in many bad ways. You know, for a long time, I thought it was quaint that Amazon was putting the hurt on Wal-Mart after years of Wal-Mart putting the hurt on everyone else… but in a way, even though I will not shop at Wal-Mart, I kind of am rooting for them as the small guy. Weird right? Because truth of the matter is, we need brick and mortar stores, and by saying we need them, what I do not mean is that we need Amazon to open brick and mortar stores (which they are). Moreover, we need more competition, both online, and off.
For the longest time, I was proud of what Amazon had become. One stop shop for everything. After all, this was the company that started online shopping in one sense. They helped bank roll many early websites with referral programs (something that they have stopped doing for smaller websites like mine that don’t get a ton of traffic). I loved them. And I returned that love with my money. I bought most everything from Amazon now, Games, clothes, electronics, food… seriously almost everything. I am becoming too reliant on them and this has, in reality, been terrible for competition at large. Other retailers, both online and off, have a hard time competing with them because they just don’t have the resources to.
Consider Toys ‘R Us… They were the last toy chain out there, I live in a decent sized town and only one toy store remains… an independent retailer that specializes in expensive hipster toys. Or Borders and several other book retailers. Even Barnes and Nobles is struggling in recent years. Best Buy is on its last legs. And no matter what you feel about these individual companies… them closing is NOT good for business, except if you are Amazon.
And so I was looking at the $120 a year program whose real cost was that I buy everything from them instead of diversifying… and I wonder… am I doing the right thing?
And you know… Amazon is actually making it easier on me. One of their bigger features of Prime was that you get a 20% discount on pre-ordering video games. I bit into that hard. And they pulled that away. They also pulled benefits that really didn’t lose them a ton of money like removing ads for Prime members on Twitch. Prime Pantry, which was never great, has gotten worse because it is now a subscription on top of Prime. And the other big thing… their video service… I’ve never been a huge fan of the originals they have offered, and their interface for finding videos has always easily been the worst of every online streaming service hands down. And that thing that got us all hooked originally years ago? You know, free next day shipping on everything? Well first of all, they got rid of paying to ship for the remainder of this year anyway, and even when they go back, free shipping is down to $25 instead of $35. And really the next day was always a meh benefit anyway. Part of the reason ordering everything on Amazon instead of going to say, Best Buy, was OK was because I made the conscious decision that I didn’t need the instant gratification of going into a store and getting it RIGHT NOW. I could wait to save money, and that remains true with waiting an extra day or two for shipping.
I’ll be honest, I’m a little surprised that at the same time that they are raising the price, they are removing features. I am certain that they made up for any perceived losses from the various Prime benefits from having people use them almost solely instead of another store. Prime features were Amazon’s loss leader. But now it seems that Amazon wants to make profit on even the yearly subscription and I am sure they have done studies to prove that if they take stuff away and raise prices, they won’t lose much business so why not.
I think I’m going to blog the next couple of weeks about my disconnect from Amazon. I want to blog about steps I’m taking to cut the cord, alternative stores I’m going to instead of Amazon. I’d like to cut the cord on Amazon Web Services too thanks to Hisan Minhaj (thanks bro), but I don’t think that is a possibility at this point considering that would mean also cutting out the likes of Netflix. Maybe that’s phase 2 or 3…