Frugal

Crazy. I was out of town last week, annoyed I couldn’t order stuff as I discovered I needed it, because it would have been delivered before I got home. I did finally order last night, but had to specifically avoid the overnight delivery in favor of fewer trips/boxes. ….. if Amazon is giving you these ridiculous lead times, maybe you want to take a box,over look at who you’re ordering from

Yep, canceled back then too, for the very reasons.

Same here. Never ordered anything off Amazon. Not sure about the U.S., but I've never had trouble finding anything in other places, so I never had to resort to Amazon. Maybe certain things are harder to get in the U.S. except on Amazon? Some kind of monopoly thing?

There was a time in the long ago times when it was a really good, customer focused service that didn't have all of the issues it has today. It then of course got worse every year like everything else but now many people use it out of habit or addiction.

How does that work? Do they require another launcher or other kind of drm?

It probably takes too long to go to each apartment, especially ones on the opposite end, and they probably are incentivized/punished more on time than accuracy.

Maybe they're using different map providers by default? Check Open street map, Apple, Google and Bing and see if some will route to the wrong side of the building, for example.

If you're that curious, of course. I'm not telling you what to do :-)

They're also trying to trick you into staying.

I've posted this elsewhere in similar comments. The value of Amazon has shifted from "buy anything" to "buy something that's annoying to find".

Unfortunately local brick and mortar stores are to blame as well.

Say you're looking for a 3-ring binder. You likely know where to go for it at your local Walmart. You aren't tied to a particular brand (or you are) and it doesn't take you long to find it.

But now let's say you're looking for something small like car wax. You're not sure what you need. You'd think it's in the care care section but you're not seeing it. The Walmart app says it's in aisle K44 and your in, what the hell? Z4? Map does you no good. And when you get there there are so many small products that you can't find it.

Amazon has done studies and the majority of shipped products weigh less than something like 5 pounds. People find Amazon search better than the in-store experience.

Walmart, and most B&M stores unfortunately have no incentive to change because they want you to browse. For Walmart, it's basket size (items per cart) whereas Amazon is the speed of checkout.

We buy as little as possible from Amazon, though it sort of doesn’t matter because our choice is basically Amazon or Walmart (where we live there aren’t any other retailers).

Basically we buy as little from all of these shit companies as possible. We keep a running list of things we do need to buy from Amazon and when the tally is $35 or more, then we make the purchase. It doesn’t cost us anything extra because it’s stuff we can only get from Amazon and it’s all stuff we need.

I cancelled Prime about a year ago, and so far it has had zero affect on our lives. Sometimes I'll put something in my cart that's under $35 and just wait until I want something else that brings me over $35. Maybe I'm more disciplined than other people? If I need something urgently, I'm not ordering it online anyway.

Quite a few times, a long period of time goes by before I add something to my cart to get above $35, and in the meantime I decided I don't even want the original thing. I'm ordering from Amazon a LOT less often, and it's great.

I really wish there was a non-profit or coop or public utility like replacement for amazon and ebay. Yeah you need a website and infrastructure and warehouses but this is becoming so fundamental to our economy that it's not good to let this "rent seeking" to continue. Make it a fair marketplace that is democratically controlled and optimizes for customers and sellers and workers instead of for shareholders. There is no need for amazon or ebay to exist.

Similar to paypal, all they did was make wire transfers easy. At least I can finally wire money immediately in the EU without extra costs making paypal and their tax on the internet economy superfluous (damn lazy banks!).

Governments ignoring ecommerce as a vital infrastructure has created these completely useless plutocrats.

PS: Sorry for the tangential rant lol

True, you do have to be wary of drop shippers on eBay though. A handful of times down I order something on eBay only to get it in Amazon packaging and with an Amazon gift packing slip - then I look up the item name on the gift receipt and find that the Amazon listing was cheaper and the eBay seller just skimmed off the top.

I cancelled two years ago and they renewed it somehow.

Then this year I let it use a cancelled card as the default and my one working card was on a list of 20 or so cards. It kept warning me that my card would not renew my prime subscription. Nah, they just ran an if statement over my cards to renew it.

I didn't really fight it because my family uses my prime video which has ads but I'm prepping them that it's not gonna be there next year.

If you haven't used any of the benefits since its renewal, you can call to get a full refund. It did the same to me, and I was able to get the newest renewal fee back.

Reach out to their customer support and get a refund.

This is an example of dark patterns. It can also include multiple steps to 'confirm' a decision, where the confirm button is beneath the decline button, only for the final step to have the button locations (or colours, shapes, etc) reversed. It's done on purpose to confuse people into giving up. Unfortunately, even if it works one time, it's justifiable for the company to continue the practice.