Amazon Prime (not the leader of the Autobots nor an incredible simulation)

In the spirit of public service, consider thread bumped.

I received an email notice this morning that my trial of Prime would expire in one month (3/20).

I had trial a long time ago and for some reason they decided to offer the trial to me again, I guess it's because I haven't bought something from them for almost a year

i bit the bullet and signed up the other day for the trial membership. aaaaaaaand will cancel before the month is up.

will i ask myself questions and them answer them in order to tell the dull story of why i'm canceling?
yes i will.

am i happy with the free 2-day shipping?
oh fart yeah!

did i look up the number of amazon purchases i made over the last year, define it as X, and then divide $80 by X to see how much I'll really pay for 2-day shipping per order over the course of an average year, for example, if someone made 40 orders in a year and then sign up for an $80 amazon prime membership they're pretty paying $2 per 2-day shipping per order?
Why yes i did, and i was pleased with the figure.

was i pleasantly surprised that i could extend the membership benefits for free to others in my household, specifically my beyonce?
i was, i had no idea.

was i bummed today when i got home and realized that the 2-day shipping is UPS, and UPS leaves the package at the door and requires a signature at the time of delivery, and they pretty much only deliver when i'm not home (before 5pm, M-F only), and to take this a bit further i'm not sure how in the world anyone could ever accept the package unless they didn't have a job, and now i have to drive 30 minutes away and then stand in the worst-fucking-line-in-the-tri-county area notorious UPS line for another 30 minutes to get my package, and this will happen everytime i order from amazon now, pretty much?
YES, pretty bummed about it

is the run-on answer your own question format acceptable to others?
no, probably not, sorry

lol.

considering I made 129 orders last year, and that I'd guess at least 70 of them I used Prime for,.....I probably paid for my Prime at least ten or more times over

also re: UPS I'm having that problem now too, cuz in our area they've stopped 'leaving' packages due to recent thefts, I have to have them all sent to work. you can also sign the little slip on the door, and when they try to deliver the next day they'll leave it.

btw regging multiple email accounts for Prime works if you have more than one credit card. I did it.

can't have them sent to work, unfortunately.

and the little slip on the door has option B checked ("The sender required a signature at the time of delivery"), as opposed to option A ("Your written authorization is required to leave packages"), which means I can't just sign it and get it the next day.

:-/

really? that's bizarre, Amazon doesn't generally send signature guaranteed. did you buy a lazer beam or something

question: is there any way to contact amazon and/or UPS and let them know that it's cool to just leave it at the door in the future (option A)?

do they sell anything else? xpost

FedEx once refused to leave "Wire Season 3" at my door because they marked "dangerous materials" on teh slip

it's worth emailing them to check...dunno that anything will come of it, but they could at least explain why that particular item was sent that way.

up until a week ago, all of my shit was left for me, which is good cuz I work M-F. now that they're pulling the 'have to be home' shit I have to use work which sucks cuz they misplace stuff sometimes

there is now a streamin gvidoe app for Wii! Goodbye netflix!

This is the best!

Noticed a bunch of good older movies got added to Amazon Prime recently, including North by Northwest & Days of Heaven.

Dark City, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Hud

Dark City with Charlton Heston?

the only reason I kept Netflix after Prime added videos is that they don't seem to have EVERYTHING I want, so I feel like I need both :/.

still, tho, Prime is great cuz I order like 300+ things a year, so the savings are immense. except now they're using 'cheap' tactics like using shitty local couriers to deliver shit. who often fuck things up.

One thing that's nice about the streaming selection is that the films are in their correct letterbox in many (all?) cases, unlike Netflix. and they have a lot of the stuff that Netflix has. And the quality of the stream was way better.

If there's a movie they don't have streaming you can use their app to stream a rental version, although you can't make the purchase in-app... only access your amazon library. But it's nice to have the option.

i used to have this

it's cool & if i had more money i'd have it now

I buy so much heavy stuff from Amazon - 50 lbs of cast iron kettlebells, 8'x6' bamboo fencing, flats of canned tomatoes and tuna and coconut milk, cases of coconut water, raised bed garden kit, wheelbarrow, etc - that yearly charge for Prime is well worth it even if we didn't use the streaming.

I still love Prime, and it's still more than worth the money, but as expected, they're starting to penny pinch and use cheaper means of shipping...as a result, their 'guaranteed two day delivery' is turning into three and on rare occasions, four because of using things like FedEx Smartpost. Which ok, w/e for the most part, but the last three new releases I ordered, that were supposed to be 'guaranteed to be received on release date' according to the email, have been a day late.

Yeah, first world problems, I know, but if you're going to advertise something, probably best not to keep not delivering it. complained, hopefully I get $2 towards a future mp3 purchase.

i watch heaps of stuff on prime, and we milk their shipping every year come Christmas time, more than pays for itself.

love it

http://www.amazon.com/b?ref_=tsm_1_tw_s_amzn_mx3eqp&node=8037720011

What the fuck

Amazon Drone

:D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98BIu9dpwHU

http://i.imgur.com/FT03DGb.jpg

I'm shorting Amazon right now. Somebody give me their Amazon shares. I'll have them back to you by Tuesday

will i be able to recoup my investment in a gun

and can u buy guns on amazon

i want to order an rc helicopter just bcz it would make me lol

http://i.imgur.com/VAzdZBT.png

Think the thread title will need to be changed soon

srsly think how amazing it would be to shoot one of these suckers out if the sky and take its bounty

Amazon Prime (applying to be the leader of the Autobots)

Best part is when you emerge from the field victoriously clutching your Amazon Prime Air package and you open it and it's just a wine bottle opener

my favorite corkscrew

no corkscrew is sweeter than the one you killed yourself

http://kdvr.com/2013/09/03/drone-hunting-certificates-already-being-sold-in-deer-trail-angering-residents/

lol bezos talking drones and doing custom development for the cia in the same segment http://gigaom.com/2013/12/01/amazon-drones-were-not-the-biggest-surprise-from-jeff-bezos-on-60-minutes

You give me some of your tech I'll give you some of mine

Bezos is a clown from the future laughing at us all

I think all that stuff is great, Jeff, but like you said, it requires third party investment (sort of the way using Amazon Music the way I'd want would require an annual fee). The hands-free function is great, better than I expected, but to do anything beyond smart clock-radio stuff requires lots of outside help, whether IFTTT or some specific lightbulbs or whatever. I love Apple but have resisted its vertical integration mode for similar reasonsl, because it's so controlled it prevents me (or slows me) from doing what I want to do with ease. Speaking of IFTTT, if Echo doing what I want it do to means that I need to invest in several outside or supplementary products or services, then ... it's not doing what I want it to do. It's doing what Amazon wants it/me to do.

Again, this will all work itself out soon enough, I hope, but for now it is a truly maddening epidemic to see solutions on the horizon through a reinforced window that keeps you trapped inside.

like refugees trapped in greece

Exactly like that.

then my kids can just walk in and say "Alexa, play shitty music"

now what kind of language is this to be using

Finally giving this a go, as there was a good deal in the Prime Day event that I wanted to get. Not sure whether I'll keep it beyond the one month trial, though it is tempting given my ordering history of the last few years.

what did you get

i considered getting a dustbuster but did not

It was a photography purchase... a fast 128GB Lexar SD Card for just £26. One can never have enough memory cards when it comes to shooting weddings!

I just bought a VTIN Royaler bluetooth speaker, need a new one after my JBL Flip broke. $45, normally $65-70. Not bad. Most of the things I've seen that I would be remotely interested in were at around 20% discount -- not bad, but also not the level of discount that would make me jump to buy something I don't immediately need.

I swear it's like I don't know how to use the internet anymore. I go to Amazon, go to the Prime Day splash page, see a bunch of crap I couldn't care less about, see no way to filter sale products into categories that might interest me, so I quit.

you can filter by category, although you still wind up having to wade through like 50 pages of stuff per category or more with no "view all." however there does seem to be a semi-functional prime-day-only search function.

Generally I find Amazon to be completely shit in terms of navigability and I hate shopping on it unless I know exactly what item/brand/model I want.

They have way too much crap for sale. Way too many products in every category, and everything is bumped by fake reviews. I prefer ordering from Costco where things are more curated, except that they sort of go to the other extreme and could use a bit more selection.

It should be more like Black Friday sales imo, confine the sale to very popular items and make the discounts deep.

So many of the prime deals are items and/or brands I have never heard of. I would have no way of even evaluating whether they were good deals other than trusting Amazon that it was more expensive yesterday.

I can see why an internet-based black Friday of that sort would be problematic though -- they probably couldn't do the volume on those items needed to satisfy people and the whole thing would be over in a server-crashing second.

(xp) right, and I won't even waste time clicking on item where the price is expressed as a range from 19.95 - 49.95

i have stuff enough

To find out a price history of an item on Amazon I've been pointed to this website: http://camelcamelcamel.com

I've ignored signing up and just put the URL of the item in the top search bar and it seems to work well.

It turns out that they actually offer same day shipping with Prime here in Glasgow. If you order before noon things arrive later that day and the range available seems quite extensive.

I haven't set it up yet, but it also seems I can share some of my Prime benefits with my girlfriend as part of a household. That's very neat too.

I can imagine I'm going to end up paying for the year in the end.

Did my first same-day delivery. It worked precisely as advertised and was very handy - ordered about 11:30am, arrived about 7pm. Hopefully it wasn't actually like this, but I did feel guilty imagining a delivery van driving the 50-ish miles from the warehouse to my flat that evening with my single item.

I signed up for Prime last month after years of putting it off because I never had the spare cash to drop on the cost all in one go. But now you can pay for it monthly (and it comes with Amazon video, which I've used a bit already).

Basically, the $10.99/mo pays for itself really quickly.

It also comes with the Amazon Music streaming service, and here's where I'd like some opinions. Is it good enough to forsake spending extra on Spotify and/or Apple Music?

nah

actually it doesn't have a streaming service like spotify yet, you can just stream your own music

I stand corrected, they have streaming now, but it sure hasn't done much for me

Selection is v poor vs Spotify - I sometimes use the playlists or radio function if I can't be bothered thinking.

It's a nice extra but not worth subscribing for. I don't even know if Prime Video is 100% worth the price but it's come a long way over the past few years, possible they'll improve Music as well.

Prime membership is such a weird hodgepodge of stuff. It's really hard to value the shipping plus entertainment media combo.

I like the Video offerings but I already have Netflix and order from Amazon maybe twice a year, so it's like juuuuust not quite worth it

Might get back on if they offer that huge discount again (and/or I get some more money coming in)

I'm on my annual free 30 days Prime trial again. God the stuff on there is pretty awful.

Have managed to finally watch Batman Dark Knight Rises thought, and Mad Max was pretty fun. Other than that? A whole lotta nothing.

That's nuts, there is so much good stuff.

Near random stuff in my watchlist:

City of God
Captain Fantastic
Moonlight
Salesman
Paterson
20th Century Women
Sweet Hereafter
Married to the Mob
Prom Night
History of Violence
The Handmaiden
Green Room
The Witch

And so on. I suppose some of these come and go from Prime, but I think most of these are current.

Plus whatever original programming is there now. They seem to be ramping up further.

Prime Video makes it hard to find the good stuff sometimes, even on my FireTV half the easy to find recommendations are cheap documentaries and straight to video garbage.

http://instantwatcher.com/a

There's a fourth season of Bosch coming, but no date yet.

I got invited by Amazon to complete a survey regarding changes to the Prime set up. I guess they'll be changing the price and what's included before too long. They had me laboriously choosing which I'd go for out of various combinations of the shipping/movies/music/photo storage/e-books/deals/etc features of prime at differing price points, trying to gauge which were most important and how much I'd pay for them. I'm very happy at £79 per year, but will baulk if they raise the price or drop any features I do actually use.

From the way they set the questions up it seems like they want to raise the price quite significantly for Prime that features both video streaming and one-day/same-day delivery and have cheaper options that drop either one or both of those aspects.

Doesn't sound surprising; with the explosion of streaming video they presumably have to recoup more costs now.

fuck amazon

they're bad but hey we got The Handmaiden out of it

I never really wanted Amazon Video to begin with so I can sign up for the delivery only

do we have a thread for Amazon's horrific labor practices

http://fortune.com/2017/11/24/amazon-black-friday-2017-strike-italy-germany/

Worst American tech company thread yeah

Also, they just opened in Australia and made the odd decision to charge higher prices than their competitors for pretty much everything

pulling a real "target in canada" move there

It's ok the "invisible hand" will self correct

They do that to us too but the maddening thing is never being sure if the item will ship here until you're halfway through buying it

Also no .ie site so kindle is through .com but all else through .co.uk

For a company essentially based four miles from my apartment. Dicks.

Sry deems if they actually sold things in Ireland they might have to pay taxes on it

Valid point of course

Like it's not that we're not grateful for the job