This is sarcasm right? The ads will function as an additional revenue stream at the current price. Rich company gets richer by shoving ads in your face.
Nothing is getting cheaper. The existing thing is getting worse and you have the option to pay more if you like.
Ads must be incredibly overvalued by now, I can't think of any evident reason that keeps the ad business growing and growing uncontrollably. It should be in diminished returns territory by now, it seems almost desperate.
From the article it sounds like trying to make more from the remaining user base after people cancelled subscriptions during 2022 for living expenses. Presumably the remainding people are less price sensitive. It does seem like a pretty significant increase in price though - something like 30% increase to avoid ads.
I only watch a few prime series, so my plan will be to only upgrade during months they release new seasons and downgrade as soon as I’m finished.
I'm not saying there can't be legitimate reasons to change your fee structures and product offerings over time...but every time this happens I can't help but think of the mob "That's a ad-free nice service you're paying for. It would be a shame if someone introduced ads to it".
Though, with the impending anti-trust case against Amazon, maybe they're afraid that AWS is going to be split off and they won't be able to subsidize their shipping and logistics any more. Every cent counts and what not.
We did this recently due to some changes in our situation for about the last 10 months, after about 3-4 years of prime. Bought a lot less stuff in general I think, and they still had free shipping options when we did. Just had to plan ahead and adjust our mindset, saved 80$ (CAD).
You just have to spend $35 at a time to get free delivery. Not having Prime anymore means I have lot fewer $5 bits of Chinese junk lying around my house.
Prime shipping isn’t faster. And you get free shipping if you batch your orders. Which you should do anyway to cut down on packaging.
I had a free shipping Walmart order delivered in two days. So that’s an option too.
When companies offer worse products for the same price the market will respond by making the competition more attractive.
It wouldn't work for me. There are many occasions I make use of the free shipping, like replacement 3d printer nozzles, or cleaning brushes, or car parts, list goes on. Batching would be very inconvenient for these things. And having moved to a big house in the suburbs I'm too far from stores where one could buy this stuff (and half of the items are not even available in brick-and-mortars). Bottom line, it's a valuable enough service even without any TV.
You don't actually need to order anything from Amazon. I don't know how much of a QoL increase it is to have that luxury for anyone except maybe impulse project-hobbyists. Even so, project planning is a skill worth honing.
I canceled my Prime membership years ago. They rarely met their shipping speed promises, and after getting counterfeit, or obviously used/broken/returned items I just decided it's not worth it.
I haven't bought anything on Amazon in years. There are better sites and sellers for anything you need.
Walmart.com is good, but avoid any 3rd party sellers -- only buy from Walmart itself. They do not do a good job keeping fraudsters off of their platform.
I cancelled my prime subscription a few months ago (UK), and like others have commented it's really not a huge loss and it actually pushes me to think more about whether I want to buy something rather than just adding it to cart because it's cheap and free shipping.
(Obviously my cancellation wasn't in response to this news, and I hardly ever watched prime video anyway - for me it was the fact that for years Amazon has been getting less and less reliable, more filled with junk and counterfeits, and especially that they've never done anything about the commingling problem that leads to knock off items being kept in the same buckets as official items, such that if you buy for example an iphone charger that is "sold by Apple directly, shipped by Amazon" you might get one genuinely provided by Apple or you might get a dodgy one that pretends to be sold by Apple.)
Prime shipping is almost worthless these days. The good stuff you actually want to buy isn’t on Prime. You know what’s on Prime? Knockoffs from QZEEVLO and YAAOUIE brands.
Does company trust mean nothing anymore? Once you lose trust, you lose consumers, even if you reverse the trust-losing decision. Look at Bud Light - they still haven't (and may never) recover.
Why would anyone "trust" a company to not raise prices or otherwise try to make more money?
Was Netflix, for example, expected to be $9.99/month for the rest of our entire lives? That is an insane thing to expect. Yet people always act like it's some great betrayal that, five years later, they need to pay another couple bucks for the same service.
Raising prices is expected and literally every company does it, within reason. Increasing ad time, censoring shows, and forcing politics all thoroughly erode trust over time.
They are giving you a choice, price increase of $3 a month, or no price increase and ads. I don't see this as a trust violation. Maybe they should have raised prices for everyone, but given the ad option as an opt-out.
I don't want to collate raising prices with "otherwise". I will gladly keep tacking on a dollar here and there, with some internal debate, but I will not tolerate things with ads, even when they are free. Even when I am paid to watch them!
Trust is irrelevant when you've got the kind of market dominance Amazon has.
Even if you don't use Prime, don't buy anything on Amazon.com, and don't shop at Whole Foods...you're still guaranteed to be sending money their way, due to how much of the Internet they provide support for with AWS. Visited joesrandomwebsite.cheaptld recently? Well, it's hosted on a service that uses AWS, so most of its ad revenue goes straight to paying Amazon for that.
I dislike repeating "enshittification" so much, but behavior like this seems to be spreading at an exponential rate. It seems like there's going to be a steady uptick of torrenting and Usenet as people get fed up and discover that the piracy landscape has become much more ergonomic over the last few years.
Honestly, I think what I see next is not just ads, but sponsored content within the content itself. No different than YouTube.
Yet then, then… we can have tiers. There can be more interesting sponsors and advertisements in the pricier subscription tiers. For the bargain tier, you get the literal 90-120 minute “advertisements” I’m aware exist on YouTube (yes, as ad breaks!) that are basically financial scams. Except on Prime they might be unskippable depending on the device you’re using.
Then Bezos will have so much money he’ll need a second monocle.
Oh no, far worse than that. Imagine some Game of Thrones character breaking into a three minute uninterrupted dialogue on how they’re protecting their communication throughout the kingdom with XVPN.
I know product placements have always been a bit controversial but I'm completely fine with product placements personally. I find the opposite -- sterilizing a movie of all brands -- a little more jarring even because things like coca cola or giant billboards DO exist in real life. Usually they are done in a non obtrusive (or at least satirical when they are obtrusive) way. I think my opinion would change if it was more in your face but otherwise if they can get some money from it I don't see the issue.
Okay that's just funny given what we're commenting on: When I opened that link, a subscription popup covered half the page and I just reflexively closed it, but the title on the popup was large enough it did register as I clicked: "There's good reason not to support The Guardian". I clicked too fast to see the rest.
With huge companies and VC willing to spend unlimited sums of money to get a monopoly in some segment they eventually want to milk it as much as they can, cause they killed meaningful competition.
More often than not I move from one service to the next because the last service got so shitty/annoying/terrible privacy decisions that I jumped ship.
The internet and tech was meant to be a wild west of ideas and options but if it ever was that was a sadly brief period.
> I dislike repeating "enshittification" so much, but behavior like this seems to be spreading at an exponential rate.
Modern-day capitalism optimizes for maximum enshittification, because there isn't enough competition to encourage any other result. Occasionally
you'll have a company that does what's "supposed" to happen: provide a generally better product to gain market share against competitors, but that's rare. Pretty quickly they start responding to the same incentives as the incumbents, and enshittify their products too.
Modern technology has also been a double-edge sword. It's provided consumer benefits, but has never really lived up to its potential, because "innovation" frequently means new consumer-hostile uses of the technology (e.g. pervasive communications technology means your car can now provide a middling navigation app; as well as can spy on you, sell your data, and show you ads).
Enshittification aptly describes the symptoms, but it doesn't explain the problem.
The underlying issue is that enshittification is just growth induced entropy. The constant accumulation of half-baked features or user-hostile choices. Every business that is pressured by investors to grow suffers from this. It's the commercial equivalent of old age. It's why the advertising slowly increases everywhere, why Spotify can't just stay a decent app, why each new release of Windows only rearranges the ads and throws in a new version of the control panel.
The cycle is inescapable:
* Startup has modicum of success
* Success attracts investors/cash
* Cash is spent hiring "talent"
* The talent has to build SOMETHING
* And by definition, half of what the talent produces is BELOW AVERAGE
And so it goes, the mutations increase, the telomeres shorten, and eventually the product ends up in the nursing home wishing it had spent more time just focusing on what was important.
Doesn't enshittification usually connote something done fairly deliberate and explicitly exploitative? Whereas your description makes it seem accidental or incidental.
Doesn't surprise me. The economy demands exponential growth. Companies demand exponential growth. First the force in ads, then they offer a subscription to get rid of ads, then they put ads back in and jack up the subscription price, etc etc etc...
> the piracy landscape has become much more ergonomic over the last few years.
I've already been considering the idea of just buying my media when I want it and see how that compares to my streaming bill. I'm willing to pay for things. I think that's important. I'd just like to make sure I'm getting what I want when I buy in, and the proliferation of services has come with the likelihood that not only will the ones I have not have specific content I'm looking for, some shows aren't available at all, which means I have to buy anyway.
But ads in things I'm already paying for are a new level of problem that are an expression of contempt for both the customer and the product. Streamers: it's not enough that I'm paying you for access to the content you've made or secured a right to so that I can give it my full attention? You also want to actually dilute the value of that by requiring me to divert my attention somewhere else?
That's an outright invitation to media piracy. If you're going to spend your attention on something extraneous to the actual media, the digital literacy skills involved in piracy are more generally useful than an advertisement. Not to mention the satisfaction in sending a message to people who'll erode the value of their own product to bump profit margins.
I might accept a price raise. Lots of streaming was probably underpriced in the first place. Add $25-50 a year to my bill and I'll keep paying for it if the value is there. But subtract from the value and I'll find a substitute.
It's depressing, but what's frustrating to me is that my instinct is the pricing is also just "what the market will bear" and not "advertisers would pay us $3 a month to stuff garbage in your eyeballs, so you need to match their offer". So not only is it ruthlessly milking us, it's using a false justification to do it.
Waiting for the moment Micro&soft will embed ads into Windows Media Player (is it still called like that?), which stops whatever you are watching/listening for your mandatory 60seconds, hourly ad injection
The obvious caveat to this being that we don't know how Amazon collect this data or if it's even accurate in any way. Furthermore, even if it has been viewed a lot, that could just be a result of Amazon putting it on the homepage of the app/webpage (which would make it easy to play accidentally) and autoplaying it after finishing other Prime Video content.
Looks like this shouldn't pertain to movies you individually rent or buy. I hate all advertising, but this doesn't bother me much -- particularly since Prime has sort of been a raw deal for a while now. Like all valuable services, it has slowly become worse in order to extract more value. It was useless long before now. Ads make it worse than it was, but it was already dead to me.
Will this be limited to pre-roll? I don’t mind starting a movie and muting while I do something else for a minute. But if they degrade the experience by inserting ads, I’m out.
This on top of getting increasingly terrible shipping from Prime has me thinking it's no longer worth it. It's kind of sad, but also kind of inevitable as all major brands seem to go through this period of testing how much crap they can get away with until the user base breaks or finds better alternatives.
Now would be a good time for Walmart to get their sh*t together and dominate.
> This on top of getting increasingly terrible shipping from Prime has me thinking it's no longer worth it.
I thought that years ago: it seemed like orders actually arrived as slowly as they did pre-Prime (e.g. not 2 day shipping), so I canceled Prime and thought there wouldn't be much of a loss. Then my Amazon shipping became even more terrible. Everything was basically no-rush shipping with a $25 minimum order.
So basically, when Prime started, you got better service for an extra fee, and if you didn't pay you got "normal" service. Now you have pay to get "normal" service, and if you don't you get bad service.
There was a time (15 year ago?) when amazon was also generally cheaper for stuff too - I think that some people still seem to believe that, but really you are paying more for 'convenience' - even though it isn't that convenient anymore.
The big box stores only carry 90% of the stuff they’d need for that to be feasible, and they put local shops out of business. (At least in the SF Bay Area, maybe it’s different in bigger cities.)
I quit Amazon prime mid-pandemic as the shipping went from 2 days to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (and never recovered). I kept them until I watched Wheel of Time first season, and when I realized how awful their adaptation was, I dropped my years-old subscription happily. It's harder for me to get individual small things, but at least my chances of it being counterfeit are lower and I can generally expect them in a reasonable time. I just hate paying for shipping now; still worth it.
This makes perfect sense to me. Regular cable was like 100 bucks plus ad revenue, and I never understood how streamers could charge less than cable, have no ad revenue and still make the numbers work.
I don't mind advertisements because it always felt like a free way to pay people who make content I enjoy.
This is the same path trod by cable television. Originally you paid for premium channels like HBO, then over time ads crept in until they were as terrible as the free channels.
I was pretty sure this would happen to streaming and here we are.
Can you clarify? Ads never crept into the premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Movie Channel. At least no third party ads beyond the internal promotions between uninterrupted movies/shows. I haven't had cable for ~5 years, so maybe things have changed?
So local operators are selling ads on HBO between programming? Replacing what used to be trailers/interviews etc? I'd definitely say that is terrible and an example of enshittification.
Cable operators in my city do, you get ads about local businesses between shows, and if the ads sometimes don't cover all the filler, you see parts of the original ads.
I wouldn't say HBO became "as terrible as the free channels". I would say perhaps HBO is now as bad as the free channels once were, and the free channels are worse than ever. The last time I visited my grandmother I saw a few minutes of daytime network TV out of the corner of my eye and good god, I don't have anything else to compare it to. It reminds me of an article I read a long time ago about the continual decay of pretty much any publishing organization. It showed magazines when they were new, and the same magazines the year before they went out of business. At the end, the magazines were 75% ads, 25% "content". TV is the same way. At some point in the future, some new competitor will come in promising all the things HBO used to deliver. And in time they'll decay as well.
Originally, all cable channels were ad-free, because you paid for them.
There were several tiers in cable. Over the air channels being retransmitted (mostly with commercials, except PBS) A small number of premium channels led by HBO that were an extra fee. Then "basic channels" a bunch of non premium channels like TBS, ESPN, MTV, USA Network that had ads. Some basic cable channels didn't have ads. Then there were public benefit channels without ads like C-Span, and local public access. But from the earliest days, there were ad supported cable channels.
I wonder if the writers strike has anything to do with it. The studios are not going to make "less" money, so instead they will just increase the money, squeezed out of consumers by running commercials, and raising prices.
I was working on Prime when VoD launched. The benefit was advertised as ad-free, but within a few months pre-roll promos for other shows or movies started getting attached.
I brought it up at an all hands with our VP, and IIRC, one of the business guys that I didn’t work with directly interjected and said the offering was “interruption free”. I’m pretty sure that’s not how it was advertised.
At the time most of the organization would call customer-hostile BS like that out, but no one else challenged him on it and I was a lowly IC.
Until I left in 2013, I can’t say there were really any other disappointments like that in the org. There was a strict sense of not diluting the Prime brand with things that members would see value in. The teams got split geographically after I left, and at least from an outside customer’s perspective, the program seems incoherent and inconsistent. I used to pay for a shipping benefit and get some bonus features that were icing on the cake. Now Prime gets applied to items with no shipping guarantees, FireTV hides Prime content, Kindle Lending Library is inundated with garbage, I’m not even sure if there is a Music benefit anymore, and it all costs considerably more, for what I use less of. As others have mentioned, if it wasn’t for the ability to impulse purchase cheap items, I would cancel. eBay, Walmart, Ali Express, and others all have the same crap, the same duplication of listings, basically the same prices, and delivery times are just as random. Amazon is the only one I’ve ever received counterfeit products from.
> There was a strict sense of not diluting the Prime brand with things that members would see value in.
Prime Video was something I didn't ask for. I just wanted Prime shipping. When Video launched, suddenly I was getting charged about 2x as much for no added value, with no chance to opt out.
To make matters worse, since I was being coerced into paying for Video, I decided to try it out. Picked some series I was interested in. Watched seasons 1 and 2. Season 3 had to be rented or purchased separately to my Prime subscription. Similar things happened with other programs as well.
Prime Video has been the flagship of enshittification since launch.
I don't mind some ads, but the other day on Paramount Plus it started to show a 300 second ad for Wegovy (after already seeing several 30s slots for Wegovy play back to back). 300 seconds, that's 5 minutes! I just turned it off (the TV) and gave up at that point, so I don't know if it was the same 30s ad played 10 times or if it was longer "infomercial". Totally ridiculous!
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] thread(Edit -- I see that there will still be an ad-free tier, but it will cost an extra $3 a month. Doesn't affect me anyway, I'm not a Prime subscriber.)
I only watch a few prime series, so my plan will be to only upgrade during months they release new seasons and downgrade as soon as I’m finished.
Not sure where this is coming from. Amazon Prime subscriptions did not decline, they increased slightly over that period [1]:
* 2020 142.5 million
* 2021 151.9 million
* 2022 157.4 million
* 2023 161.7 million
[1] https://backlinko.com/amazon-prime-users
Though, with the impending anti-trust case against Amazon, maybe they're afraid that AWS is going to be split off and they won't be able to subsidize their shipping and logistics any more. Every cent counts and what not.
No thanks.
I had a free shipping Walmart order delivered in two days. So that’s an option too. When companies offer worse products for the same price the market will respond by making the competition more attractive.
I haven't bought anything on Amazon in years. There are better sites and sellers for anything you need.
Walmart.com is good, but avoid any 3rd party sellers -- only buy from Walmart itself. They do not do a good job keeping fraudsters off of their platform.
(Obviously my cancellation wasn't in response to this news, and I hardly ever watched prime video anyway - for me it was the fact that for years Amazon has been getting less and less reliable, more filled with junk and counterfeits, and especially that they've never done anything about the commingling problem that leads to knock off items being kept in the same buckets as official items, such that if you buy for example an iphone charger that is "sold by Apple directly, shipped by Amazon" you might get one genuinely provided by Apple or you might get a dodgy one that pretends to be sold by Apple.)
Was Netflix, for example, expected to be $9.99/month for the rest of our entire lives? That is an insane thing to expect. Yet people always act like it's some great betrayal that, five years later, they need to pay another couple bucks for the same service.
Even if you don't use Prime, don't buy anything on Amazon.com, and don't shop at Whole Foods...you're still guaranteed to be sending money their way, due to how much of the Internet they provide support for with AWS. Visited joesrandomwebsite.cheaptld recently? Well, it's hosted on a service that uses AWS, so most of its ad revenue goes straight to paying Amazon for that.
Yet then, then… we can have tiers. There can be more interesting sponsors and advertisements in the pricier subscription tiers. For the bargain tier, you get the literal 90-120 minute “advertisements” I’m aware exist on YouTube (yes, as ad breaks!) that are basically financial scams. Except on Prime they might be unskippable depending on the device you’re using.
Then Bezos will have so much money he’ll need a second monocle.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/oct/31/emilia-...
This is nothing new. The Wayne's World 2 movie had a fourth-wall bending/breaking scene that made fun of this back in 1993:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne%27s_World_2
I switched over completely. This is on iOS Chrome.
Do you get ads if you watch anything from CNBC? I think that's the only channel I get ads from on my phone.
More often than not I move from one service to the next because the last service got so shitty/annoying/terrible privacy decisions that I jumped ship.
The internet and tech was meant to be a wild west of ideas and options but if it ever was that was a sadly brief period.
Modern-day capitalism optimizes for maximum enshittification, because there isn't enough competition to encourage any other result. Occasionally you'll have a company that does what's "supposed" to happen: provide a generally better product to gain market share against competitors, but that's rare. Pretty quickly they start responding to the same incentives as the incumbents, and enshittify their products too.
Modern technology has also been a double-edge sword. It's provided consumer benefits, but has never really lived up to its potential, because "innovation" frequently means new consumer-hostile uses of the technology (e.g. pervasive communications technology means your car can now provide a middling navigation app; as well as can spy on you, sell your data, and show you ads).
Enshittification hits the sweet spot between big word and escathological humor, and that's probably why it became viral.
The underlying issue is that enshittification is just growth induced entropy. The constant accumulation of half-baked features or user-hostile choices. Every business that is pressured by investors to grow suffers from this. It's the commercial equivalent of old age. It's why the advertising slowly increases everywhere, why Spotify can't just stay a decent app, why each new release of Windows only rearranges the ads and throws in a new version of the control panel.
The cycle is inescapable: * Startup has modicum of success * Success attracts investors/cash * Cash is spent hiring "talent" * The talent has to build SOMETHING * And by definition, half of what the talent produces is BELOW AVERAGE
And so it goes, the mutations increase, the telomeres shorten, and eventually the product ends up in the nursing home wishing it had spent more time just focusing on what was important.
I've already been considering the idea of just buying my media when I want it and see how that compares to my streaming bill. I'm willing to pay for things. I think that's important. I'd just like to make sure I'm getting what I want when I buy in, and the proliferation of services has come with the likelihood that not only will the ones I have not have specific content I'm looking for, some shows aren't available at all, which means I have to buy anyway.
But ads in things I'm already paying for are a new level of problem that are an expression of contempt for both the customer and the product. Streamers: it's not enough that I'm paying you for access to the content you've made or secured a right to so that I can give it my full attention? You also want to actually dilute the value of that by requiring me to divert my attention somewhere else?
That's an outright invitation to media piracy. If you're going to spend your attention on something extraneous to the actual media, the digital literacy skills involved in piracy are more generally useful than an advertisement. Not to mention the satisfaction in sending a message to people who'll erode the value of their own product to bump profit margins.
I might accept a price raise. Lots of streaming was probably underpriced in the first place. Add $25-50 a year to my bill and I'll keep paying for it if the value is there. But subtract from the value and I'll find a substitute.
Waiting for the moment Micro&soft will embed ads into Windows Media Player (is it still called like that?), which stops whatever you are watching/listening for your mandatory 60seconds, hourly ad injection
Rings of Power, proven huge hit?
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/lord-of-the-rings-ratings-r...
The obvious caveat to this being that we don't know how Amazon collect this data or if it's even accurate in any way. Furthermore, even if it has been viewed a lot, that could just be a result of Amazon putting it on the homepage of the app/webpage (which would make it easy to play accidentally) and autoplaying it after finishing other Prime Video content.
Now would be a good time for Walmart to get their sh*t together and dominate.
I thought that years ago: it seemed like orders actually arrived as slowly as they did pre-Prime (e.g. not 2 day shipping), so I canceled Prime and thought there wouldn't be much of a loss. Then my Amazon shipping became even more terrible. Everything was basically no-rush shipping with a $25 minimum order.
So basically, when Prime started, you got better service for an extra fee, and if you didn't pay you got "normal" service. Now you have pay to get "normal" service, and if you don't you get bad service.
I don't mind advertisements because it always felt like a free way to pay people who make content I enjoy.
I was pretty sure this would happen to streaming and here we are.
Originally, all cable channels were ad-free, because you paid for them.
Over time, ads crept in until everything but premium cable became equally infested.
There were several tiers in cable. Over the air channels being retransmitted (mostly with commercials, except PBS) A small number of premium channels led by HBO that were an extra fee. Then "basic channels" a bunch of non premium channels like TBS, ESPN, MTV, USA Network that had ads. Some basic cable channels didn't have ads. Then there were public benefit channels without ads like C-Span, and local public access. But from the earliest days, there were ad supported cable channels.
I brought it up at an all hands with our VP, and IIRC, one of the business guys that I didn’t work with directly interjected and said the offering was “interruption free”. I’m pretty sure that’s not how it was advertised.
At the time most of the organization would call customer-hostile BS like that out, but no one else challenged him on it and I was a lowly IC.
Until I left in 2013, I can’t say there were really any other disappointments like that in the org. There was a strict sense of not diluting the Prime brand with things that members would see value in. The teams got split geographically after I left, and at least from an outside customer’s perspective, the program seems incoherent and inconsistent. I used to pay for a shipping benefit and get some bonus features that were icing on the cake. Now Prime gets applied to items with no shipping guarantees, FireTV hides Prime content, Kindle Lending Library is inundated with garbage, I’m not even sure if there is a Music benefit anymore, and it all costs considerably more, for what I use less of. As others have mentioned, if it wasn’t for the ability to impulse purchase cheap items, I would cancel. eBay, Walmart, Ali Express, and others all have the same crap, the same duplication of listings, basically the same prices, and delivery times are just as random. Amazon is the only one I’ve ever received counterfeit products from.
Prime Video was something I didn't ask for. I just wanted Prime shipping. When Video launched, suddenly I was getting charged about 2x as much for no added value, with no chance to opt out.
To make matters worse, since I was being coerced into paying for Video, I decided to try it out. Picked some series I was interested in. Watched seasons 1 and 2. Season 3 had to be rented or purchased separately to my Prime subscription. Similar things happened with other programs as well.
Prime Video has been the flagship of enshittification since launch.
Has anyone tried using burner accounts with their retail side? (Sign up, buy something. Pick up at locker, delete account, repeat.)
I’d pay a service that offered such a thing, perhaps as perk for renting a post office box.