I only keep it (Prime) for Amazon Prime Video really - there are some videos in the catalogue that I enjoy watching again, and new stuff is generally good.
It's not about 1-day delivery for me, or anything else. And £9.90 will not make any effect on my month expenses, not as much as the energy impact on my household, which doubled in one year.
We need to force companies to be ethical and sustainable. Evil companies hurts everyone except a few who become extremely rich. A first step would be regulating markets where there are less then 5 competitors. A common strategy now is to remove the competition rather then having a better product.
An upside of the latest political turmoil is that it’s shown me how apathetic I’ve become over the last 10-15 years. Having seen tech-bro after tech-bro bend the knee recently, it’s prompted me to take more responsibility in my choices and stop giving money to cowards.
For me any modern service that uses subscription model feels like unnecessary fraudulent scheme. I use bandcamp to buy music, because it's a clear and a straightforward way to do it. Never ever am I going to subscribe to anything, because every day the market comes up with more and more ideas how to mess with you. It's become a really unpleasant experience and it's depressing to see how people simply don't care and just go with everything the marketing guys come up with.
Serious question: how does Bandcamp manage purchases? Are you buying a "license for listening to music" or can you actually download a DRM-free copy etc.?
You can get a ZIP of OGGs if you want. Those will last as least as long as a 2005 DVD rip from Pirate Bay. Feels good.
(You can also stream through their site and app, and I think they have all sorts of social features... but you can ignore the hell out of it and just get tunes for money. Really one of my top 5 sites, Bandcamp, though I wish they were still independent.)
Zip of FLACs even. As space is cheap and abundant (or at least for me, buying only about 6-12 albums / month) that allows me to not worry about transcoding into whatever at some point in the future.
I once bought https://djemynai.bandcamp.com/album/zao. Once is the keyword here, because it allowed me to download the audio files. You are essentially paying for the ability to be able to download, and then you are free to do whatever, just like old times. :D
Indeed, what others have said. Bandcamp files are DRM-free, and they say as much on their site. The only time I use their app to listen is when I'm driving, since the app plays nice with Android Auto, but you can use any capable player you wish. I have probably purchased around 200 albums from there over the years with an average of about $12USD per and discovered TONS of new-to-me artists from there. It is my sole source of music these days and all my purchases are backed up on my home media server in the event Bandcamp shutters its doors or does something ethically stupid.
You get DRM-free copy, and unlimited amount of downloads for the music. In multiple formats, including flac and nowadays quite often 24bit flacs are also available.
In addition to streaming, you can (and should) download the mp3 or flac files. Once you have them, they are yours.
Be warned though, the artist/label can decide for whatever reason to take the music they have listed on the website down, which includes what you’ve purchased, so while it’s rare, it’s possible for things to just disappear, so make sure you download before then.
I just create a tmux session on my proxmox homeserver and copy+paste a command whenever I make purchases. I can paste the command I use tomorrow if anyone likes.
I recently learned that foobar2000 can load the zip files of songs directly without having to unpack them, which is nice.
>think it's a subscription (q: is it monthly or yearly subscription?),
I've heard from a friend that some of his customers complain that his one off cost is more than the monthly subscription of one of his competitors. If you aren't serving consumers you might be surprised by how financially illiterate the average person is.
For desktop software I think JetBrains have the right model here; it's a subscription, but at the end of the year you have a perpetual license to the version from the start of the year.
If I decide I don't want the subscription with updates I can just cancel and fall back to that version.
Otherwise the subscription ensures that there will be a new version coming along and that the users are the customers.
You may want to consider one-time (full price) and optional annual renewal fees (a fraction of the full price, depending on the value/upgrades delivered in the new version). It's then up to the customer to pay an annual fee to get updates or stay on the old version (which may be a pain to support...).
Basically, what you mentioned—' I don't want to pay a full price' and 'try the full functionality out without paying the full price'—are the primary drivers behind customers' preference for a subscription-based model.
> Basically, what you mentioned—' I don't want to pay a full price' and 'try the full functionality out without paying the full price'—are the primary drivers behind customers' preference for a subscription-based model.
Or a third driver, somewhat related to the first two: the customer is simply priced out of the product in question as a one-time payment.
Part of the reason Adobe makes the killing it does off CC is because it's $55/mo and not $500-$600 or whatever. It doesn't require a consumer to have a chunk of money in their bank account all at once just sitting around, which especially in the case of students and art folks is money they may not have.
Yeah, I agree. If I was not a minority, the market would be different.
I don't mind buying major updates for the software I'm using. The issue with software subs is that the moment I stop it, I don't have access to it anymore. But that's not what I want. I want to pay once and be able to use it as long as I want. It should not be different from buying... a bicycle for example. But that's me, as you said.
> It should not be different from buying... a bicycle for example
But a bicycle is a physical object that can't be replicated at no cost. Digital representations of songs can.
A world where music can be purchased once is a world where piracy obliterates that business model. Piracy will unfortunately always be easier than buying the song. You lose the song? You pirate it again. If you buy it, you need log in to some website and download the song. If you lose the creds, you need to reset, log in and download the song. Lost your email account? Now you need to liase with a human on the customer service team. With piracy, the answer is always "just download the file.".
Streaming simplifies this and adds additional functionality that makes it much easier than piracy by allowing you to search for songs easily, suggesting songs to you, letting you make playlists and adding the social element.
Mainstream movies and music are fast food. Made fast and consumed fast. They have a very short shelf life and new songs/movies come out every 2 weeks or so which is an order of magnitude faster than games. Games take longer to play and many have a high replayability factor so you can justify a one off pay.
Essentially you are buying hundreds of hours of experience vs 2 hours of experience watching a movie or 3 minutes listening to a song. And unlike games, movies and songs are literally the same no matter how many times you play them. If you look at games that can be completed in a few hours by casual players, you will see that the pay is extremely low.
> Yeah, I agree. If I was not a minority, the market would be different.
It's more like the market pushed and pushed and pushed until it was close to the only option available and consumers passively forgot that it could and used to be different.
Now everybody is on the quick-buck wagon, and will come with an entire collection of convoluted reasons why it is perfectly normal to have a subscription-based model for everything, especially software.
I generally agree though I have to say - Costco has proven worth it to me and them sticking to DEI recently has made me appreciate them more. I admit though if they were introduced today I'd probably scoff.
I think Spotify is an outlier in a way that Netflix isn't. Spotify doesn't just let you stream music. Spotify:
a) let's you stream music on any device that is desktop/mobile/watch or has a browser. It's frictionless and uptime is as good as it gets based on my more than a decade of continuous use (over 8 hours daily)
b) lets you search for artists directly (search artist, song, lyrics) or indirectly (similarity engine by way of radio or automatic playlist generation)
c) let's you share your listening habits with friends
d) let's you make friend playlists
The top 3 are the killer features and the reason why I would not move to Tidal/Apple Music/bandcamp. None of these services have target those 3 areas anywhere near as good as Spotify has.
While I could see myself buying albums from bandcamp, the lack of advanced music search or recommendation functionality as well as the inability to make playlists is just a deal breaker for me. The days where music listening was just playing an album on a loop are long gone just like the days where listening to music meant exclusively live music. In 2025, music discovery and music tagging (as in making playlists) is part of the music listening experience and any service that does not let me make that is sadly not going to make it.
In addition to this, I feel that due to the way music is experience today but many young people means that music discovery and social sharing needs to be at heart of any service that aims for mass appeal. If your business model does not address social sharing or discovery as part of its listening experience, it is unlikely to succeed in my opinion.
People listening to albums on repeat, people buying single albums, people not sharing their listening habits directly (i.e not by just mentioning the artist/song/album) are the minority. The future of popular music at least short terms leans heavily towards single songs over albums, streaming over downloads, subscription over purchases, social listening over individual listening.
It's like people complaining of the inability of popular artits to project their voices without using amplifiers. Artists complaining about electrical instruments over acoustic ones. The wave is here to stay, you can ride with it or end up at the bottom of it never to be seen again.
>The top 3 are the killer features and the reason why I would not move to Tidal/Apple Music/bandcamp.
For regular people, the #1 reason they can't use Bandcamp is it doesn't have mainstream artists on the Big 3 Record Labels like Universal+Sony+Warner. In contrast, Bandcamp is deliberately designed for the smaller independent artists to upload and sell their music.
If people want to listen to today's Taylor Swift or yesterday's Beatles and Led Zeppelin, that music is only (legally) found on the major subscription services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. A very small hardcore subset buy Big Label artists music from HDTracks but that site doesn't have the selection of Spotify and it's a lot more expensive.
The issue lies in that most honest "independent artists" do want to go mainstream. They don't want to stay "small" (I highly dislike that word). Hence, they go to the place where mainstream music listeners listen to music: spotify.
I would be surprised if most non-techy folks know about bandcamp. Especially, the older generation who are often not very computer literate and will default to the mainstream option (windows for os, gmail/outlook for email, spotify/radio for music, google for search engine, etc).
Young tech-savvy audiophiles, yes. But everyone else, most likely not.
I'd actually wager the opposite. I really doubt young people are going to Bandcamp much. While I know a ton of people over the age of 35 who use Bandcamp to keep up with old bands or friend's bands.
SoundCloud was more popular with younger folks. "SoundCloud rapper".
That could very well be the case. A tiny minority nonetheless.
A small demographic intersection likely made of old millenials and young Gen Xers. Music leaning heavily towards alternative, and away from edm and mainstream.
Oh, man. I get the social thing around these experiences. People nowadays asking me what I watched and the next question is it on Netflix? Yeah, alright. I don't want the life to roll back to old days, I'm completely fine with things going their way.
The problem of subscription world is that it fucks you over in various ways, makes you spend more and more money and attention on stuff you don't really need or need in a much lower scale than your are forced to consume. It's a much deeper and bigger problem than just the social aspect or the aspect of convenience.
And you simply don't own anything. It's like renting an apartment/house for life instead of buying one. And your rent service can be shut down at any time. I'm just not ok with this. It may be fine with young people, but the moment you start taking life seriously it becomes obvious how wrong everything is.
I agree with you on "makes you spend more and more money and attention on stuff you don't really need" but sadly this is just sometimes we have to live with and learn to control on our own or with the help of the market. Is like junk food or any other byproducts of capitalism that might not be good for us. They are not going away. We have to learn to live with them (more self-control, regulation to make it less addictive, reducing usage). As with other things capitalism, eventually an industry will grow to tackle this, it will be like Ozempic but for people with short attention spans low self-control.
Regarding your "you simply don't own anything". Leaving aside the financial aspect of it, this is a purely philosophical matter. You could say that owning and streaming are means to experiences. You have more individual control over one than the other. But at the end of the day, for most people, not being able to have a say on whether they can access a given movie or song is not a big deal. Mass media is mostly a commodity. And especifically a commodity they are happy to pay someone else to manage. Sure, a pop artist might remove her music but there is thousands of other pop artists there. You can replace pop for any niche style you might fancy. If you are one of those who finds a specific media artifact not a commodity, then you have the ability to acquire and preserve a copy of that artifact. That carries its own problems of course (loss, corruption, access issues, reliability, etc).
In the age of internet, if Spotify collapses, a competitor will fill the market with pretty much the same functionality. Makes no difference to you. A company removing a song or a movie from your service means you have to search for it in the bay of the pirates instead of your favourite streaming service. Either way, you will have access to it.
When folks talk about owning your email server or having your own customised OS. Most people are not interest in the benefits that the ownership entails and are happy to pay directly or indirectly for a third party to manage it for them. The things people care about are the same as 2000 years ago. Their friends, their family, their love life, their work. The consequences of ownership of media ranks very low in the vast majority of the population.
Ownership is a pretty practical and obvious thing. It is either mine to use/do whatever I want with it or it is not. Whether it's a car or a piece of media. So I can't agree with you here. Yeah, a vinyl is much less important than an apartment, but it doesn't change the concept of owning something.
As for the rest. The issue I see with the subscription approach is exactly what you described. People start getting used to it in other domains other than media consumption. Like cars for example, car brands introducing subs to enable your seat warmers or whatever that technically is already there, but for you to use it you have to subscribe. It's a matter of time this starts spread everywhere. And when it does there will be people who will come up with a number or reasons why it is actually fine and everybody should just go with it.
>Ownership is a pretty practical and obvious thing. It is either mine to use/do whatever I want with it or it is not.
You're repeating this benefit -- and it is an undeniable benefit -- but the other issue you're not giving any weight is that other people have other priorities that can be more important than ownership -- such as a finite amount of money to spend.
Of course, ownership is wonderful -- IF it doesn't cost more, and IF it doesn't cause more inconvenience, an IF it's even available. In other words, the concept of ownership can't be considered only in isolation.
I know all about ownership as I have over 2000 CDs that I legally purchased and ripped losslessly to FLAC files using custom scripts. Would I recommend "music ownership" like that to most others who have a casual relationship with music? No. The Spotify subscription with access to 100 million songs is much cheaper and a better financial deal for most regular listeners than buying individual CDs or individual songs at 99 cents at a time from the iTunes store.
Does my 4TB harddrive of full of *.flac files that I own let me "do whatever I want with it?!?" Well... it's not a simple "yes". E.g. My friend's music streaming subscription lets her instantly load up any of the 100 million songs to listen at the gym. On the other hand, my iPhone doesn't have access to my entire music library because it only has 256 GB of space. I guess I could somewhat duplicate the "streaming" aspect if I go through the trouble to set up some Plex media server with a vpn TailScale or Cloudflare Tunnel back to my home computer. But now I get into the realm of "my music CDs owning me" instead of the other way around. I have paid over $20k in music CDs ownership to have less convenience and usability. So others paying $11.99/month for more music than my personal library with more convenience to play on any device doesn't seem so ridiculous.
But can't Spotify raise the subscription from $11.99 to $13.99 on a whim? And can't they remove Taylor Swift from their catalog without warning because of a licensing dispute?!? All true. But those negatives are outweighed by the positives of cheaper price, more music, more convenience.
Ownership is not the be-all-end-all. It's only one aspect of experiencing music.
I have conflicted feelings about all the money I spent on owning CDs and vinyl records. But then again, I didn't consider other options as I did all that ripping 20 years ago before the existence of Spotify and mobile phones.
I get your point in a way. If we get into details of owning different stuff, then yeah, there are pros and cons of this and that.
Btw, I actually set up a server using Raspberry Pi with 1TB of storage for my music collection to be able to access it from anywhere. Funny that you mentioned exactly this case.
Can I ask why you wouldn't use a cloud provider for that? Just curious. If I had a music collection, I would have set up similar to yours along with a linked service to constantly review global trends and check new music that I might like as about 20-60% of the music I listen every week is new relative to previous weeks
I'm not a heavy listener. Most of the time I prefer silence. So I just wanted my music to be accessible when I need it.
As for the recommendations, occasionally I listen to the bandcamp feed. Not even sure if it's based on my followings. And before that I was using one specific forum to learn about new stuff. It's not there anymore. And I don't like the idea of algorithms telling me what to listen to.
The way I see it is like this: a lot of media is like books. People mostly use them to read once and that's it. So there is no difference between buying a book or taking a copy from the library. If you are planning on doing more than that, then ownership benefits might be more relevant. Yes, if you buy a book you can do whatever you want but will you actually do anything other than reading the book? For most people, when it comes to mass media, the answer is a resounding no. Unused freedom is closer to a concept than a tangible thing for most people and paying for that is like paying for vaporware in that sense.
If you were a writer, then books might be different to you. Or if you were a record collector, records might be a different.
Yes, it becomes problematic when people apply that attitude everywhere but sadly it is likely where we are heading with all the consequences it will carry. Most people are addicted to convenience and will sell everything to attain it
> For me any modern service that uses subscription model feels like unnecessary fraudulent scheme.
I actually think the incentives are aligned better with a subscription than with a one-off sale. With a subscription, the companies have to work to keep you a member. (Having said that, I still prefer open source software or commodity services since I don't like being rugpulled.)
I commend this viewpoint, but it is just untenable for me.
How much media do you consume? I can’t imagine paying “retail” price for the amount of TV, movies, songs, etc. that my household consumes. Not even factoring in that I share my subscriptions with out-of-house family/friends. You get a couple of months of streaming for price cost of one season of one relatively recent show. For the price of one movie ticket for one person, you get at least one month of a subscription to Disney+.
And while there _is_ a lot of content that we repeat (especially songs), most of it we don’t, so I don’t care to have my own copy of it.
Sure there are many ways to find it cheaper or free (such as a library), but those all take up valuable time.
> Second, for a lot of things you want to order, the manufacturer has its own online store these days and a lot of them are actually well-built, perfectly pleasant to use.
Which in my experience are ALL a combination of:
- More expensive,
- Very long shipping times,
- Paid shipping which removes the benefit of the lower price in the rare event they do exist,
- Abysmal customer guarantees and return policies.
I think the rest of the article is good but frankly there just isn't a real alternative to Amazon.
I left Amazon years ago because of endless counterfeit stuff, poor search, and prices that aren't actually better than you can get elsewhere. The fast delivery was not reliably fast anyway, and I can wait an extra day for things. I'm not usually in that much of a rush.
I have not found buying things from other places to be worse in general. Often cheaper, delivery is fine, and more confidence I'm getting the actual thing I wanted.
The only thing Amazon does better is simply that it's a one stop shop for almost everything. But given the other downsides, that is not enough.
EDIT: Also, the dark patterns they deploy to try to make people sign up to Prime makes me sick.
> Emotional? · Amazon is an US corporation and the US is now hostile to Canada, repeatedly threatening to annex us. So I’m routing my shopping dollars away from there generally and to Canadian suppliers specifically. Dumping Prime is an easy way to help that along. ¶
The more I use the Amazon, the sketchier it feels. I was misguided and spent the last year buying way too many niche things and was invited into their Amazon Vine program. I got a tax bill I can't actually afford but opted to put it on my credit card rather than a loan situation because I don't trust our institutions now that DOGE is pillaging IRS data.
Edit: Right, done being discouraged from feeling like an equal participant on a gamified karma platform run by startup jerks.
>Second, for a lot of things you want to order, the manufacturer has its own online store these days and a lot of them are actually well-built, perfectly pleasant to use.
It depends on what you buy but in general, the manufacturer's website will often cost more than Amazon. E.g. In the USA, Apple Watch 46mm GPS+Cellular is currently $429 on amazon.com but $529 on apple.com
Also, manufacturers are often contractually required to have higher prices (i.e. MSRP) than the retailers that sell their products. So getting a discount from Amazon is more realistic than the manufacturer's official website. Another example is buying TurboTax software on Amazon ($55.99) costs less than Intuit's website ($80)
>Third, Amazon’s prices aren’t notably cheaper than the alternatives.
Again, it depends on what types of products you're buying. For things like USB cables and rechargeable batteries, Amazon costs less than Best Buy. Buying a Fiskars garden shears cost $10 less at Amazon than Home Depot and Lowe's. What's happening is that those local stores are using price discrimination to upcharge the impatient walk-in customers who need "instant gratification". Home Depot charges $5 more for a toilet plumbing repair kit than Amazon because they know customers are likely making an emergency purchase. Yes, the local stores sometimes have a "match Amazon's price" policy but it's a hassle to hunt down a manager and get an override of the price at the cash register.
Where Amazon often costs more (often 2x because of shipping) is commodity household items like toothpaste and Windex glass cleaner. A local Walmart will have cheaper prices on those.
Lastly, I recently went through my 200+ accounts in my password manager to migrate my email address and the lesson I've learned is to avoid creating new accounts at more ecommerce websites. It's not worth it. Maybe I'll make an exception for Shopify in the future because a lot of sellers have consolidated there but I'm going to hold out as long as I can.
I really like having my orders history in one website instead of scattered across Newegg, ZipZoomFly, BHPhotoVideo, etc, etc.
>It depends on what you buy but in general, the manufacturer's website will often cost more than Amazon. E.g. In the USA, Apple Watch 46mm GPS+Cellular is currently $429 on amazon.com but $529 on apple.com
This pretty much, I do not buy from Amazon because of the experience but because of price. Like you said very often Amazon is significantly cheaper than local stores here in Europe, like I was buying woodworking tools and I could get same tool, same manufacturer warranty for 20 percent less. Apple devices cost even more than official Apple store in my country because Apple does have a first party store, meanwhile Amazon has below MSRP prices always. The only downside is that they dont have customization options.
Different experience here in Germany. Amazon is often 2-10% more expensive than cheaper alternatives on most goods (just check a random product on idealo.de). People are still buying at Amazon, frequently citing the "hassle-free returns" experience. I'm satisfied with the alternatives (no issues with returns so far) and rarely use Amazon. Also, most shops have guest checkout, no need to open an account on all of them.
I don't think Amazon's return policy is matched by anyone in my country. I dread even thinking of purchasing something and make use of the warranty, it's usually a pointless exercise that deprives you of your purchase for months.
Compare that to Amazon that will easily refund a purchase made 18 months earlier no questions asked.
I almost never buy from Amazon, but there's no denying I feel much safer ordering there than elsewhere. My last expensive non-Amazon purchase got me an opened box (either a return or plain used item). Even PayPal didn't care to do anything about it.
You don't need Amazon's return policy if the country has decent pro-consumer laws. In Netherlands, for example, you can return an item purchased online. For that you need to notify the seller within 14 days of receipt and then send it back within next 14 days.
Amazon -> 30-day return policy, they cover shipping costs, no questions asked, doesn't matter how much you used the item.
Law -> 14-day return policy, you pay for shipping, the shop will make it as difficult as possible to let you return the item (even if it's illegal), they don't have to take the item if you opened it (which makes no sense - how do I know I don't want it if I can't try it?)
Oh yes you definitely have rights, but also you have to make sure they're not infringed. They could easily just say "you damaged the box" or, very commonly, withhold shipping fees as well as making you pay for that shipment. So for no fault of your own, you're 15€ down on a 50€ product.
Hell even Apple has been fined by Italy for not properly disclosing that customers have 2 years warranty from the seller. I even had to tell customer service about it just last year, who acted like they didn't even know.
Your mileage may vary. I've had horrible experience with German shops, when you have an issue they do whatever to make it look like it's your own fault. And you can only call them or send them snail mail, which is still quite common.
Amazon has their chat, which replies immediately and you get your money back pretty easily.
> I've had horrible experience with German shops, when you have an issue they do whatever to make it look like it's your own fault.
That's just the usual experience of German customer service. The consumer is expected to quote the relevant paragraphs to explain customer service why they need to cover cost of return shipping or whatever and they will fight you every step of the way (or try to ignore you). It seems to be a cultural thing.
Edit: and what makes this so annoying is that I really want to be a nice guy for the customer service, not an asshole. And when they treat me like this, I turn into a monster and I'm not happy about it.
Both of those stores price match Amazon unless the item is not fulfilled by them (and could be counterfeit)
It also depends on the items you're buying. Household goods, like laundry detergent and deodorant, are usually more expensive on Amazon, sometimes by a wide margin.
The whole market is one big price discrimination where you spend time to avoid getting ripped off by shameless decoy prices. I haven't noticed Amazon being routinely less for any category. It is generally more for household items, but that still isn't a hard rule. If you're not shopping around, you've already lost - most other large retailers have free shipping as well, and frankly it's often quicker than Amazon's slow spiteful shipping.
Really I want some user-representing local-first software that searches many stores with one query. Of course these sites fight tooth and nail to make that comparison harder (the main point of captchas). Still maybe we'll get there as the surveillance industry enters its screw-turning extractive phase.
As for (sub)Prime, it still boggles my mind that people pay for it as an ongoing subscription. I activate the free trials when they're conducive to some other goal (eg fixing/making something that's going to require a bunch of iterated rounds of parts). Between my account, my partner's account, and my "business" account (more price discrimination, hooray!), I'd say there's a free trial more than half the time. And the once or twice a year I need something quick and don't have a trial, there's always the $2 for one week option.
(Also, I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread - one of the "economic blackout" flyers has March 7-14 as Amazon-specific boycott. I don't think this kind of thing is going to move the needle on overall revenue any time soon, but rather it's about sending some kind of message to the neofascists and those who readily support them. Frankly we need many more of these days. And if that seems inconvenient, look at it as practice for when we're back to full blown Trumponomics with empty store shelves everywhere)
This was a timely reminder for me to cancel it too, for pretty much all the same reasons. But also primarily because the content on Prime Video is like the clearance bucket in a closing down Blockbusters and then they had the brass neck to put adverts in something I'm already paying for.
Bray says he doesn't think amazon is any more objectionable than is mandated by capitalism. Perhaps he's right. But their participation in the genocide in Gaza should be objectionable by any definition. It's clear that Israel would not have been able to completely destroy Gaza and kill probably [1] 100,000s of people without the cloud tools provided by Amazon (and Google and Microsoft) [2]
[1] Numbers you've heard like 40,000, reflect only the absolute minimum number of people killed directly by Israel, and not those killed indirectly (running out of insulin, starving, etc). https://data.techforpalestine.org/updates/gaza-ministry-casu...
So Amazon Prime never really made sense here as it really didn't do anything for shipping, but you could watch the Fallout show. Amazon it self, the e-commerce site, is sadly determined to destroy itself.
Stuff isn't cheaper on Amazon, shipping is expensive as hell, delivery times is in weeks, not day, and the risk of getting scammed is up with about something like 800%. Much easier to just order from a local store, pay a little extra for the item, but less for shipping, and be sure that you get what you order.
I have been buying direct from manufacturers for a few years now.
Sure I don’t get it in 1 day. The common carriers are a hit or miss (FedEx straight up doesn’t deliver on weekends).
Sure, I may pay more. I’ll tank the cost if it’s a quality item.
Sure, shipping isn’t “free” and return shipping may have a cost. But as I have learned, free shipping and returns is usually built into the cost when most people may not use it.
I dropped Amazon a long time ago when:
1) free two-day delivery no longer came in two days
2) I ended up with two counterfeit Vince shirts. They were honestly well-made but the fabric and some stitching was wrong.
3) when there was an eclipse (not the most recent one but the one where Trump was watching it without protection) some people were blinded by using counterfeit eye protection bought from Amazon
It’s safer to buy direct than going through Amazon.
Same here, I live in the UK and I will not renew my membership. I have about 1.5 T worth of photos store for "free" on Amazon Photos and it was an absolute pain to reclaim possession of those files but, now that I am nearly done, I think it is time to spend locally and stop funnelling money to big tech for a false sense of convenience.
This is why some people are turning to piracy for a more pleasant experience. It reminds me of when DVD producers started using unskippable intros to their DVDs - it's basically being hostile to the customers.
I have a Beelink n100 device running linux. These lil beelinks are great devices. They can be picked up for ~$140. Then i just keep a look out for cheap 10+tb datacenter drives. For example, I snagged a 12tb one for $75 the other day. Toss those into my raid array.
I self host plex, web servers, samba, etc. Right now I have ~100tb of space. I even self-host a great google images alternative called Immich.
I use a private torrent tracker and usenet to acquire most of my media. I do those because they're just so easy. It's pretty rare I can't find something within a minute or two.
If there is a legal way of obtaining a real copy of media I'll usually do that. Most of my music library is legal, purchased directly from artists, bandcamp or soundcloud.
I also have 2gb fiber internet which is helpful in all this. I wouldn't be able to get away with some of the stuff without the upload bandwidth of fiber.
There's also the issue of older stuff not always being available on streaming sites - IIRC 28 Days Later wasn't available until the new film made it popular enough). Similarly, the BBC Oppenheimer series didn't get put onto their iPlayer service until 2023.
Yup! There are a ton of great movies that aren't available on streaming services for really dumb reasons, such as music copyright issues or the artist had a disagreement with a distribution company.
I've cancelled and resubscribed a few times. I do the same with Netflix, Apple TV, and a few others. Account hopping is a good way to save money. I don't have a lot of time so I don't want to have a lot of active subscriptions I'm under-using.
I don't think I order enough stuff via them to make the "free" deliveries really valuable to me (it varies from month to month). But I like the convenience of having just one place to order stuff.
Amazon Prime's video offerings are limited but they have a few nice things. I liked the Bosch series. I didn't mind the rings of power thing though it was a bit long winded. I guess if you are a Tolkien nerd, it might be a bit offensive to deal with all the creative liberties the plot takes.
They also have some alright movies; including some recent block busters. And there are some older classics.
The UI and search are a bit garbage indeed. They do a poor job of exposing the content they actually have. Unless you actively hunt for stuff, you could be missing out.
Also, I should mention I watch Amazon Prime via Firefox, which is really effective at blocking the ads they are now injecting. If they "break" that, I'd be more likely to cancel.
Shipping times for vast majority of orders I've placed with Amazon in the past two - three years without an Amazon Prime subscription vary between 2 - 3 days. I don't need Amazon photos/music/video/audible, so there's really little value on that subscription tax for me.
The only real downside is that I can't put in a $0.50 order without a shipping fee, I need a $25 minimum order for free shipping.
Figuratively, some of Mr. Bezos's famed Two Pizza Teams seem to be throwing their pizza crust ends at The Customer's Chair.
(Incidentally, I think that line should let me skip the hiring screen Leadership Principles made-up anecdote STAR recital. :)
I make a lot of personal decisions on-principle, but Amazon is too essential for me to boycott it.
I also tolerate a number of practical non-customer-focused qualities of the company, of late, because of remaining utility.
Overall, I like that I have use of Amazon, even though in some ways it's not as good as it used to be, and there are obvious ways it could improve customer focus but doesn't seem like it's going to.
Though, I did cancel Amazon Prime awhile ago. The final nudge was that Prime Video seemed to be getting conspicuously customer-hostile, though I'd come to consider Prime Video to be part of the value for which I was paying. Also, Amazon no longer seemed to be taking 2-day shipping as seriously as they used to.
A side effect of canceling Prime is that I recently stopped using my Amazon credit card. Since I'm no longer getting 5% rewards at Amazon and WFM, my non-Amazon 2% cash rewards card is close enough. The last nudge was Chase switching to eight-unhyphenated-digits SMS 2FA, every time I checked my statement. It was a tiniest little customer-unfocused thing, but it annoyed me enough in the moment, on top of ongoing mixed feelings, to energize me to go to the trouble of switching.
Another side effect of canceling Prime is that I've been buying a lot less there, because I wait for $35+ orders, to get the free slow shipping, with the effect that I often end up buying the items elsewhere or not at all.
(Incidentally, Walmart.com had a chance tonight, to get more of my business, since I hate-hate-hate that Amazon commingles product with questionable third-party sellers. But Walmart.com's product search was was no longer filtering by "Retailer" like it used to, which led me to Web search and learn of a potential problem with their supply chain integrity in general, and I really didn't want to be spraying third-party-sourced counterfeit/returned/shoplifted Flonase up my nose.)
We’re getting to the point where that might not be a safe assumption… my purchase history goes back 19 years… you could have a 25 year old on here who doesn’t really remember pre Amazon
> If they can't figure out an alternative, that says a lot about their lack of critical thinking skills, and that's a problem.
I'm with you on the value of critical thinking skills.
But, before using this thread to call out anyone for a perceived lack of critical thinking skills, maybe first make a compelling argument that it's worth their time to even determine whether Amazon is "essential" rather than "convenient".
I suspect that you arrived to the thread with a belief that there's something like a moral imperative not to use Amazon. But you didn't articulate an argument for that, and it wasn't otherwise established in this context. So maybe that's why I think your approach in this thread was a bit aggressive or rough. Which is disincentive to invest critical thinking energy into the thread.
> I suspect that you arrived to the thread with a belief that there's something like a moral imperative not to use Amazon. But you didn't articulate an argument for that,
Was it not you above that said you make a lot of decisions on principal, but find Amazon too efficient to not use?
Is that not implying you see moral issues, but decide to use them anyway? If so, is it not fair to then question to what extent by efficient you really mean convenient?
I'm not interested in trying to argue a moral imperative here. People that don't see an issue are not going to be convinced by my arguments that I definitely would not be investing a lot of time in.
I am interested in questioning peoples given reasoning as to why they keep using it when they see a moral issue with doing so, though.
> So maybe that's why I think your approach in this thread was a bit aggressive or rough.
I don't think I was aggressive or rough on any individual. My above comment you quote is against an unnamed abstract group, and I wasn't rude or aggressive in my reply to anyone else by my view - I just asked a simple question.
In my country at least Amazon delivery drivers are the only reliable and trustworthy ones, they call when they can't get in the building, they never pretend to deliver something, they never pretend you were not in they deliver fast and reliably, you can get it delivered to lots of stores if you know you wont be in and Amazon customer service actually sorts it out and dispatches replacements fast in the rare cases it does go wrong or and its next day.
Any other delivery service just causes way more stress.
Feel like this article is downplaying which was the real reason because it's definitely only one of the three things listed and we can rule out ethics if you happily used it for decades you didn't suddenly start caring about that out of nowhere.
Same here in London. I've ordered items from Amazon even if they are more expensive there, because I know it'll be delivered. Random storefronts relying on Royal Mail or who knows what delivery service just can't compete and waste my time.
This one depends a ton on where you live though. I'm in the Midlands and we have parcels go missing and ending up at neighbours houses down the road probably 30% of the time. Royal Mail and Evri are bizarrely the most consistent. Our house is not difficult to find.
I found when we lived in a flat it was a total write off, things never went in the right place.
fedex (home delivery) is the worst. Ordered some shelves and found them dropped in front of the bushes of the neighbors.
It's hard to tell who's responsible though, it's like shell corporations all the way down. I remember talking to one delivery driver and even though the van said their name, they were a private contractor and the van wasn't owned by the company.
Prime never made sense to me in Sweden because I've been getting packages within 1-2 work days for years already. And I prefer having them delivered to a drop off station like a bluetooth controlled locker, or a pick-up point in a local store.
Our system here has worked for many years and I much prefer it over people leaving packages at my doorstep.
I agree. We also have a lot of other last-mile services delivering home as well, though I never use them if it can be avoided since they routinely abuse their employees.
I went through all my US based SAAS subscriptions yesterday and only found EU replacements for some of them. But I will continue to do so for the coming years.
I was also saving money for a family trip to the US in the coming years, but my kids now want to go to Australia instead as they hate everything about the current administration’s rhetoric.
> I think the pressures of 21st-century capitalism have put every large company into a place where they really can’t afford to be ethical or the financial sector will rip them to shreds then replace the CEO someone who will maximize shareholder return at all costs, without any of that amateurish “ethics” stuff.
> I think the pressures of 21st-century capitalism have put every large company into a place where they really can’t afford to be ethical or the financial sector will rip them to shreds then replace the CEO someone who will maximize shareholder return at all costs
How do you explain companies like Costco? They treat their customers and employees very well. I am sure there are many others we could name, but I think Costco is a great example. They also have a maximum profit margin on all products.
Please name some others that are similar in size to Costco. I would love to live in a world where there were more businesses like it, but it my experience it really does seem unique.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadIt's not about 1-day delivery for me, or anything else. And £9.90 will not make any effect on my month expenses, not as much as the energy impact on my household, which doubled in one year.
- Good Omens
- The Expanse
Not for everyone, but I enjoyed:
- The Wheel of Time
- The Peripheral
- On Call
- The Boys
- The Rig
- Gen V
- The Power
- Night Sky
- Paper Girls
- The Rings of Power
- Bosch
- Outer Range
- The English
Apparently, they now own James Bond, as well: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2025/02/21/troubletown-u-...
(You can also stream through their site and app, and I think they have all sorts of social features... but you can ignore the hell out of it and just get tunes for money. Really one of my top 5 sites, Bandcamp, though I wish they were still independent.)
Be warned though, the artist/label can decide for whatever reason to take the music they have listed on the website down, which includes what you’ve purchased, so while it’s rare, it’s possible for things to just disappear, so make sure you download before then.
The tool I use is: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader
I just create a tmux session on my proxmox homeserver and copy+paste a command whenever I make purchases. I can paste the command I use tomorrow if anyone likes.
I recently learned that foobar2000 can load the zip files of songs directly without having to unpack them, which is nice.
- think it's a subscription (q: is it monthly or yearly subscription?),
- would prefer it be a subscription (q: I don't want to pay a full price of I don't know if I will use it for life),
- or sometimes demand a subscription so that they can try the full functionality out without paying the full price
And then there are those who pay one-time and are angry they don't get all newest upgrades for free.
My next product will be a subscription for sure.
I've heard from a friend that some of his customers complain that his one off cost is more than the monthly subscription of one of his competitors. If you aren't serving consumers you might be surprised by how financially illiterate the average person is.
If I decide I don't want the subscription with updates I can just cancel and fall back to that version.
Otherwise the subscription ensures that there will be a new version coming along and that the users are the customers.
It feels fair to me as a customer.
Basically, what you mentioned—' I don't want to pay a full price' and 'try the full functionality out without paying the full price'—are the primary drivers behind customers' preference for a subscription-based model.
Or a third driver, somewhat related to the first two: the customer is simply priced out of the product in question as a one-time payment.
Part of the reason Adobe makes the killing it does off CC is because it's $55/mo and not $500-$600 or whatever. It doesn't require a consumer to have a chunk of money in their bank account all at once just sitting around, which especially in the case of students and art folks is money they may not have.
I don't mind buying major updates for the software I'm using. The issue with software subs is that the moment I stop it, I don't have access to it anymore. But that's not what I want. I want to pay once and be able to use it as long as I want. It should not be different from buying... a bicycle for example. But that's me, as you said.
But a bicycle is a physical object that can't be replicated at no cost. Digital representations of songs can.
A world where music can be purchased once is a world where piracy obliterates that business model. Piracy will unfortunately always be easier than buying the song. You lose the song? You pirate it again. If you buy it, you need log in to some website and download the song. If you lose the creds, you need to reset, log in and download the song. Lost your email account? Now you need to liase with a human on the customer service team. With piracy, the answer is always "just download the file.".
Streaming simplifies this and adds additional functionality that makes it much easier than piracy by allowing you to search for songs easily, suggesting songs to you, letting you make playlists and adding the social element.
Mainstream movies and music are fast food. Made fast and consumed fast. They have a very short shelf life and new songs/movies come out every 2 weeks or so which is an order of magnitude faster than games. Games take longer to play and many have a high replayability factor so you can justify a one off pay.
Essentially you are buying hundreds of hours of experience vs 2 hours of experience watching a movie or 3 minutes listening to a song. And unlike games, movies and songs are literally the same no matter how many times you play them. If you look at games that can be completed in a few hours by casual players, you will see that the pay is extremely low.
It's more like the market pushed and pushed and pushed until it was close to the only option available and consumers passively forgot that it could and used to be different.
Now everybody is on the quick-buck wagon, and will come with an entire collection of convoluted reasons why it is perfectly normal to have a subscription-based model for everything, especially software.
a) let's you stream music on any device that is desktop/mobile/watch or has a browser. It's frictionless and uptime is as good as it gets based on my more than a decade of continuous use (over 8 hours daily)
b) lets you search for artists directly (search artist, song, lyrics) or indirectly (similarity engine by way of radio or automatic playlist generation)
c) let's you share your listening habits with friends
d) let's you make friend playlists
The top 3 are the killer features and the reason why I would not move to Tidal/Apple Music/bandcamp. None of these services have target those 3 areas anywhere near as good as Spotify has.
While I could see myself buying albums from bandcamp, the lack of advanced music search or recommendation functionality as well as the inability to make playlists is just a deal breaker for me. The days where music listening was just playing an album on a loop are long gone just like the days where listening to music meant exclusively live music. In 2025, music discovery and music tagging (as in making playlists) is part of the music listening experience and any service that does not let me make that is sadly not going to make it.
In addition to this, I feel that due to the way music is experience today but many young people means that music discovery and social sharing needs to be at heart of any service that aims for mass appeal. If your business model does not address social sharing or discovery as part of its listening experience, it is unlikely to succeed in my opinion.
People listening to albums on repeat, people buying single albums, people not sharing their listening habits directly (i.e not by just mentioning the artist/song/album) are the minority. The future of popular music at least short terms leans heavily towards single songs over albums, streaming over downloads, subscription over purchases, social listening over individual listening.
It's like people complaining of the inability of popular artits to project their voices without using amplifiers. Artists complaining about electrical instruments over acoustic ones. The wave is here to stay, you can ride with it or end up at the bottom of it never to be seen again.
For regular people, the #1 reason they can't use Bandcamp is it doesn't have mainstream artists on the Big 3 Record Labels like Universal+Sony+Warner. In contrast, Bandcamp is deliberately designed for the smaller independent artists to upload and sell their music.
If people want to listen to today's Taylor Swift or yesterday's Beatles and Led Zeppelin, that music is only (legally) found on the major subscription services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. A very small hardcore subset buy Big Label artists music from HDTracks but that site doesn't have the selection of Spotify and it's a lot more expensive.
I would be surprised if most non-techy folks know about bandcamp. Especially, the older generation who are often not very computer literate and will default to the mainstream option (windows for os, gmail/outlook for email, spotify/radio for music, google for search engine, etc).
Young tech-savvy audiophiles, yes. But everyone else, most likely not.
SoundCloud was more popular with younger folks. "SoundCloud rapper".
A small demographic intersection likely made of old millenials and young Gen Xers. Music leaning heavily towards alternative, and away from edm and mainstream.
All sales go straight to the artists today. Bandcamp takes no cut.
The problem of subscription world is that it fucks you over in various ways, makes you spend more and more money and attention on stuff you don't really need or need in a much lower scale than your are forced to consume. It's a much deeper and bigger problem than just the social aspect or the aspect of convenience.
And you simply don't own anything. It's like renting an apartment/house for life instead of buying one. And your rent service can be shut down at any time. I'm just not ok with this. It may be fine with young people, but the moment you start taking life seriously it becomes obvious how wrong everything is.
Regarding your "you simply don't own anything". Leaving aside the financial aspect of it, this is a purely philosophical matter. You could say that owning and streaming are means to experiences. You have more individual control over one than the other. But at the end of the day, for most people, not being able to have a say on whether they can access a given movie or song is not a big deal. Mass media is mostly a commodity. And especifically a commodity they are happy to pay someone else to manage. Sure, a pop artist might remove her music but there is thousands of other pop artists there. You can replace pop for any niche style you might fancy. If you are one of those who finds a specific media artifact not a commodity, then you have the ability to acquire and preserve a copy of that artifact. That carries its own problems of course (loss, corruption, access issues, reliability, etc).
In the age of internet, if Spotify collapses, a competitor will fill the market with pretty much the same functionality. Makes no difference to you. A company removing a song or a movie from your service means you have to search for it in the bay of the pirates instead of your favourite streaming service. Either way, you will have access to it.
When folks talk about owning your email server or having your own customised OS. Most people are not interest in the benefits that the ownership entails and are happy to pay directly or indirectly for a third party to manage it for them. The things people care about are the same as 2000 years ago. Their friends, their family, their love life, their work. The consequences of ownership of media ranks very low in the vast majority of the population.
As for the rest. The issue I see with the subscription approach is exactly what you described. People start getting used to it in other domains other than media consumption. Like cars for example, car brands introducing subs to enable your seat warmers or whatever that technically is already there, but for you to use it you have to subscribe. It's a matter of time this starts spread everywhere. And when it does there will be people who will come up with a number or reasons why it is actually fine and everybody should just go with it.
You're repeating this benefit -- and it is an undeniable benefit -- but the other issue you're not giving any weight is that other people have other priorities that can be more important than ownership -- such as a finite amount of money to spend.
Of course, ownership is wonderful -- IF it doesn't cost more, and IF it doesn't cause more inconvenience, an IF it's even available. In other words, the concept of ownership can't be considered only in isolation.
I know all about ownership as I have over 2000 CDs that I legally purchased and ripped losslessly to FLAC files using custom scripts. Would I recommend "music ownership" like that to most others who have a casual relationship with music? No. The Spotify subscription with access to 100 million songs is much cheaper and a better financial deal for most regular listeners than buying individual CDs or individual songs at 99 cents at a time from the iTunes store.
Does my 4TB harddrive of full of *.flac files that I own let me "do whatever I want with it?!?" Well... it's not a simple "yes". E.g. My friend's music streaming subscription lets her instantly load up any of the 100 million songs to listen at the gym. On the other hand, my iPhone doesn't have access to my entire music library because it only has 256 GB of space. I guess I could somewhat duplicate the "streaming" aspect if I go through the trouble to set up some Plex media server with a vpn TailScale or Cloudflare Tunnel back to my home computer. But now I get into the realm of "my music CDs owning me" instead of the other way around. I have paid over $20k in music CDs ownership to have less convenience and usability. So others paying $11.99/month for more music than my personal library with more convenience to play on any device doesn't seem so ridiculous.
But can't Spotify raise the subscription from $11.99 to $13.99 on a whim? And can't they remove Taylor Swift from their catalog without warning because of a licensing dispute?!? All true. But those negatives are outweighed by the positives of cheaper price, more music, more convenience.
Ownership is not the be-all-end-all. It's only one aspect of experiencing music.
I have conflicted feelings about all the money I spent on owning CDs and vinyl records. But then again, I didn't consider other options as I did all that ripping 20 years ago before the existence of Spotify and mobile phones.
Btw, I actually set up a server using Raspberry Pi with 1TB of storage for my music collection to be able to access it from anywhere. Funny that you mentioned exactly this case.
As for the recommendations, occasionally I listen to the bandcamp feed. Not even sure if it's based on my followings. And before that I was using one specific forum to learn about new stuff. It's not there anymore. And I don't like the idea of algorithms telling me what to listen to.
If you were a writer, then books might be different to you. Or if you were a record collector, records might be a different.
Yes, it becomes problematic when people apply that attitude everywhere but sadly it is likely where we are heading with all the consequences it will carry. Most people are addicted to convenience and will sell everything to attain it
I actually think the incentives are aligned better with a subscription than with a one-off sale. With a subscription, the companies have to work to keep you a member. (Having said that, I still prefer open source software or commodity services since I don't like being rugpulled.)
Which in my experience are ALL a combination of:
- More expensive,
- Very long shipping times,
- Paid shipping which removes the benefit of the lower price in the rare event they do exist,
- Abysmal customer guarantees and return policies.
I think the rest of the article is good but frankly there just isn't a real alternative to Amazon.
I left Amazon years ago because of endless counterfeit stuff, poor search, and prices that aren't actually better than you can get elsewhere. The fast delivery was not reliably fast anyway, and I can wait an extra day for things. I'm not usually in that much of a rush.
I have not found buying things from other places to be worse in general. Often cheaper, delivery is fine, and more confidence I'm getting the actual thing I wanted.
The only thing Amazon does better is simply that it's a one stop shop for almost everything. But given the other downsides, that is not enough.
EDIT: Also, the dark patterns they deploy to try to make people sign up to Prime makes me sick.
The author clearly states:
> I’m bailing out of Prime not to hurt Amazon, but because it doesn’t make commercial or emotional sense for me just now.
So, he doesn't doesn't get the ROI he needs, that's purely a financial transaction.
> Emotional? · Amazon is an US corporation and the US is now hostile to Canada, repeatedly threatening to annex us. So I’m routing my shopping dollars away from there generally and to Canadian suppliers specifically. Dumping Prime is an easy way to help that along. ¶
Edit: Right, done being discouraged from feeling like an equal participant on a gamified karma platform run by startup jerks.
It depends on what you buy but in general, the manufacturer's website will often cost more than Amazon. E.g. In the USA, Apple Watch 46mm GPS+Cellular is currently $429 on amazon.com but $529 on apple.com
Also, manufacturers are often contractually required to have higher prices (i.e. MSRP) than the retailers that sell their products. So getting a discount from Amazon is more realistic than the manufacturer's official website. Another example is buying TurboTax software on Amazon ($55.99) costs less than Intuit's website ($80)
>Third, Amazon’s prices aren’t notably cheaper than the alternatives.
Again, it depends on what types of products you're buying. For things like USB cables and rechargeable batteries, Amazon costs less than Best Buy. Buying a Fiskars garden shears cost $10 less at Amazon than Home Depot and Lowe's. What's happening is that those local stores are using price discrimination to upcharge the impatient walk-in customers who need "instant gratification". Home Depot charges $5 more for a toilet plumbing repair kit than Amazon because they know customers are likely making an emergency purchase. Yes, the local stores sometimes have a "match Amazon's price" policy but it's a hassle to hunt down a manager and get an override of the price at the cash register.
Where Amazon often costs more (often 2x because of shipping) is commodity household items like toothpaste and Windex glass cleaner. A local Walmart will have cheaper prices on those.
Lastly, I recently went through my 200+ accounts in my password manager to migrate my email address and the lesson I've learned is to avoid creating new accounts at more ecommerce websites. It's not worth it. Maybe I'll make an exception for Shopify in the future because a lot of sellers have consolidated there but I'm going to hold out as long as I can.
I really like having my orders history in one website instead of scattered across Newegg, ZipZoomFly, BHPhotoVideo, etc, etc.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Cellular-Smartwatch-Aluminium-A...
[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-watch/apple-watch
This pretty much, I do not buy from Amazon because of the experience but because of price. Like you said very often Amazon is significantly cheaper than local stores here in Europe, like I was buying woodworking tools and I could get same tool, same manufacturer warranty for 20 percent less. Apple devices cost even more than official Apple store in my country because Apple does have a first party store, meanwhile Amazon has below MSRP prices always. The only downside is that they dont have customization options.
Compare that to Amazon that will easily refund a purchase made 18 months earlier no questions asked.
I almost never buy from Amazon, but there's no denying I feel much safer ordering there than elsewhere. My last expensive non-Amazon purchase got me an opened box (either a return or plain used item). Even PayPal didn't care to do anything about it.
Law -> 14-day return policy, you pay for shipping, the shop will make it as difficult as possible to let you return the item (even if it's illegal), they don't have to take the item if you opened it (which makes no sense - how do I know I don't want it if I can't try it?)
Hell even Apple has been fined by Italy for not properly disclosing that customers have 2 years warranty from the seller. I even had to tell customer service about it just last year, who acted like they didn't even know.
Amazon has their chat, which replies immediately and you get your money back pretty easily.
That's just the usual experience of German customer service. The consumer is expected to quote the relevant paragraphs to explain customer service why they need to cover cost of return shipping or whatever and they will fight you every step of the way (or try to ignore you). It seems to be a cultural thing.
Edit: and what makes this so annoying is that I really want to be a nice guy for the customer service, not an asshole. And when they treat me like this, I turn into a monster and I'm not happy about it.
Have you considered not using Amazon, and giving up those slight conveniences, to not keep supporting such an unethical company?
It also depends on the items you're buying. Household goods, like laundry detergent and deodorant, are usually more expensive on Amazon, sometimes by a wide margin.
Really I want some user-representing local-first software that searches many stores with one query. Of course these sites fight tooth and nail to make that comparison harder (the main point of captchas). Still maybe we'll get there as the surveillance industry enters its screw-turning extractive phase.
As for (sub)Prime, it still boggles my mind that people pay for it as an ongoing subscription. I activate the free trials when they're conducive to some other goal (eg fixing/making something that's going to require a bunch of iterated rounds of parts). Between my account, my partner's account, and my "business" account (more price discrimination, hooray!), I'd say there's a free trial more than half the time. And the once or twice a year I need something quick and don't have a trial, there's always the $2 for one week option.
(Also, I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread - one of the "economic blackout" flyers has March 7-14 as Amazon-specific boycott. I don't think this kind of thing is going to move the needle on overall revenue any time soon, but rather it's about sending some kind of message to the neofascists and those who readily support them. Frankly we need many more of these days. And if that seems inconvenient, look at it as practice for when we're back to full blown Trumponomics with empty store shelves everywhere)
Yes, the search result page is truly horrendous. It shows many results, while most of them are not actually available.
[1] Numbers you've heard like 40,000, reflect only the absolute minimum number of people killed directly by Israel, and not those killed indirectly (running out of insulin, starving, etc). https://data.techforpalestine.org/updates/gaza-ministry-casu...
[2]
- https://www.972mag.com/cloud-israeli-army-gaza-amazon-google...
- https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/5/12/how-us-big-tech...
- https://www.commondreams.org/news/idf-aws
Stuff isn't cheaper on Amazon, shipping is expensive as hell, delivery times is in weeks, not day, and the risk of getting scammed is up with about something like 800%. Much easier to just order from a local store, pay a little extra for the item, but less for shipping, and be sure that you get what you order.
Also Amazon search has been broke for a decade.
Sure I don’t get it in 1 day. The common carriers are a hit or miss (FedEx straight up doesn’t deliver on weekends).
Sure, I may pay more. I’ll tank the cost if it’s a quality item.
Sure, shipping isn’t “free” and return shipping may have a cost. But as I have learned, free shipping and returns is usually built into the cost when most people may not use it.
It’s safer to buy direct than going through Amazon.
I bought something last week from an OEMs website. It showed up the next day in an Amazon envelope. Nowhere was it mentioned when I checked out.
I dumped prime when they added adverts.
Comments mention The Expanse, and they're right. I'm currently watching it, on Blueray. It's not the price I find objectional, it's the adverts.
(I actually went to resubscribe to prime when Clarksons Farm season 3 came out, but there was no option to subscribe on my tv without adverts)
And of course a hierarchy of piracy that Louis Rossman came up with
I pay for the hardware to self host. Even pay for a private torrent tracker and usenet.
It's not the cost. It's the horrible experience and changing of media. I want a copy of that media that won't change.
I'd love to know more!
I have a Beelink n100 device running linux. These lil beelinks are great devices. They can be picked up for ~$140. Then i just keep a look out for cheap 10+tb datacenter drives. For example, I snagged a 12tb one for $75 the other day. Toss those into my raid array.
I self host plex, web servers, samba, etc. Right now I have ~100tb of space. I even self-host a great google images alternative called Immich.
I use a private torrent tracker and usenet to acquire most of my media. I do those because they're just so easy. It's pretty rare I can't find something within a minute or two.
If there is a legal way of obtaining a real copy of media I'll usually do that. Most of my music library is legal, purchased directly from artists, bandcamp or soundcloud.
I also have 2gb fiber internet which is helpful in all this. I wouldn't be able to get away with some of the stuff without the upload bandwidth of fiber.
There's also the issue of older stuff not always being available on streaming sites - IIRC 28 Days Later wasn't available until the new film made it popular enough). Similarly, the BBC Oppenheimer series didn't get put onto their iPlayer service until 2023.
I don't think I order enough stuff via them to make the "free" deliveries really valuable to me (it varies from month to month). But I like the convenience of having just one place to order stuff.
Amazon Prime's video offerings are limited but they have a few nice things. I liked the Bosch series. I didn't mind the rings of power thing though it was a bit long winded. I guess if you are a Tolkien nerd, it might be a bit offensive to deal with all the creative liberties the plot takes.
They also have some alright movies; including some recent block busters. And there are some older classics.
The UI and search are a bit garbage indeed. They do a poor job of exposing the content they actually have. Unless you actively hunt for stuff, you could be missing out.
Also, I should mention I watch Amazon Prime via Firefox, which is really effective at blocking the ads they are now injecting. If they "break" that, I'd be more likely to cancel.
The only real downside is that I can't put in a $0.50 order without a shipping fee, I need a $25 minimum order for free shipping.
(Incidentally, I think that line should let me skip the hiring screen Leadership Principles made-up anecdote STAR recital. :)
I make a lot of personal decisions on-principle, but Amazon is too essential for me to boycott it.
I also tolerate a number of practical non-customer-focused qualities of the company, of late, because of remaining utility.
Overall, I like that I have use of Amazon, even though in some ways it's not as good as it used to be, and there are obvious ways it could improve customer focus but doesn't seem like it's going to.
Though, I did cancel Amazon Prime awhile ago. The final nudge was that Prime Video seemed to be getting conspicuously customer-hostile, though I'd come to consider Prime Video to be part of the value for which I was paying. Also, Amazon no longer seemed to be taking 2-day shipping as seriously as they used to.
A side effect of canceling Prime is that I recently stopped using my Amazon credit card. Since I'm no longer getting 5% rewards at Amazon and WFM, my non-Amazon 2% cash rewards card is close enough. The last nudge was Chase switching to eight-unhyphenated-digits SMS 2FA, every time I checked my statement. It was a tiniest little customer-unfocused thing, but it annoyed me enough in the moment, on top of ongoing mixed feelings, to energize me to go to the trouble of switching.
Another side effect of canceling Prime is that I've been buying a lot less there, because I wait for $35+ orders, to get the free slow shipping, with the effect that I often end up buying the items elsewhere or not at all.
(Incidentally, Walmart.com had a chance tonight, to get more of my business, since I hate-hate-hate that Amazon commingles product with questionable third-party sellers. But Walmart.com's product search was was no longer filtering by "Retailer" like it used to, which led me to Web search and learn of a potential problem with their supply chain integrity in general, and I really didn't want to be spraying third-party-sourced counterfeit/returned/shoplifted Flonase up my nose.)
Or just too convenient?
You survived at some point without being dependent on Amazon. You really couldn't do so again?
I'm with you on the value of critical thinking skills.
But, before using this thread to call out anyone for a perceived lack of critical thinking skills, maybe first make a compelling argument that it's worth their time to even determine whether Amazon is "essential" rather than "convenient".
I suspect that you arrived to the thread with a belief that there's something like a moral imperative not to use Amazon. But you didn't articulate an argument for that, and it wasn't otherwise established in this context. So maybe that's why I think your approach in this thread was a bit aggressive or rough. Which is disincentive to invest critical thinking energy into the thread.
Was it not you above that said you make a lot of decisions on principal, but find Amazon too efficient to not use?
Is that not implying you see moral issues, but decide to use them anyway? If so, is it not fair to then question to what extent by efficient you really mean convenient?
I'm not interested in trying to argue a moral imperative here. People that don't see an issue are not going to be convinced by my arguments that I definitely would not be investing a lot of time in.
I am interested in questioning peoples given reasoning as to why they keep using it when they see a moral issue with doing so, though.
> So maybe that's why I think your approach in this thread was a bit aggressive or rough.
I don't think I was aggressive or rough on any individual. My above comment you quote is against an unnamed abstract group, and I wasn't rude or aggressive in my reply to anyone else by my view - I just asked a simple question.
No.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43288929
Any other delivery service just causes way more stress.
Feel like this article is downplaying which was the real reason because it's definitely only one of the three things listed and we can rule out ethics if you happily used it for decades you didn't suddenly start caring about that out of nowhere.
I found when we lived in a flat it was a total write off, things never went in the right place.
It's hard to tell who's responsible though, it's like shell corporations all the way down. I remember talking to one delivery driver and even though the van said their name, they were a private contractor and the van wasn't owned by the company.
Our system here has worked for many years and I much prefer it over people leaving packages at my doorstep.
I was also saving money for a family trip to the US in the coming years, but my kids now want to go to Australia instead as they hate everything about the current administration’s rhetoric.
Insightful observation.