<p>I highly doubt this. I imagine after a certain period of time (6 months, a year?), you’ll be charged $79 unless you opt out. </p>
<p>I also don’t understand the appeal of Amazon Prime. I buy from them a lot, and almost never pay shipping fees because I invariably buy enough to meet the minimum for free shipping. Much of the time I get my purchases within two days anyway, and even if I don’t, I’m never in that much of a hurry. If I were, I’d pay the shipping only for those times I really needed the item quickly, and it certainly wouldn’t add up to $79 a year.</p>
<p>I never had amazon prime but lately the shipping has been terrible. The last thing I ordered I waited 10 days for! I am positive they just sat in the warehouse, one was a book and once it was sent it got here in 2 days. I had a top I wanted to order and it said that without prime the wait would be 2 to 3 weeks. With prime 2 days. </p>
<p>I am sure they are putting long waits on things so that people will feel pressured to buy prime. My S has prime so I asked him and he put me on his account. He travels and likes the streaming movies so it’s good for him. </p>
<p>This slow shipping is very new, within the last 2 months, so I feel this is their new tactic.</p>
<p>Interesting booklady. I know they have a distribution center in Allentown so that might explain it. I went back and looked at my order and I ordered October 5 and it was delivered on the 15th. I did order something else but canceled it because it was going to take too long to get.</p>
<p>My experience with Amazon has been the opposite of yours. I just ‘assumed’ they’d do an artificial hold on shipping for people not doing prime and not paying extra for the 2 day shipping and I felt this was simply part of their business model and accepted it as ‘fine’ and saved the extra cost. </p>
<p>At first my experience was as I assumed, that products were delayed in shipping, which I was fine with, but then I noticed that when it comes to Christmas time for the last few years, they seemed to not do the delay and actually ship it right away. It makes some sense that they would because if they happened to miss getting it delivered before Christmas, even due to some factors out of their control like weather and shipper delays, then people would quit using them at Christmas time which is probably a major part of their business. I think this was a problem for them a number of years ago, i.e. the products didn’t make it until after Christmas, such that they got some bad press out of it, so I assume that was a factor in the change.</p>
<p>Then, in the last year or thereabouts, I noticed they were routinely shipping more quickly than with the built-in display. I considered what the business reason would be for them doing this since I think there’s a business reason behind all of this, it’s not an accident, and it led me to wonder if they’re doing it to retain business after they were forced by the government to start collecting sales tax up front and the knew people would have a bit less of an incentive to buy from Amazon vs their local store (still some incentive, but less).</p>
<p>However, all of this is counteracted IMO by the use of the USPS rather than strictly UPS in shipping. There’s now something relatively new where they ship UPS but it gets delivered by the USPS and other times the item might be delivered strictly by the USPS. It’s been my experience that anytime the USPS is inserted into the process the service gets worse - delivery time take longer.</p>
<p>Shipping origin points do make a difference. Besides the Amazon distribution points, if I’m ordering something that I know is coming from an Amazon ‘partner’, i.e. someone selling via the Amazon front, I’ll often research to see where that company’s based and switch the seller based on that - i.e. choosing one on my coast rather than on the opposite coast.</p>
<p>A few months back ShopRunner actually offered a year of free service if you linked your Amex card to your SR account. Guess they’re just going all out now.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’ve been a loyal Amazon Prime subscriber for a few years now and love it. I have my parents, my brother, and my girlfriend all on my subscription, so that’s three households getting free 2-day shipping from Amazon for $80. The free book a month on my Kindle and the fact I was able to drop Netflix in exchange for Amazon Streaming (and save money in the process) was just a bonus.</p>
<p>RR, yes I can see how those things would make sense, especially the Netflix issue. I don’t use a Kindle (note my username ;)) or Netflix, so those aspects of it hadn’t occurred to me.</p>