Amazon's new "Delivery Plus" service. For an additional $29.95 your stuff will arrive less fucked up. Free with Amazon Prime.
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It sounds like a protection racket.
"Sure would be a shame if your package arrived in... less than ideal condition."
Prime is already a protection racket. Sure, we could deliver your package on time but we won't unless you pay us extra to not artificially slow it down.
It's amazing how so many people still haven't realized this and dutifully pay for Prime because, "It's just so convenient!"
Honestly I'm 50/50 on getting my prime shit on time.
The alternative is ordering shit from another website and then wondering if it'll ever even show up at all
I've made a couple electronics orders recently where my order seemingly just slipped into a void somewhere (no confirmation email, no tracking info) and then just showed up at my door two weeks later. I think Amazon has made us all forget what ordering things from the internet used to be like.
Exactly. And unfortunately, the other go-to response, "just go to a physical store," is rarely an option since even in major areas as even major chains like Radio Shack and Fry's, not to mention all the small local shops that used to exist, have gone under.
Yeah I'm definitely jealous of the people who have a Microcenter nearby. We had Radio Shack and a Fry's 45 minutes away and both are gone now. Fry's came in clutch when my old AM3 backing plate snapped in half and my CPU cooler fell off. They had one in stock and I was able to buy just the backing plate by itself. If I'd gone to Best Buy, they'd probably just look at me weird and tell me I'd need to buy a whole new computer.
They give me "Prime free for 30 days" every so often. The only difference I notice is that I can send in an order for one little cheap thing and get free shipping, instead of waiting until I have $35 worth of stuff to send the order.
The "faster shipping" with Prime isn't faster most of the time - frequently promises fast and actually delivers slow, which is worse IMO than promising slow and usually delivering faster.
They run bogus discounts for "Prime members only" that just steer me away from the products altogether - add up all the "Prime discounts" I might have bought in my lifetime and it's less than two months Prime subscription cost.
If I need something "right away" - that's what local brick and mortar stores are for. Prime is a sucky attempt at competing with a 5 minute drive to the hardware store.
I hate how free two day "super saver shipping" went from $25 worth of stuff to $35 to "maybe a week? Lol we'll deliver it whenever we want".
I have spent maybe $2k total there now in the last year? Mostly things I can't buy locally or elsewhere.
Truth is, there's precious little I need from Amazon, let alone need in a hurry. It mostly comes down to wants, supplies for projects which are themselves entirely optional, etc. As such, I will let a "want" item sit in my cart for weeks until it is joined by enough other want items to make the $25 or $35 or whatever arbitrary limit they have set to erase the arbitrary $6.99 small order shipping fee.
I don't like to think about how much I have spent there, and elsewhere online, for things I don't really need. I do like to take arbitrary months off from buying anything optional, kind of like intermittent fasting - gives me time to finish out things I have started, clean up stuff I have abandoned, do things that don't require "stuff."
If I am typical, the world could boycott over 80% of their amazon.com purchases without even bothering to get the stuff from elsewhere, and 80% of the remaining 20% could be sourced elsewhere, perhaps for 10-20% higher cost, perhaps not even that.