Don’t get me wrong, Amazon is a great service…that I don’t use that much. Prime membership costs over a 100$/year, and gives you the ability to watch movies and listen to music and such, but I primarily used it as a shopping tool.
FREE SHIPPING! ™ wooooohooooo!!!! -uh…yeah nope.
Lemme’ ‘splain.
If you go to ANY other online shopping portal and search for a product, check the shipping costs. A lot are moving to this “FREEEEEEE!!!!! SHIPPING!!!!” to emulate/compete with Amazon, but independent vendors use these portals to save time and effort, and some of them do not ship for free. Find a product that has a shipping cost, and most of the time that product’s base price is “X$”. Now go to Amazon and look for the exact same product that screams “Prime”. Most of the time you will see the product listed at “X+abc$”. Where X is the base cost, and the “abc” is a hidden increase that usually equals that other place’s shipping cost.
So on vendor A, you get product XYZ for 10$ and 3$ shipping, and on Amazon, product XYZ for 13$.
NOT always…nothing is ever set in stone, and sometimes the vendor will get a break on a bulk purchase which changes this up a bit, but most of the time this applies.
I hate being lied to. Shipping isn’t free, it is factored into everything you buy that says “Free Shipping”.
Robert Heinlein, the brilliant science fiction writer, once coined the phrase “TANSTAAFL“.
which stands for:
There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
This is proof of that axiom.
If Amazon advertised their Prime membership as QUICK shipping built in, plus videos and music, I wouldn’t be as sussed. But they claim “free”, which is a lie.
And I hate being lied to.
