My Private Little War on Amazon

Up until extremely recently, I LOVED Amazon.

I don’t think anything would have shaken me out of that love, either, until I learned their plan to increase their Prime membership cost to $119, a 20% increase.

I haven’t been a Prime member long; in fact, I only enjoyed one year at the $79 rate before they raised it to $99. I spent a year and three months at that rate, so that’s a pretty disturbing trend of increases in a very short time, from my perspective.

Prime membership, for those not fully indoctrinated yet, entitles you to a selection of free stuff from Amazon’s streaming video, a limited amount of free music (which may have recently decreased even more), and most importantly, “free” “2-day” shipping on a very large percentage of Amazon merch.

But every single one of these benefits comes with a caveat or a modifier. “Selection” of video means “not all,” and even searching for “Prime movies” results in options that aren’t free getting snuck in. Some TV shows are available, but (in my experience), usually season one is free and the rest, aren’t. You get Amazon Originals free, but I can tell you how many of those I actually watch — four, and one of them got canceled.

So the streaming video isn’t anything to write home about, not if you also have Netflix and Hulu (which, pssst, Amazon, EVERYTHING is included in the subscription, no need to pussyfoot around a mixed bag). (And, of the three, Amazon’s player is the most buggy and least enjoyable to use.)

The music — well, I can’t comment on that. I have other ways to get music that don’t depend on cloud storage, so I don’t think I’ve used the music once.

But the shipping — this is what’s really important to me. And the reason I put “free” in quotes is because rumor has it, Prime items are marked up slightly to recoup that cost (confirmed: I’m suddenly finding better prices on eBay on the reg).

And the reason “2-day” is in quotes is because when I started two years ago, two days meant two days — if I placed an order Monday, it was at my house on Wednesday (Thursday at the latest, if I was shopping close to midnight). And that was awesome. Then Amazon started Sunday delivery, and THAT was AMAZING. And a real value, I thought, for only $99 a year (because we easily bought enough for that to pay for itself).

But this year, things slowly started to change. I didn’t notice right away, but now it’s obvious. “2-day shipping” has quietly become “2-day transit time once the order leaves the warehouse.” Which is a different story entirely, and results in 4 or even 5-day shipping. Not what I signed on for.

And if you complain to Amazon, they’re pretending that it’s always been this way and our lying memories deceive us. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Because I complained. Between all of the above items of questionable or non-value, I felt a 20% increase was unreasonable and unfair. I complained on Amazon’s Facebook page, and I wasn’t alone. I wasted a day watching people slowly popping up as the news of the increase spread with gleeful, self-righteous schadenfreude.

And Amazon ignored us.

Pretty obviously, too. Any other question/complaint and some underpaid intern (more later) was ON IT. Anything about the increase, crickets. In fact, I screen grabbed this convo with a woman who I felt had been pretty clear in her complaint, so I was astonished when she got a reply. But when she clarified further, Amazon left Looney Tunes skid marks in their haste to disappear.

Yeah, Amazon wasn’t playing with that.

I shared this new, callous attitude towards customers with my friend, and I was all like:

Her response was, “It’s almost as if they know if they just ignore the outrage, it will eventually die down and not have the slightest effect on them.”

Which made me feel like this:

Seriously. I genuinely felt sucker punched. And betrayed. More, I felt my whole worldview shift, to a new bleak one where Amazon didn’t care about customers.

Because she was right. Amazon continued to ignore all complaints about Prime, including my naive, heartfelt plea to remember how great they were at customer service once.

And then I felt like this:

People fighting for refunds. People being banned for too many returns. People banned from reviewing if they wrote a negative one. Amazon saying FU to Australia. Packages misplaced or arbitrarily designated undeliverable (which actually happened to my friend, who in no way lives at a business; see below).

This last complaint probably ranks the highest. This is the work of “Amazon Logistics,” their new private citizen delivery service. I personally haven’t had trouble, but every day their page is flooded with video and photo evidence of packages left in the rain just short of a perfectly good porch, packages left in plain view of neighbors and potential thieves, packages flung like footballs from yards away. And apartments decided to be businesses, closed for the day.

I slowly realized that Amazon’s page wasn’t being manned by overworked interns, but rather very sophisticated bots, programmed to include just enough human-sounding phrases to fool the casual observer (this theory has been more or less proven by this article, particularly the section about the “blurb index”). But if the conversation went on too long, “Amazon” would pull a fadeaway. Most threads end with a “please follow this link so we can escalate this” or “please provide more information so my team can look into this.” Unclear how many customers did as instructed and got a resolution off camera and how many were defeated by dealing with a now faceless corporation (if the legion of complaints about the delivery service ever make it past a bot, there’s nary a sign judging by how they continue unabated daily. Or maybe, as previously speculated…AMAZON HONEY BADGER DON’T GIVE A SHIT).

I googled “Amazon is evil” (see above about fury and scorning; I’m also not above a certain degree of childishness) and found an article that said they’re basically a cult that sells you stuff (my choice of the word “indoctrinated” above was very deliberate). And wow, did that resound with me–facing the prospect of never shopping there again felt like stepping off a cliff, like leaving a safe haven. (Think “cult” is a tad histrionic? I got in arguments with two complete strangers who acted like I was proposing to boycott them personally, and simply wouldn’t accept that it was my choice to leave, the same way it was theirs to stay. A woman posted “I love you Amazon! In case you’re getting tired of all this negativity” and “shame on you people, social media isn’t for complaining!” (LOL WHUT.) Oh honey, you’re adorable. I guarantee everyone here loved Amazon too until they had a good reason not to. I also guarantee someday if you have a problem Amazon decides it can afford to ignore, your good friend Jeff Bezos (who probably doesn’t cry himself to sleep over the internet being so darn mean to him) won’t give a shit about you either).

That was eye-opening. This is terrifying, and it’s already happening. Whole Foods has special pricing for Prime members (color me unimpressed though; probably brings their exorbitant prices slightly closer to Kroger’s lower ones), an idea that might spread to other retailers (and some very economic-ignorant customers are clamoring for Amazon to take over MORE shit. Monopolies are bad, dumb asses). Jeff Bezos wants there to be two kinds of people in the world, Prime members and “irresponsible” people (see first article).

So it’s “irresponsible” to budget and prioritize now? Because I have news for Mr. Bezos: Costs are going up everywhere. Our internet bill went up. Our mortgage went up (don’t know why, have to call about that). Things break down, and electricity and health care don’t grow on trees, and I haven’t had a proper raise in a decade, so forgive me, Mr. 135 Billion, if free shipping on your site slides a little in the rankings.

The point isn’t whether or not we can afford another 20 bucks a year. The point is that a company worth $200 billion plus shouldn’t need to raise their prices. And if raises are merit-based, spend some time on their Facebook page to see how they’re failing their performance review.

Let me humbly propose eBay as a viable alternative.

• Free shipping on the vast majority of items, and if they don’t arrive in 2 days either, that’s not nearly as frustrating as when you’ve paid a special fee for them to.
• Most eBay sellers aren’t multinational conglomerates, so they aren’t racing to ship 200,000* packages a day (*pulled out of my ass, Google only gives worldwide figures). Which means they aren’t grabbing the nearest box, regardless of how huge and wasteful it is (or doing asinine things like sticking packing pillows around an actual pillow (happened to me). A pillow is its own packing, dummies).
• EBay seller locations are listed on the site; Amazon is secretive about them. I wanted a T-shirt, which Amazon reviewers revealed there were two companies selling them, American (which everyone loved) and Chinese (cheaper and unauthentic looking) — and it was a crap shoot which Amazon would send. On eBay I could zoom on the collar tag and know exactly which I was getting (AND it arrived in 2-3 days to boot).

You get the idea. Which is that Amazon isn’t the only game in town, as much as they’ve started acting like it. Yes, I’m only one customer, and the only power I have is my spending dollars. If you aren’t ready to quit Amazon yet, I won’t hold it against you. But I hope I’ve given you something to think about.

Amazon hopes we’ll go away if they ignore us. I say we give them what they want.