Price of Amazon Prime May Jump To $119 a Year

colinneagle writes "Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak hinted during the company's earnings conference call [Thursday] that we might see an increase to the company's popular Amazon Prime service. As it stands now, Amazon Prime costs $79 per year and offers users free shipping on millions of items, free book borrowing for select Kindle titles, and last but not least, free streaming to the company's video on-demand service. Going forward, Amazon may increase that pricepoint to either $99 or $119. That's a rather significant price increase, but it's important to keep in mind that the price of Amazon Prime has remained the same ever since Amazon first started the program nine years ago." How many products do you use that haven't increased in price for that long?

Comments

how many products?

[gl4ss]

hmm lets see.

isp is cheaper now than 9 years ago.
the tv I got at back home I could not have afforded 9 years ago.
my mobile subscriptions are cheaper than 9 years ago. I can order stuff from china cheaper than 9 years ago(transportation costs).

Re:how many products?

[Anonymous Coward]

I spend way too much on living. I'd save lots of money if only I could shake my food addiction. I tried going cold turkey but then I developed an overwhelming craving for cold turkey.

Re:how many products?

[Trepidity]

Depends on where you live and what your costs are. Real-estate prices are down in some places and up in others. Oil prices are up considerably from the '90s, though roughly flat for the past few years. Natural-gas prices are up in Europe, but way down in the U.S. due to the shale-gas boom. Food prices are relatively stable overall, though specific food items have gone up or down. Amortized cost of car ownership has gone down, due to a mixture of cheaper initial-sales prices and longer average lifespans. Amortized cost of ownership of a family computer suitable for basic email/web has gone way down, due to advances in technology. Airfare has gone down in Europe (due to competition from low-cost airlines), but up in the U.S. and internationally (due to increased oil prices, plus maybe related to airline consolidation). Etc., etc.

So, if you live in Pittsburgh, use a lot of natural-gas for heating, drive a basic car relatively short distances, and have a home computer, your overall cost of living has probably declined over the past 20 years. On the other hand, if you live in Boston, take frequent roadtrips or plane trips, and heat you apartment with fuel oil, your cost of living has probably increased over the past 20 years.

Of all these, rent/housing costs are typically the dominating factor in most CoL equations.

Re:how many products?

[gl4ss]

no, the price of 55" fullhd tv's came down... as have prices for usable refrigators, washing machines and other household shit. not everything goes up in price yearly even if the article summary implies that.

in regards of amazon prime.. has shipping gotten more expensive or are people ordering more stuff?

Re:how many products?

[MickLinux]

Generally speaking, we are in deflation, not inflation. So as the commenter correctly points out, a lot of things are decreasing in price.

Here's the problem: our wages are also decreasing.

Here's another problem: a lot of things -- especially thing which we are *legally required* to buy from one source-- are increasing in price. So housing, electricity, union leadership, health insurance, the cost of government, public schools, taxes, bailouts... all are crashing through the roof.

Basically, if the purveyor thinks he has a captive market, he's grabbing everything he can.

But, that being the case, the appropriate question is not as the original headline, "how many things haven't increased in price in that long", it is instead, "how many things, when they increased in price 25- to 50-%, did you have the option to not buy, and still continued to buy?"

Typically speaking, when something went up in price 25- or 50- percent, I stopped buying it. That is, my purchases went to something like 5% of what they had been before. Often, I stopped buying it completely, because I had the incentive to find better alternatives. Once I had the better alternatives, I was done.

Here's a better question: in today's era of retail cannibalization, how will Amazon's market share hold up if they increase prices?

Re:how many products?

[Pharmboy]

Plus the products we sell are the same price they were 10 years ago. We've offset cost increases by increases in productivity, and our margin has actually gone up. I have prime, I would drop it if it goes up. I also have Netflix, which kicks Amazon's ass when it comes to video interface. Amazon is constantly trying to up sell you, making it much harder to find and enjoy videos than Netflix. Right now, I have Prime only for the shipping savings.

Re:how many products?

[Lumpy]

Nothing is decreasing in price. Please name ONE thing that is still the same quality as before but is lower in price.

HDTV's are garbage quality compared to what was out 10 years ago, yes UTTER garbage. They used to be repairable by swapping out separate boards, today they are throw-away items because they are made as cheap as possible. Electronics in general are utter crap quality compared to 10-20 years ago. THAT is why it's cheaper.

You are paying less for a lesser product.

Re:how many products?

[Lumpy]

Mostly because Newspapers only hire no talent hacks to write for them that have no education at all in what they are reporting.

newspapers killed themselves, they deserve the horrible lingering death they are enjoying.

Re:how many products?

[TheGratefulNet]

Please name ONE thing that is still the same quality as before but is lower in price.

m job ... ;(

have not had a raise in a long long LONG time. essentially I went backwards about 10 yrs ago and never caught back up again with the cost of living. my software and hardware skills are as good (or better) than 10 yrs ago but I'm paid LESS, overall.

Re:how many products?

[CastrTroy]

This is probably one of the best examples. Bicycle prices have come way down. For $1000 you can get a bike that is better than what the pros were using 15 years ago. For a little more you can get a competitive racing quality bike. You can spend a lot more, but it won't help you that much. However, I find that quality on the low end has tanked. Most department store bikes used to be decent quality, and now they are mostly complete garbage. And they are almost exclusively designed to look impressive (suspension and fat tubes) but are completely terrible for actually riding.

Re:how many products?

[MickLinux]

Okay, first of all, deflation is a money supply issue, and when. Sou realize that money supply includes credit -- and that credit is the largest part of the economy, then you'll find that yes, we are in deflation here in the US.

Now, what about PRICE inflation / deflation?

Well, as robotics, improved methods, and tech make manufacturing faster, cheaper, and easier, that causes deflation. Likewise, as power over little folks forces their wages down, that makes things cheaper. More slaves (you, me) means cheaper goods.

On the other side of the coin, we are not just at peak oil, we are at peak everything. So as raw materials become harder to come by, that causes price increases.

Incidentally, that may have been how Greenspan or Paulson (I forget which) triggered the bursting of the housing bubble. Until then, they had kept the CPI at a constant price inflation of about 5% singe the '50s. early 2000s, they changed policy in response to the bursting of the tech bubble, to keep the CPI constant at 0% increase. But if things are harder to get, that meas that wages have to fall. But people had taken mortgages on the assumptionof 5% CPI price INFLATION. So when their wages fell, they couldn't keep up. That forced housing prices down, which then triggered massive losses from the investment flippers, who themselves were massively overleveraged, which caused Fannie Mae to go plfft, which triggered the hedge fund leveraged derivitive bets into losses, which caused TARP and the jobless recovery...

Re:how many products?

[dgatwood]

The thing is, 99% of the time, I don't care about getting things quickly, but I joined Prime last summer because I needed to buy a bunch of things for a trip to Europe, and I wanted to make sure stuff arrived in time. I initially planned to cancel it after a year, but I've tried the Prime Instant Video, and now I'm debating.

Either way, if it goes over the price of Netflix ($96 annually), I can't imagine choosing to stay with Prime over Netflix. The two-day shipping benefit is only significant if you would ordinarily have paid for two-day shipping. Otherwise, it's just not a very enticing perk unless you know you're going to need to buy a lot of gear in a short period of time. And that doesn't lead to continuous customer revenue. It leads to people buying it for just long enough to get the job done, then dropping it, which raises the cost for Amazon, which means they'll raise the price, and then even fewer people will buy it when it isn't absolutely necessary.

What really matters is the streaming service. And in that regard, Amazon's offering doesn't compare too favorably. Netflix has more content, and fewer encoding problems. There was one episode of Buffy where the video was jerky on every device I own, and I've watched a few TV shows where Amazon incorrectly encoded 16:9 content as letterboxed 4:3 content, so I get four black bars on my TV. That was excusable ten years ago. Now, it's just negligent.

And the Netflix iOS app actually works over cellular connections, unlike Prime, which deliberately refuses to work. That means if I were using Netflix, I could watch stuff on my phone while away from home as part of my unlimited data package. With Amazon, I have use my laptop, where I have a tethering data limit of about three hours of video.

So I've been debating whether to continue Prime even at $79 or jump to Netflix for only a few dollars more. Raise the price to $119, and they'll make my decision a lot easier.

Re:how many products?

[benzapp]

Read up on Modern Monetary Theory if you haven't already. Bill Mitchell's blog is by far the best.

I almost NEVER read anyone on slashdot or mainstream sites that understands bank credit. Nearly everyone thinks of money as some sort of commodity, even though it's never really been that way, and definitely is nothing like that now.

Cheers to you.

Re:how many products?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Yeah, right now at $79 I just keep letting my Prime membership auto-renew because a) I'm lazy, and b) it does save me a little at Christmastime. But their video catalog is pretty limited - much of what I've tried to watch is TV shows where, it turns out, they've only included a few episodes you can access without paying more. And their Kindle Lending Library is likewise pretty limited - it's "all the Harry Potter books plus hundreds of authors you'll never want to read".

Really, even at $79 it's hard to justify. There's not a whole lot I *must* get in two days...

I'll probably just not renew this time around - free ground shipping is good enough. And, if they further limit that, I'll probably start frequenting other online stores. Pretty much everyone is on the web now; I just currently default to Amazon because of the "free" shipping.

Re:how many products?

[smaddox]

The problem with Bill Mitchell's approach to monetary theory (Chartalism), is that it is focuses on public debt when it's the inevitable deleveraging of private debt that cause recessions and depressions. Given, it may be a workable approach, but it's not very direct. Steve Keen, on the other hand, focuses directly on the role of private debt in the macroeconomy. He's currently working on a dynamic model fully capable accurately simulating booms, recessions and depressions in all their glory, and he already has some very instructive models. You can check out his blog here, his "manifesto" here, and his research papers here.

Re:how many products?

[Jason Levine]

I'd add that Amazon stubbornly refuses to release a Prime app for Android. They have for iOS and Kindle Android, but no general Android. While their streaming selection might be somewhat competitive with Netflix at times (what one lacks the other sometimes has), I'm limited with Prime. I can watch Netflix via my Roku box, our Android tablets, computers, or even our phones. Amazon Prime, we can only watch via our Roku box (with a worse interface than Netflix) and on our computers. Were Amazon to release their Prime video streaming app for Android, it might mean we'd watch more videos that way.

"Sumsing vwrong here!"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sumsing vwrong here!"

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/amazon-prime-could-soon-cost-next-to-nothing/

But but there has been no inflation in 10 years

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the US federal reserve governments are printing billions of dollars all over the world to prevent the horrible horrible deflation that might happen. Why there has been no rising prices in stocks, food, commodities, or cars, or anything. Nope no inflation anywhere.... Just like all the unemployment numbers are perfectly fine and everyone is doing much better. After all gold is super cheap. I don't possibly see why Amazon would jack up prices all of the sudden, especially since its been making so much money the past few quarters... After all the last failed revenue report, they just said they intentionally weren't making money. Amazon has often believed in making up losses with volume. Maybe Amazon is making a play to be a central bank.

It would still be a bargain

[reboot246]

Just in the savings in shipping costs it would still be a bargain for me. I order a boatload of stuff from Amazon, and watch their steaming service all the time. I think of their streaming service as my humongous DVR. Even at $119 per year we're still talking about less than $10 a month, just slightly more than my Netflix subscription. It's like having Netflix with the added benefit of free two day shipping.

Re:It would still be a bargain

[dreamchaser]

Nobody is making you pay for them. If you aren't going to spend more on shipping than a Prime membership then don't get said membership if you don't want the other features.

Re:It doesn't offer free shipping

[mysidia]

Personally I love prime, but at $129 I would actually count my purchases

Prime makes financial sense if you make on average more than 2 orders a month items that would be covered by prime that would not be eligible for free shipping, at $5 shipping.

The streaming videos and free upgrade to 2 day shipping on prime eligible items: add additional value.

I suppose what would be interesting is if they started offering a "Prime Lite" for $60 a year --- with no streaming videos, no 2 day shipping, but free standard shipping on all normally prime-eligible items fulfilled by Amazon.

worth it to me, with the free shipping and video

[cascadingstylesheet]

Not sure I'd be paying for it for just one or the other, but the free shipping on eligible items and Amazon Video on my Roku make it a sweet deal.

My coworkers get a laugh at how many packages I get, but for anyone who's busy, there are countless items that are just a pain to get in the store, but easy as pie to just show up in a box and bring home from work. (Have 'em shipped to work to avoid the whole randomness of where packages get left thing.)

Re:worth it to me, with the free shipping and vide

[Trepidity]

Have 'em shipped to work to avoid the whole randomness of where packages get left thing.

This is getting common enough that some companies are starting to complain, though. If a few people do it occasionally it's no big deal, but if 500 employees are each receiving multiple packages a week, it starts becoming a significant added burden on the corporate mailroom.

Re:worth it to me, with the free shipping and vide

[Anonymous Coward]

The mailroom staff are demanding bribes or they'll go postal.

Re:worth it to me, with the free shipping and vide

[dreamchaser]

Your cow-orkers don't steal your packages, don't break your packages, and don't bully you for receiving packages? Must be nice not working among humans.

If that is happening to you then you're the one not working among humans.

Re:worth it to me, with the free shipping and vide

[gnasher719]

This is getting common enough that some companies are starting to complain, though. If a few people do it occasionally it's no big deal, but if 500 employees are each receiving multiple packages a week, it starts becoming a significant added burden on the corporate mailroom.

The relationship between company and employees, at first approximation, is that employees come to work, and the company pays them money. In a better approximation, employees do useful work to advance the purposes of the company, while the company does things to keep employees happy. Adding a person to the mailroom is a cheap way to make 500 employees a lot happier, so they will work for you instead of someone else if everything else is equal.

Makes sense from a shareholder PoV

[EmagGeek]

This makes perfect sense from a shareholder point of view. Raising the price to $119 will decrease the number of Prime members, thereby decreasing the cost of providing the Prime service, but the people who stay with Prime will likely more than pay for those who leave. So, it's a win-win for shareholders and Amazon.

Re:Makes sense from a shareholder PoV

[AthanasiusKircher]

This makes perfect sense from a shareholder point of view. Raising the price to $119 will decrease the number of Prime members, thereby decreasing the cost of providing the Prime service, but the people who stay with Prime will likely more than pay for those who leave.

This logic is horribly flawed. Yes, it's possible that this will be the case, but it will really depend on a lot of factors.

The main problem is your assumption that the people who would drop were the ones who weren't profitable to Amazon. This is not necessarily true.

Let's take the shipping aspect. I bet a lot of people who pay for Amazon Prime don't order nearly as often as they assume they might. They just want stuff fast occasionally, so it's convenient. Maybe they only place an order every 4-6 weeks.

Now, let's say for the average order (just to make up some numbers), that Amazon breaks even at an $80 price point for shipping if a customer orders once per 4 weeks. If they order more frequently, the shipping ends up costing Amazon more than $80; if they order less, Amazon makes a profit.

Okay, so what happens when we raise the price to $120, i.e., an increase of 50%? Now the break-even point is 18 shipments per year, so you'd think Amazon can now afford to provide better service to frequent users, right? Except, suppose a significant number of those people who only order once per 4, 6, 8, etc. weeks decide $120 is too much for them. They all drop. Suddenly you're left with all the "heavy users" of Prime -- the people who place orders weekly or biweekly or something. Amazon can now afford to make 18 shipments per year per customer, an increase of 50%, but their average customer demand went from 12 shipments per year to 26/year or 52/year or something.

It's perfectly possible for this to go the other way, in which case Amazon's decision works for shareholders and Amazon's profits. But it's also certainly possible that if they raise the price too much, it will drive away all but the "worst" Prime users in terms of the value to the company.

This is generally an issue whenever an "unlimited free X" service is offered. It's the issue with internet bandwidth, for example (to bring up something that's inevitably going to lead to huge digressions in this thread if anyone wants to argue about it). A small percentage of users for "unlimited" services often utilize a hugely disproportionate amount of resources... and most companies would generally prefer to get rid of the heaviest users when possible, if it were.

Instead, they usually accept the fact that they will take a hit in profits on the top 5-10% of "unlimited service" users (who cost more than they are worth) in order to grab that bottom 30 or 40% who barely use the service but pay anyway. The "unlimited" idea is great advertising.

But eventually, if you raise the price enough, you'll probably hit some sort of place where you only have those crazy people left... and the entire service ends up being unprofitable.

To take the extreme case, the logical outcome of your argument is that companies should increase prices to the point where they only have one customer for any given service, since the person who stays will "likely more than pay for those who leave." That's clearly not a "win-win" in most scenarios.

Re:Makes sense from a shareholder PoV

[poolecl]

But if you shed the casual Prime customers, the ones that are making less purchases, you are decreasing your prime revenue more than you are decreasing the cost of providing prime services. Also, you risk loosing the sales of those customers altogether if they no longer feel "locked in" to Amazon through their prime membership.http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4739279&cid=46128421#

Re: But but there has been no inflation in 10 year

[TheRaven64]

There are two things wrong with your post. The first is that the electricity cost just from the CPU is significantly higher than the value of the BitCoins created. The second is the assumption that there are a lot of spare cycles on EC2. The entire design of datacentres like this is to ensure that the computers are used efficiently by ensuring that there is always some job ready to run.

Brilliant strategy: Pay more for less

[rayd75]

I find it interesting that this comes just as Amazon has fallen in love with hybrid shipping services such as UPS Mail Innovations and FedEx SmartPost for Prime delivery. These services utilize UPS or FedEx only to the destination city where your package is then handed off to the USPS for delivery. As a result, Prime "guaranteed" 2-day delivery has become "often 2-day" or "occasional 2-day" ...and now, they feel like this is worth more? Wow.

Oh, they still haven't dropped the magic word "guaranteed". Their offering to satisfy the guarantee is an additional month of inconsistent, slower than stated service.

Re:Milk

[c0lo]

Was $1.10 in 2003, now it is $0.99

Last time I checked, it was over $40 a galon 128 fl oz.
Yeap, it starts at $45 now, but can get as high as $120,000.00 (+$13.49 shipping).

Seeing as it's not a product...

[jpellino]

...it really doesn't need to be justified. It's a leash. Like your Sam's, BJ's or Costco membership. It makes you want to buy more stuff at Amazon (on account of you don't want to waste that $80 you handed them) and they make it all up on volume and margins. No way the $80 ever offset the shipping in any reasonable fashion. I get free shipping from Bean's and pay nothing up front for it.

They do need to get more money though, if only to replace the drones that will no doubt be used for plinking practice by the neighbor kids.

If only Prime were a premium service...

[SavvyPlayer]

As a Prime member, for every non-prime eligible item I find, I look for a Prime eligible counterpart. The price for the counterpart is _always_ about $3-5 more expensive, usually by the same amount as the quoted shipping price on the non-Prime eligible item. So what we are getting here is the 2-day upgrade for free, not the entire cost of shipping. Most of the time, 2-day vs. 4-day shipping makes no difference to me.

We do occasionally stream Prime content, but the vast majority of titles on Prime are also on Netflix. If I could cancel my Netflix subscription and replace with Prime, the $120 pricepoint might not look so steep, but alas, it often seems Amazon's library is only about 25% the size of Netflix, so that's not an option.

So as it stands, I feel I am not really getting $80 in value from Prime as it stands. $120 with no improvement to the service is out of the question. I like the idea of a premium Amazon service, it just needs to actually _be_ premium.

Re:Why Prime?

[guruevi]

It's not really the wait time, it's mostly that almost all shipping is free. Where regular Amazon users generally pay a few bucks in shipping per order (yes, there are free 3-5 day shipping items but not everything is), Prime users don't pay anything at all AND they get a 2 day delivery. I order just about anything for my office from Amazon, the Prime cost is recouped in less than a month.

The Umbrella Corporation.

[rmdingler]

I enjoy the convenience of Web shopping for personal and professional use.

I can order from online companies I have never heard of, without fear of being cheated, when they are under the umbrella of the Amazon corporation. This is their prime benefit to me.

The reduced prime membership rates also include a nominal fee (sometimes $3.99) to upgrade to one day shipping... very handy when shopping parts for a job. It is still almost magical to me that I can order something from a city 1500 miles away at 1400 hours and, despite signs at both gates to leave the package outside the fence, have our puppy chewing the box it was delivered in the next day.

Re:Why Prime?

[sehryan]

Amazon Instant Videos, which includes much better movies than are available via Netflix. $79/year breaks down to being cheaper than Netflix Streaming.

The free two-day shipping is just a perk for me. You can also share Prime shipping with other Amazon accounts, which allows my wife (and the business she runs) to benefit from Prime with no additional cost.

Re:Why Prime?

[squiggleslash]

As far as the free shipping goes - It's not just about two day shipping, the "free" (non-Prime) supersaver shipping option only applies on orders over $25. Ordering one book or one DVD won't qualify. Prime, on the other hand, lets you order something for $5 and not have to either find $20 worth of other stuff you don't really want, or add 20-50% to the price just to cover shipping costs.

By itself that's of questionable value, but quite nice, but the fact Prime also includes a Netflix type streaming service and an eBook library makes the subscription worthwhile, at least at its present price, for me.

If it wasn't such a mess in Europe

[jbernardo]

I have Prime for the German amazon, as it is the closest (less delivery time) to where I live, the prices are in euros, and has the most diversity of the European amazon stores.

However, I have my kindle set to amazon.co.uk because I only understand a few German words, most my reading is in English, my magazine subscriptions (Analog) are available only from there or the US, and I'd rather read some of my favourite authors in the original UK English spelling.

As such, I can't loan kindle titles (only if I had my kindle set to the German amazon), and of course I don't have the streaming. The interesting part here is that I can have prime either with German, French, Italian or UK amazon, without living in any of these countries, but I must pay a Prime subscription in each country, like if it was a different company and not the same one with headquarters in Luxembourg.

Re:Why Prime?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Prime is for the people that must have what they bought now. Whatever happened to delaying gratification?

You don't go to stores? Prime is to replace driving to do store shopping, not getting a book you will read next month. Need an odd concrete anchor bolt you can't find at the little hardware store or Home Depot? Just get it on Amazon and save the hour and a half drive to the specialty concrete yard

Our washing machine died, and I paid $4 to have the part here the very next day. Sears was a week plus shipping and double the price. What benefit would I have gained by waiting a week to fix the washer?

Both

[tepples]

has shipping gotten more expensive or are people ordering more stuff?

Both. As wages and fuel prices increase, shipping costs increase. (Much of this ultimately results from cost-push when the U.S. minimum wage and other wages tied to it rise.) And people have been ordering so much stuff from online stores in general that in the fourth quarter of 2013, parcel volume exceeded even UPS's reserve capacity.

Re:Both

[Pinky's Brain]

I agree with you for the most part ... but increased parcel volume should reduce the cost per parcel (smaller distances between drops).

Re:It doesn't offer free shipping

[Lumpy]

Amazon punishes people who use free shipping, they will refuse to process the order until there is a whole semi truck full going to the section of the state you are in, I have had an item sit for 7 days before they shipped it. It's the scammy Fedex Post they use, Fedex delivers a semi truck to your state region post office then they carry the packages off to the cities around it. If your timing sucks it can be up to 10 days before it ships.

Re:worth it to me, with the free shipping and vide

[Lumpy]

Employer can STFU and stop being assholes or they can try and pay someone else for my expert talents and all the experience I have with their systems... Childish hissy fit by a moron manager are always costly in employee replacement and training.

Why is it you people all roll over for the company? they OWE YOU not the other way around.

Hey If You Want to Make Money Amazon

[tekiegreg]

Likely I'll pay the price hike, but if they want to earn money, how about something like this. Currently (as many know) Shared Amazon Prime Members can only use the 2 day shipping benefits, not the Streaming Instant Video benefits. How about for $40/member/month more, change that? This way I don't have to beg my wife for her last login all the time and can use my account instead. Also perhaps, allowing 2 linked prime accounts who both have instant video access to get to each others separately purchased (non-prime) instant videos? This way I can even get to my wife's video library and watch something of hers if there's something in there I want without needing a second purchase. Just sayin...

What hasn't gone up in price for that long?

[Rick Zeman]

Costco hot dog and soda at the snack bar. Been $1.50 for nigh on 20 years.

Limited appeal service.

[Anonymous Coward]

When Amazon introduced Prime at $79, I evaluated it.
It really didn't offer me enough to compensate for the $79 fee.
Some people have a life style that the service at makes sense, at certain price points.
I imagine there are some people for whom a Valet makes sense.

For you it may be the greatest thing since slice bread.
For me, the break even is very low. Lower than $79.

It will be interesting to see what they do.

Re:Why Prime?

[Pulzar]

I figured that, like most people on /., I'm not in the target demographic.

I don't think you figured "like most people on /." part right. At least in my experience, just about every computer geek I know has Prime.

Screw the delayed gratification. When I go to store to buy something, I get it right then and there. Online was always a pain because of the delay... Prime makes the delay very manageable.

Re:There have been more subtle increases

[AK Marc]

I just did a search on a couple things and I didn't see any price penalty on Prime items. I've never had Prime, as it doesn't work for Alaska, but I haven't seen the problem you complain about. Could you point out some examples?

Re:worth it to me, with the free shipping and vide

[chihowa]

That depends. I'm at a university and, no matter what I put for the address, the package always goes through the receiving department. Some companies are like that, too. This is especially true at places with restricted access to the buildings, in which case delivery trucks are only allowed to go to the receiving docks.

Sounds like a great way to get people to cancel.

[TheFirebyrd]

That seems like a brilliant strategy to get Prime members to all quit. If they raised it by a little, say $5-10, a lot of people probably wouldn't care enough to go to the effort of quitting. Increasing the price by 50% though? People are going to care then. As it is, the value of Prime has gone down substantially in just the three years I've had it. One of the reasons it seemed worth it to me was that before, I'd always feel like I had to make sure I had an order worth $25 in order to get free shipping. Prime made it so that I would just go and buy the thing I actually needed instead of buying extra crap just to get free shipping. Now they've made a huge number of items, including the exact things I've bought in the past, "add-on" items that you can't buy unless...you order at least $25 worth of product. So I'm back to square one. I haven't even been getting my free book lately because trying to find good stuff by digging through the Kindle's awful, slow menus takes longer than hitting TPB (or even Baen's free list) and downloading what I want. As for Prime Video, I don't think there's ever been anything I wanted to see (though admittedly there are a few kids' shows my kids like) that wasn't also on Netflix. So go ahead, Amazon. Raise the price. I'll just cancel. I'm half tempted to right now after documenting how little value I'm getting out of Prime already. Getting a new power supply in a day for only $6 extra (the best use I've gotten out of it recently) really doesn't justify $79/year as it is.

An iron law of economics

[russotto]

Things that are "bargains" will increase in price or decrease in quality or quantity until they are merely "ok" deals. Yet another reason economics truly is the dismal science.