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Amazon Is Offering a Discount on Prime For People On Government Assistance (theverge.com)
Amazon announced on Tuesday that it is offering a discount on Prime membership for US customers participating in a number of government assistance programs. From a report: Anyone with a valid Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card, which disburses funds for programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps), is eligible for Prime's discounted monthly price of $5.99. Prime's normal price is a $99 a year, or a monthly fee of $10.99. From a report:
Well, I'm sure this thread will be completely full of reasoned and polite discussions, free of any strawman arguments, ad hominem attacks, trolling, or general asshattery.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The linked article doesn't mention that Amazon is going after EBT dollars that typically gets spent at Walmart.
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-lowers-prime-cost-for-shoppers-on-food-stamps-2017-6
It's also good business from Econ 101, where you adjust your price based on the ability to pay. Do a find on "price discrimination".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I would have thought that people using EBT cards have more pressing problems than dealing with the high cost of Amazon Prime subscriptions...
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
I suspect that won't stop the usual suspects going off on a rant about how the undeserving are getting something for nothing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, this is just a corollary of Amazon's all-things-to-all-people strategy. If anybody buys anything, Amazon wants it to be through them.
Even people on welfare have to buy stuff. And most people who are on welfare are off welfare in under three years and back in the workforce. So in a sense this is like the prime membership they gave my college student daughter, who is poor as a church mouse and has to live like a monk. But when she graduates she'll have a lot more money to spend, and she'll have been trained to find Amazon the most convenient way to buy things.
Even I find myself buying things through Amazon for convenience. I should buy electronics shit through Digikey but sometimes if I'm ordering something else on prime I'll throw in something I need for my current project.
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To be successful, the classic requirements are:
I think it's safe to say that if they dropped the price of Prime, more people would join - so they meet the first criteria. They definitely have the means to identify consumers willing to pay more. And prime would be hard for low-price customers to resell.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Oh stop with the left/right garbage. Democrats are just as responsible for ghettos as Republicans. Ghettos are deliberate policy, not an intractable problem that no one can figure out how to solve.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Government Cheese flows more freely..
Limited applicability, but valid in some cases. Some.
This is part of the reason luxury items which actually cost more to make than most people can afford have higher profit margins (the businesses have higher net profits) than consumer goods. The other part is that high costs and small markets means lots of risk, meaning high probability of failure, and high barrier-to-entry: another player can't just stand up shop next to you and sell at a 10% margin versus your 20% if there are all of 1 million customers in the world for your product.
Fail either of these and you get slimmer margins. They're sort of the same thing: an inability to pay means a loss of demand--consumers aren't willing to pay by virtue of being incapable of exercising any such will, or they're unwilling to pay because the next guy has it cheaper. Higher luxury goods are so expensive their target markets are folks with more-than-well-enough money to spend so freely, and at the same time the markets are capable of supporting fewer suppliers than broad consumer markets and thus fewer competitors to undercut your prices.
The logical progression is, of course, that the ability to produce at lower cost allows you to sell to people with less money, taking even more profit. Keeping that 20% margin is hard, because now 100,000,000 consumers can buy your good instead of 1,000,000, and so a small-time competitor can slip in with a 10% margin and capture your entire vertical. At a point, lowering your prices won't attract enough additional consumers to generate an increase in profit, so these price cuts eventually stop until the product becomes even cheaper to make.
In the case of Amazon, however, it's not just Prime they're selling. They don't want Prime subscriptions so much as they want people to order that $12.99 family pack of toilet paper from them instead of pay $15.99 at Wal-Mart, and they expect these people live disbursement-to-disbursement and so can't plan too far ahead. These potential customers need one- or two-day shipping, and they need it free, so they need Prime.
If the target market is sufficiently small, then even the tiniest subsidy can cover a sizable discount. If 0.01% of their customers are buying groceries and paper towels on EBT, then a 50% discount means Prime for everyone else needs to cost $0.00395 more, or essentially nothing. If this makes an operating profit conversion, it's just slimming Prime margins as a razor-and-blade strategy.
Could end up being good for basically everyone involved except whoever Amazon takes business from. Cheaper access to necessities for EBT recipients, more business for Amazon, more efficiency in consumer spending across the economy at large.
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We actually put blood and sweat in for society. What about disabled veterans who, in that vast majority of cases and despite service related injuries, continue as productive members of society? I hate to be that guy, but this really sounds like "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need".
They really do help about 1% of the people who actually need the help, the rest are loafs who are freeloading, skating taxes and doing cash-only jobs to provide the illusion of being in need of assistance.
We have a robust fraud investigation office servicing all levels of the welfare system. Inappropriate provisioning is mostly in the bureaucracy, where the rules don't cover people with real need and so the caseworkers use their judgment and bend the rules a tad. Actual abuse is approximately zero.
2) the amount of soda, junk food and useless commodities spent using EBT
Some of that is bad habits (soda...); some of it is a matter of people not being able to carry perishable goods or afford the higher-priced not-junk-food. Unsurprisingly, people end up eating what's cheap--in a number of ways. I've found I can design robust food plans on as little as $25/month for 2000kcal/day with several hours of Internet research and strict budgeting and planning behaviors--in other words, several dozen times the effort anyone invests. You have to know what you're going to eat pretty much every day 2 months in advance, what every meal is going to cost, and so forth. This also devotes a surprising amount of time to cooking and cleaning.
At a point, it consumes your life. Likewise, people may not have such planning skills. For the most part, they all believe they don't have another choice.
3) Using their own wads of 'cash' on booze, cigarettes, and anything else that would be shamed upon on the cant-have-that list
Pretty much how it works. A lot of welfare is supplemental--you can even get unemployment if you have a part-time job (20 hours = employed for half a job). That means you have an earmarked account (EBT) and your own personal money (cash).
Why even get a job, when you can get upwards of $300-800/month for free?
For UBI systems, the answer is "to gain more purchasing power and enhance your standard-of-living." For the current public aid system, you're comparing your $10.25/hr welfare with the $10.75/hr FedEx warehouse job that's going to replace and terminate your welfare benefit, so why do you want to get a job making 50 cents an hour?
If they aren't trying to look for new hire [slashdot.org] opportunities
People aren't born with the Computer Programmer DNA. Talent is a myth and poor people aren't going to have a special magical power welling from their souls. The whole idea is mysticism, same shit as homeopathy.
There are people who have had time to train themselves about things and are bad at life in general, so are potentially-useful employees. Better than any other employee? Doubtful. Even given the likelihood in large numbers, you're wasting resources digging for diamonds crapped out into the horse manure when you have access to actual diamond mines.
All this does is keep on enabling a broken government hand-out system, not police it or make it better.
Assuming the prices are better, it allows access to purchase more goods with the same money. That means maybe they can afford $12 family-pack toilet paper instead of $16 family-pack at Wal-Mart, and buy those $8 worth of fruits-and-vegetables (or, you know, pork--actual healthy food) instead of $5 worth of junk food.
There's something else you missed: Unemployment trends toward ~5% in the U.S. (2% in Japan, etc.). If we get lower unemployment, people who plan to take a later retirement generally get laid off less, and job opportunities tend to draw more people to exit college early. If we get higher unemployment, those late retirements slow, and people go as far as taking up grad school to avoid the barren job market (2008 Great Recession, that happened a lot). A low-unemployment market also fails to discourage household members seeking second incomes (e.g. bored hou
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It's not actually a myth. It's just something very, very, very rare that happens in odd circumstances. For example, someone from a wealthy family becomes poor but their parents still let them drive the pink Cadillac.
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Food stamps are pretty much a thing of the past. They give you an EBT card, which works like a debit card. They load it up with funds periodically. 'Loose' it and they invalidate the card. Loose it more than a few times and questions will be asked.
Have gnu, will travel.
...would act like that here.
I don't see how this is a good deal. Food stamps can't be used for the Prime membership cost (but lest's put that aside).
The price of food tends to be so overpriced, unless you are ordering from the middle of nowhere it's a waste of food stamps. Took a quick peak and a package of Thomas' English Muffins is priced for $12.19. What. a. deal.
I guess families are supposed to survive on one-fifth (or less) of the food they can get by getting their butt to the grocery store.
Sure, I'm sure you could find a good deal on there somewhere, but you have to wade through a swamp of overpriced crap to find them and it's all on the taxpayer's dime if they tired of looking. There should be a separate search setting for purchases geared to the food stamp customers.
That product was being sold by a storefront and was not prime eligible. But yes there are lots of items like that being sold by third-party stores. They tend to be high priced because they are nostalgic foods or items you cannot get in all places so those store fronts are going for that one time sell that people want for some special reason.
At least not right now. Things like cloths, soap, house good, etc are often half the price on Amazon. There's a phrase for it: The High Cost Of Being Poor. Meaning you're too poor to take advantage of cost saving measures.
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According to their We don't accept EBT, food stamps, or any other payment method not listed for grocery purchases.
I guess this is all moot. Rethinking the article, I guess this only is a discount on Prime membership, not opening up the floodgates for EBT purchases from an overlooked market.
Awww, I'm sorry - did I interrupt your partisan spamming? Please, get right back to not solving the problem.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That seems unlikely to be honest. I'm not sure why you'd lie about that.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
$72/yr used to be what Amazon charged for Prime until Bezos got greedy.
However, Prime isn't that good of a deal. "Free Shipping" isn't really free. When you compare prices of alternate suppliers linked to an item you find that their price for that time, plus their shipping charges, usually is close to or equals Amazon's Prime price for that item.
That leaves movies. Pay $10/mo to see movies you wouldn't walk across the street to see? No thanks. One can do that on NetFlix for $8/mo. But, no matter. What come out of Hollywood isn't worth watching.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I was a food stamps recipient---I now realize that bad diet is, /yr for me,
like Monsanto, a war on the people.
The program is for 'People on Government assistance.'
It seems that only EBT holders need apply, not us Baby-burnin',
mother-stabbin', father-rapin' VietNam vets on a VA disability such as myself--Hell Vit-NAM is just some place where they're startin' to make them newfangled hard drives and such so far as Bezos is concerned, not some place where Rockefeller and Cardinal Spellman (Look up Spelly's War) started a war against some far off people no one I knew was mad at nor whose country we wanted to go to---Long Story short, $100
Droolio Iglesias
Also, what are they buying, that's so time-sensitive, if they're that impoverished?
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It's not verbatim, but indeed it happened:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This was just one element of the Obama euphoria that people experienced. Another (quite nauseating I might add) example is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...