Anybody else noticed this "exclusively for Prime" baloney?



biblio.com looks like a reasonable alternative to this out of control corporation, and I'm guessing their product catalog will leave much to be desired, but at least they don't seem to be holding their customers hostage and demanding a ransom simply to purchase the canonical reference work of an entire literature.

It says that the item at that price is reserved for Prime members. If you don't have Prime can you buy it for a worse price?

Edit- no you can not.

Apparently, they pulled this earlier this year in the UK, on people trying to buy games:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4fyl4n/amazon_uk_have_locked_popular_games_behind_a/

What's this, the Reverend Jones' Promethean Links Week?

biblio.com paid me to advertise on Massassi.



Go ahead and ban me, I don't care. The massive kickback I received was well worth it, and I'd do it again.

I'm glad that this could not happen in Germany (at least for German books). In Germany you may only sell a book at list price without any discounts to everyone. Even a 1 Cent difference can give you a huge fine.

make all books free & burn the dissenters

make the dissenters free & burn all books

Wait, there are people that aren't Prime members?

Amazon is like the Borg Cube of internet. I've heard that working at Amazon turns you into a Borg as well.

On that note, can Borg be used in the singular?

Nah. Borg have better working conditions.

We tried a combination of the two in Germany as well. Didn't work out.

That sucks. On the other hand, they started this "free 1 day delivery" for Prime recently. (Yes, I know it's not "free" since I paid for Prime in the first place.) I ordered some cat foot yesterday that's supposed to be here today. The number of trips to the store that I avoided by having Prime is well worth it. But for me, the best thing about amazon is that, in my experience, they do the right thing by their customers. If a ****ty marketplace seller screws me over, amazon doesn't hesitate to just refund my money. All it takes is a quick phone call or chat session and the stuff is taken care of. DOA monitor you purchased in-person from Best Buy? Gotta argue with them for an hour because they claim you broke it.

It's why I shop at Costco a ton, too. Products these days are so ****ty that I end up with returns and I simply avoid shopping at places that make returns a PITA.

I don't doubt that the company aggressively optimizes for positive customer experience (along with their wide product selection, excellent prices, and fast shipping).

And although alternatives to Amazon yet remain, this recent trend in which Amazon tries to funnel customers to its Prime program (first by drastically raising the price required for free shipping, now by restricting product availability) is an unsurprising way to recover profitability sacrificed in order to swallow up a large chunk of consumer product market. At this point you still have to buy in to Prime, but if Amazon truly succeeds in conquering the market, they may not only require Prime, but also having cornered the market (or maybe just the drone delivery market), might start to raise the price of Prime ever higher. At this point they will look more like a monopolistic cable company, giving you no alternative. They already produce and distribute their own shows.

So what you're saying is, capitalism sucks.

Good news is pdfs of Marx are free.

Too bad the tinfoil emoticon doesn't seem to work.

I dunno; I pay ~$100 a year for the privilege of shopping at Costco; paying the same price for Amazon is so easy for me because there's so much more value there. I do use prime music, I do use prime video, I order crap with included 2 day and now 1 day shipping all the time.

Before I had prime I pretty much only used Amazon around the holidays and I ordered way ahead of time because their shipping time for non-prime orders was crap. It would take them longer than a week to box it up and ship it and then it'd take another week to actually show up.

Amazon is obviously going to have to continue raising the price of prime; even just to keep up with inflation. But nothing in my experience shows that they are actively trying to drive up the prices on anything (like the cable companies do). They always go in the opposite direction and actually shame those responsible for keeping prices high (like when looking at kindle books and the price is higher than the hardback and it says "this price was set by the publisher - macmillan").

While I don't like Amazon basically charging a membership to be used, you can also split Prime memberships between up to 4 people (I think?) which helps to cut down the cost as well.