I'm now an Amazon customer

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**Sigh**

I vowed to never support Amazon but here I am. I didn't plan to sign up for Amazon but I had to have an Amazon account to get Audible (which was really a waste of time and money because it doesn't provide half the audiobooks I want), and they don't seem to sell items I really need in the stores so out of desperation I've been using my Amazon account to order those things instead. If the stores just sold them then I'd get them at the stores.

So I will probably end up having my hard-earned money hacked into and stolen by some saddo sooner or later.

Well, there are certain movies from the 90's which I wanted to re-watch and amazon was the best way of doing that so I'm also a customer

I buy a bit of supplements from Amazon cuz they can be hard to find or Amazon has better prices. I usually check around on various sites before placing my order like eBay, Walgreens, & RiteAid to see what's cheaper. I started buying jeans from Amazon cuz I have a weird size that's hard to find, I gained a lot of weight over the last 8 years. I sometimes buy things for my parents off Amazon that they pay me for cuz they don't like doing online shopping & don't want to pay for the Prime Membership. Are you a Prime Member Joe Amazon keeps jacking the price up but the membership can be shared with everyone in your household & me & my gf both use it so we both pay half the cost. Amazon has credit-cards(at least here in the US) that give more bonus rewards on Amazon purchases & the points can be redeemed when checking out on Amazon. That can be helpful & can save you a tiny bit of money if you regularly buy a bit of stuff off Amazon & pay the credit-card bill in full every month.

Incase anyone doesn't know, Amazon has a thing called Amazon Smiles where they donate half a percent of your purchase cost to a charity or non-profit that you chose from a big selection of. Amazon can easily afford to donate ten times as much without feeling any financial hardship but half a percent is better than nothing to the groups. You have to checkout from their Amazon Smiles site that I just go to by typing AmazonSmiles.com in my browser. There is also a way to select it from their apps. Some of the groups in their list are fighting big corporations like environmental groups & there might be some fighting to hold big tech accountable or trying to get corporations to pay their fair share(it's been a long time since I last looked) so checking out at Amazon Smiles might help you feel a tad less guilty about buying from Amazon. I'm not sure if it's only in the US or not thou. I'm suddenly curious if it's in other countries so if anyone reading from other countries uses Amazon, fee free to let us know if it works where you are or not

Amazon was the first online purchasing site I signed up with, circa 2017. For a good while it was a smart place to go for very affordable items and sometimes outright bargains, but over the past couple of years most of that seems to have disappeared. Maybe pandemic related?

Plus, they seem to be a pretty devious outfit - you really need to 'box clever' and concentrate hard to get items delivered at the low postage rates that seem to be advertised: click on the wrong option and you'll pay far too much in shipping charges, or accidentally find yourself enrolled in Amazon Prime. Then you have to work out how to extricate yourself from that situation (they don't make it easy).

I’ve been a loyal customer since 2007 and have had no problems at all. Even my experience with customer service has been positive. I certainly don’t like everything I’ve learned about the company, but they are so convenient and inexpensive…

Amazon sucks in so many ways... The actual shopping experience is one of the worst. Search and sorting are extremely unreliable.

As a Prime member I usually buy there things that I know I might end up not keeping. The free returns are definitely a feature.

While I was a college student I definitely appreciated the $4 used books (vs $100+ the university bookstore would charge). I hope they still have that.

I was annoyed about them not giving me a replacement for a clearly faulty product. They only give you a refund and you have to send the faulty item back for it. Then, you have to repurchase the item. They make it hard for you to deal with faulty items. They also try to deceive you into subscribing to Prime using confusing arrangements of buttons. I don't trust them. It's a dodgy company.

Microsoft is similar, too.

I never had Prime Membership till my girlfriend signed up. Before I had Prime I had to make sure my orders were at least $25 to qualify for free shipping which was the slowest shipping speed. Sometimes cheaper items were considered add-on items & my orders had to be $25 not counting those items. I could spend $40 or more buying multiple add-on items but still had to have $25 not counting them to get the free shipping. At some point Amazon rose the $25 minimum to $35 & it may even be higher now. Part of the reason Cass wanted Prime was so she could stream music from there for free but the apps do not always work very well & they sometimes delete songs from her playlist or have other various issues with freezing or crashing. I never streamed music from there but I used to buy music like I'd buy physical CDs from various sellers if I could not em & could get them new or used in very good condition for cheaper than buying the DL. I quit being able to afford to buy music after I moved out of my parents & about the only music I buy these days is from independent artists like on Bandcamp or Kickstarter like campaigns. Amazon Prime has some movies & TV shows available for free streaming but we have other various streaming services & hardly stream shows from there.

Some people in the US can get Prime for half price if they have food-stamps/SNAP & maybe some other benefits like Medicaid but your not allowed to share with anyone else including others in your household. Cass has food-stamps & we both have Medicaid but I would have to use her account instead of using my own & she's worried about me accidentally screwing up things like her lists, playlists, checking out using her credit-cards & using her points. We have access to each other's payment methods when checking out anyway since we're in the same household & I don't really use the list or playlist features but her OCD causes her to worry.

I've had some shipping problems with Amazon after the pandemic started. The best shipping time frame I could get sometimes when checking out was almost a month away for anything in stock & one time they waited over a month to ship my orders. I contacted customer service by their online chat thing & I got the runaround with 3 different people including a manager/supervisor. They did not have a clue about when my orders might ship & they gave me a credit for like $20 or something but my orders were all suddenly marked as shipped by the time the chat ended. I had 3 or 4 different orders made at different times. One order was made almost a month & a half earlier & the 2nd was made about a month earlier. All my orders suddenly shipped together right after I contacted customer service but customer service could not tell me anything about when my orders might ship Their system really needed to be fixed or updated or something. Their shipping has been a lot faster lately but I still try to make my orders about a month before I actually really need em just in case things suddenly get screwy again.


Amazon's business model would be the envy of all true Ferengi. Rule Of Acquisition #261 states, "A wealthy man can afford anything except a conscience" & this is VERY true about Jeff Bezos. Amazon pays no income tax & Jeff Bezos can afford to fly in space. LOTS of Amazon's customers & employees are paying income taxes & almost none of em could ever afford a space flight. Amazon overworks their employees for $hit pay & fires em for trying to unionize & speaking out.

I buy things from amazon sometimes, usually because it's significantly cheaper than in store and sometimes because they're not available in store. I guess sometimes just for convenience, too.. like why would I want to drive all over town searching through retail stores to see if they have what I want when I can just click and order a handful of things ? Internet and amazon has changed shopping forever.

Sure, I still like to support local.. but sometimes it's very hard to do when prices are WAY higher and I can't afford to pay that much more for things. There's also a shortage of workout/dietary supplements on store shelves right now, so chances are I'll buy some from amazon. Not sure how amazon sellers can keep stuff in stock but there's nothing on major grocery chain store shelves ?? But that's the current reality, soooo, gotta order from there.

Still, I try to strike a balance and buy things from locals when it makes sense - especially locally made things.. but for stuff that's mass produced mass market stuff that gets sold at every big box retailer ?? I don't really care that much whether the sale goes to Costco or Amazon. I mean, Costco Does treat their employees better.. so there's that.. but it's not like I'm choosing between a local artisan or amazon for many of these items.

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No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

I use Amazon all the time, because I hate in person shopping.
Even prior to Covid I preferred shopping online.

I've never really had a problem with them.
I can return pretty much anything long after buying it.

Sometimes they refund my money and say I can keep the item.
One time they refunded me a lot of money just because I had an inconvenience (no returned product).
I didn't even ask for compensation. ^

There are hardly any real stores here so pretty much everything we need is on Amazon, except food.

Out here in midwestern farmland where there isn't a large enough customer base for a lot of brick and mortar retailers to survive, Amazon has been quite useful, as have other online retailers.

As it happens, rural areas out here have at least a century-long history of mail order.
Including mail order kits for actual houses from brick-and-mortar retailers Sears and Montgomery Ward.
You would order the house and it would arrive as a giant kit in a railroad car.
A reference, https://everydayoldhouse.com/american-f ... s-wardway/

My experiences with Amazon itself and with 3rd parties selling through them has been mostly good.

Biggest complaint is shippers including Amazon itself sometimes shipping large, heavy, hardcover books in plastic bags.
The corners can get quite beat up.

Now it is necessary to even buy bath soap online after Walmart and the couple other retailers we have in town stopped stocking one of the very few bath soaps I can use without having an adverse reaction to.

And of course a town of population less than 10,000 is not going to be able to support a hobby shop, even with population of surrounding county figured in, so I have long been ordering hobby supplies online, even back when I lived in a suburb of Kansas City.

I can't even get Walmart delivery where I live.

It's basically Amazon or Bust.

Amazon can takes weeks to arrive here.
I ordered a bottle of vanilla and it took almost three weeks to arrive.
I use them as a last resort.Walmart ships faster here ,usually arrives within a week.

My Amazon is almost-always next day because of Prime.
They deliver until 10 pm, usually by Uber drivers or random people.

I'm waiting for something right now that I ordered last night.
It should be here any minute.

Can you order food on Amazon?
We can't get food. Even pet food is impossible to get.
We don't have Chewy or PetCo or most of the big pet stores.
I have to buy pet food from my veterinarian's office and pick it up.

* I do get online human groceries, just not from Amazon.