Lots of the automotive stuff was off-brand crap.
Amazon’s pricing doesn’t offer the same value it once did. And with prime membership prices increasing, I’m considering letting my prime membership lapse.
I’ll probably change my tune when Amazon finishes construction on its distribution warehouses in OKC and Tulsa and I have same day shipping available.
Too much off-brand crap from China that isn't worth the money and makes finding anything of value difficult. It seems like 85% of their inventory is Chinese crap with mediocre or poor reviews, 13% big name brand items, 2% small businesses with quality product. If your search returns even a modest 300 results, that's a ton of crap to filter through. You can't even trust all the reviews either, too many people write reviews as soon as they open the box instead of waiting to see how it worked for a week or month. Either that or it's a single one line review by a bot "thes prdukt is ghreat!"
Prime keeps going up so they can have exclusive original programming like Netflix. Neither company realizes that people want to see normal programming that we're too busy to catch on tv or in theaters and will only revert to exclusive programming when it's something of interest or we've exhausted all interesting shows/movies. I'm always bothered to find out that Netflix or Prime is spending millions of dollars on a new series, but still feel the need to raise my rate to cover it regardless if I'm interested in the series or not. I've already dumped Netflix because there aren't many movie theater movies there anymore. And most of what I watch on Prime I could have entertained myself with a free streaming service instead.
Same day shipping is a gimmick. I can't tell you how many times I thought I'd get something quickly because it was shipping from the warehouse that's less than 10 miles from my house, only to have it take 3 or 4 days because it didn't ship the same day it was ordered. Even though all major carriers now do home delivery on Saturday, Amazon still doesn't count it as a business delivery day.
They've changed their structure too. It used to be that items would ship directly from different warehouses directly to the end user. Now Amazon is shipping things between warehouses so that they will only ship from the local warehouse. This lets them keep shipping costs down, while making nightly use of the fleet of Boeing 767's they have leased for "inter-warehouse transfers" running out of Cincinnati airport. The downside of this is that the inter-warehouse transfers take a day or more to complete adding to the transit time. So what used to be 2-day shipping on everything is now "2 days from when it arrives at your local warehouse." Toss in a weekend and you're up to 5-7 days, yet they still claim it meets their 2-day shipping policy.
Amazon is also holding orders based on expected transit time. So if they know it will only take one day to arrive at your house from their local warehouse, they'll hold the order in the fulfillment queue until the last day they need to ship just in case you order anything else. So they've changed all their shipping policies to save them money, but it means same-day and 2-day shipping really aren't.
Their local pickup lockers are placed in the center of the city. So I have the option of getting something delivered to my doorstep after "2-day shipping" or driving 30 minutes each way into the city from the suburbs after "2-day shipping" to their pickup location. Forget the pickup locations unless thieves are constantly raiding your porch for packages.
When you deal with customer service about a late package their standard offer is $5 off your order or a free additional month of Prime. While a month of Prime is apparently more value, it costs Amazon next to nothing and ensures you're going to buy more shit from them, take the money instead.
I'll be dumping Prime when my year is up. It was a bargain back when it was $80/year under those policies and structure. I'd even be willing to pay their current $120/year for those same policies, getting everything I ordered practically overnight. But now they've just gone on an adventure to see if they can have everything under the sun for your one stop online shopping experience as cheaply as possible. /rant
