The Great UnGoogling Side Story: The Optimal Death of Prime

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/

I've been invested in the Amazon ecosystem for many years. You might even say I was an early adopter, especially when they expanded their offerings from books to DVDs. It was simply the best place to get movies if you had particularly obscure tastes like I do. I mean, if Suncoast didn't have it, it might as well have never existed.

Hopefully, you don't need me to tell you about everything wrong with Amazon. If you do, let's just say their convenience comes at a steep price, and I don't just mean the flow of money. 

Speaking of money, I had a Prime membership for years. It seemed like a no-brainer; 2-day shipping, Prime Video, Music... You were paying for the streaming service but with a boatload of perks. 

As time has gone on, however, the perks have not increased in value. In fact, many features have ducked behind paywalls and has left my membership feeling rather anemic. 

First, there was Amazon Music. Instead of giving you unlimited plays of certain songs, everything went to a Spotify-like shuffle mode. The entire catalog was available, but you'd have to wait for it to randomly show up. The biggest problem with this was that it affected any singles or albums that you purchased. This was resolved eventually, but that it happened in the first place showed how much of a rushed solution this was to a cashflow problem. 

After that, they started putting ads on Prime Video. Here I was paying about 140 dollars a year, and they were still going to have me sit through ads while watching movies and shows. Rather than make a new, ad-supported tier to draw in new users (like HBOMax and Netflix), they changed the tier I was already in to the ad-supported one. Simply put, this is not what I signed up for, and I wasn't alone in feeling this way. Ironically, I wouldn't have minded if they simply upped the price of Prime as they've done in the past. I pay it annually because that is much more convenient than juggling monthly charges. However, getting rid of the ads on Prime Video requires a monthly charge of 3 dollars. There's no option for me to pay more annually. Bear in mind, I also pay for Kindle Unlimited and Audible, so this was turning into a mess. I can understand making those a separate charge, but now they're going to nickel and dime me on a service I already paid for in advance. 

Another service I'd paid for annually was Disney+. However, after that business with Jimmy Kimmel, an increase in their annual price, and now their current deal with OpenAI to flood Plus with slop, not only did I not renew my Disney+ subscription, but I'm not giving them any money for the next year at least, including going to their movies. I'm not paying for slop. If they want in bed with OpenAI, they can have each other.

Speaking of AI, Amazon made their own AI deal that served as the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I have an array of smart speakers around the house. They're very handy. I use them for kitchen timers while cooking, controlling lights, making grocery lists, playing music (if I don't mind the shuffle mode), and sometimes as an intercom with my roommate, among other things. Again, very handy. Alexa Plus, meanwhile, is only handy in the sense I want to put my hands around its neck and squeeze its damned life out of it. At first, it was offered as a beta program and an update to the Alexa app. In addition to the hassle of dealing with how everything was rearranged in the app, using the new Alexa Plus was equally tedious and even counterproductive. Without getting into the weeds of how virtual assistants work, they replaced Alexa's hard-coded routines with a chatbot that turns nearly everything you ask it to do into a big production. I almost wouldn't mind it except everything took slightly longer than it normally did. I swear the first time I tried adding something to the grocery list in the new app with Alexa Plus, it took about five minutes. Full disclosure, I've used AI chatbots before, and I hate them. I hate everything about them. It gets under my skin because chatbots are essentially what customer service jobs want you to sound like in a call center scenario. It's that mode of speech which tries to sound casual and friendly but is so forced as to be legitimately insulting. There's an uncanny valley aspect to it as well; it's trying to sound so human that it backfires. 

I tried to back out of the Beta program, and was successful, but only until the app update forced Alexa Plus onto me. If I kept my Prime membership, I was getting Alexa Plus whether I wanted it or not. 

This led me to look into my Prime membership and see just what exactly I was (and wasn't) getting for my money. One of my favorite aspects of Amazon is something called Subscribe and Save. At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch, you lump so many items together in a single shipment and set them to be dropped off at regular intervals, and this not only comes with free shipping, but discounts on the goods in question compared to one-time purchases. This is how I get my cat food, kitty litter, paper towels, bath tissue, and even my protein bars. Having boxes of paper towels and toilet paper dropped off on my front step instead of dealing with it during a Target trip is so convenient. It's pretty much like having a bulk store membership only you get everything delivered. I'm even using it for my roommate's colostomy supplies. I was convinced that all this was part of the Prime membership; it seemed like the next logical step from the 2-day free shipping that Prime offers. Looking into it, though, it turns out this is not tied to Prime. It's a completely separate service that anyone can sign up for. 

That was my a-ha moment. The only thing that my Prime membership was offering besides 2-day shipping on some items with no minimum total in the cart was Prime Video, and that was really not worth having the ads on it for what I was paying. If I really want to see something, it's easy enough to just wait for the whole series to drop, pay for a month (maybe even shell out the extra 2 or 3 dollars to watch without ads), and then binge the whole thing before the time goes up. My roommate's a little disappointed as she's a big Critical Role fan. Even though this membership won't lapse until June, that means future seasons of both Vox Machina and Mighty Nein will have to be consumed via the binge and run model.

I wonder how long before Amazon enacts an "x-months minimum" stipulation to their Prime Video memberships. 

A Prime Example

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an Amazon slave. I've been a Prime Member for years, I have several Alexa smart speakers, I use Subscribe & Save, I use Kindle and Audible, and I even watch Prime Video (mostly for the Grand Tour or anything the old Top Gear crew is attached to). I know the company is evil, they treat their workers (especially their drivers) like garbage, their returns are a joke, and Jeff Bezos is dumping tons of methane into the atmosphere with his phallus rockets, to say nothing of that stupid yacht he tried to have a bridge disassembled over. 

Yet... I'm still paying. I can only offer so much in my defense. There's still plenty of small and local businesses I support, and there's certain items that I simply will not buy from Amazon if I can avoid it. If I can get it straight from the manufacturer, I'll go that route (especially if they let me check out with PayPal because that's just as convenient as Amazon). To me, Amazon offers a way to eliminate tedium. I don't have to haul bags of cat food, kitty litter, and sparkling water around in a cart, into my car, out of my car, and into my house. Now, all but that last step has been eliminated. It's one less thing I have to deal with. It's cruise control, not fully autonomous driving, if you follow. The point is if it all went away tomorrow, I'd be only a little bit bummed... for about five minutes, and then I'd move on to something else. 

Is it really an addiction if you're in control of it? 

Anyway, there's still the dilemma of supporting a terrible company, but the awful truth to that matter is that voting with your wallet is kind of a hollow promise. After all, there's no "vote against" just voting for something, and not voting at all. Moreover, if you know anything about how the company is structured, their main money maker is not their retail branch. It's all their web hosting. That's where this gets really scary. I heard once that all of Netflix's servers are owned by Amazon. That may seem like a massive conflict of interest, but it's actually good business. There's a similar sort of relationship between Apple and Samsung. Yes, they're rivals in the smartphone space, but if you were to open up your iPhone, you'd find Samsung's name on more than a few components. In fact, the iPhone camera is actually a Sony component. I find that funny because the camera on my old Xperia phone wasn't all that great, but the little iPhone 5c I got to replace it took damn fine pictures right out of the box. 

I decided to write this entry after receiving an email from Amazon that some of you may have read yourselves or at least heard about on social media. Ads are coming to Prime Video. Although they insist there will be overall fewer ads than television, it's more than a little disheartening that this is what they resorted to in terms of expanding their market share in the streaming space. 

Rather than create a new, lower-priced, ad-supported tier and bring in new customers, they'd rather punish loyal customers who have been paying for Prime for years (seriously, whatever happened to grandfathering?). Instead, they now offer an ad-free version of Prime for an additional fee. Obviously, this is about Amazon making more money. They chose this strategy because simply raising the rates would have deterred many from renewing, so they decide to raise the proverbial temperature of the pot of water instead of dunking us in straight away. As I said, I think they could have done more to draw in new customers than try to tiptoe around existing ones. 

As for what I'm going to do about it... very little. Ironically, most of what I've been watching on Prime Video of late has been through their subsidiary FreeVee, which is ad-supported anyway. There's also that practice of advertising their other shows before the ones I'm already watching. It's frustrating that this is happening, but I'm more mad at myself for not being more bothered. I feel like I should be cancelling my Prime membership as a statement, but I know it's not going to change anything and despite what I said about what I'd do if this all went away, I don't want to be the one to pull the plug. Given the scale, it would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. Then again, we're also living in a time when a comedy about Wile E. Coyote suing Acme was brought back from a fate worse than death for media. 

Maybe we're reaching a point where it's more than just the bottom line that a business can pay attention to. Yes, Coyote Vs. Acme got a big boost from a number of meetings being canceled, as well as the potential threat of Capitol Hill getting involved (one congressman compared the move to committing arson and insurance fraud), but it's still notable how much of a public outcry got heard. Hell, remember when the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie got delayed because of backlash against the early trailer? No calls for boycotts there, just plain, "Dear God, what is that thing!?" from a few thousand voices on Twitter. Yes, there was still a bottom line ultimately being threatened, but we didn't have to wait until opening weekend for the change to occur.