Amazon Prime

[dequire]

Sent them a message today on Twitter. Will post any response here.

[GreyGeek]

I also heard they increased free shipping minimums from $25 to $35 (to drive customers away). Actually I think it is all planned to lure customers into Prime.

mmm... I didn't hear that, Rich. Doesn't matter to me, though. I already canceled my Prime.

[GreyGeek]

I was shopping on Amazon a little while ago and noticed something that I'd seen before during previous shopping trips there. An item I was looking at was selling for $26 as a "Prime" item with free shipping. Underneath was a link to the identical product for $11.99 but without shipping. Checking, the shipping was $15. So prime with "free" shipping is just about the same as buying unprime and paying shipping.

[richb]

At least for that item. I would like to see verification that is true for all items.

[GreyGeek]

Verification is just a shopping spree away (sans purchasing). Just compare non-prime prices with prime prices on a wide variety of products.

[oshunluvr]

Not always true. Often not. We have 2 Kindles so I opted into Prime awhile ago because you can "borrow" a book once a month. My wife reads daily and I shop at Amazon often so the math worked for us. It's not like they hide the cost of anything. Even the dumbest consumer can add price + shipping and figure out which is the best deal. Heck, Amazon will do the math for you - just add your items to your cart and look at the total before clicking "buy."

The real advantage is speed of shipping. For us, the cost of prime was absorbed by the Kindle books so I basically get 2 day shipping for the "price" of 7 day shipping - which Amazon offers for free for most items they distribute. Here, in the L.A. area I once received a purchase on the same day as the order. Ordered at bedtime (technically tomorrow's business day) - item arrived before 4pm. Although, admittedly that was the only time that happened.

The other component to Amazons reduction is the cost of prime is competitors are starting to crop up. Amazon has sort of changed the playing field a bit.

[oshunluvr]

BTW: Prime now allows you to add family members - 4 I think - to your Prime account. They get the shipping/movies/books but pay for their own purchases. It's great for my sons to get the advantages for free.

[woodsmoke]

I was given a free membership to Amazon Prime ( by Amazon) because I spent ....welll several thousand dollars over a few years building a DVD collection of all the movies that I like, obscure music that I like, a boatload of books, a lot of "collections" of various comics, and some items such as one of the UNsigned limited edition release of the Maltese Falcon to help the original sculptor who had fallen on bad time.

It basically

a) eliminated all shipping costs
b) everything was overnight with no cost
c)and also offered bundle pricing.

https://And a note to the RIAA ........TEAMING MEDIA.

BUT......I am NOT going to download the Amazon Prime app on my phone because I did that with a couple of other supposedly helpful apps and I immediatly had to deal with DAILY "updates" that immediately ....dumped a "nag" for me to read.

And it irritated me.

woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

I installed Google's Chrome web browser and noticed this in its "about: plugins" page

Remember -- Adobe dropped distributing new versions of Flash for Linux when they essentially "outsourced" it to Google. Google now builds Flash using something called the PPAPI, or "Pepper." It's the only way you can get an up-to-date Flash player on Linux.

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2...-on-linux.html

[GreyGeek]

When Amazon videos stopped working for me I downloaded the Chrome browser, but it didn't work for me.

Interestingly, KWheezy 1.3 plays the videos because it uses HAL. I suspect that when Debian's stable switched to upstart it won't be able to play them any more.