I’ve been a Prime member from the very beginning, but I’m seriously reevaluating whether I should drop it. The value proposition is decreasing for me. At $99 I thought it was pretty good considering the perks like video and music. But then they crippled Prime Music a few months back so it’s a shadow of what it once was (pushing you to subscribe to Unlimited). Now Prime Video is getting ads. Those “extras” are becoming less compelling. So I’m paying $140 annually for just free shipping? Hmmm, these numbers don’t add up anymore.
I cancelled last year. Slower shipping is annoying, but it also encourages me to shop elsewhere, which is nice. I haven't missed Prime Video, and I'm considering cancelling other streaming subscriptions as well (Disney+ and Netflix left, and both raised prices for my ad-free tier).
At current prices, I could probably just buy physical media for nearly everything I care about and come out ahead.
Amazon typically hasn’t been two business days consistently for years for me. I also found out many of their prices are massively inflated for certain products. A lawn mower I was considering was at least 30% more expensive than the same one on a competing website.
They've been pretty consistent for me, sometimes faster, probably because I live a few miles from one of their warehouses. But you're absolutely right about prices, I've found Target to be competitive or cheaper if they have it, and their delivery is just as fast as Prime.
Amazon pricing seems heavily weighted on whether you shopped around online or not. I think they have tracking cookies that check whether or not your comparing prices. If you do, they keep their prices reasonable, if not, they slowly jack them up until you start, then they back off a bit.
See that’s the wacky thing for the mower specifically. Not only do I shop with a browser that has all cookies disabled, I must have checked on the price for the mower ten times over many months along with some alternatives and even other websites. I think they inflate the price if it’s a 3rd party vendor selling on Amazon sometimes.