The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

I was on Amazon.com today and read about their new Amazon Prime membership. The short version is that you pay a one time fee per year of $79 and you never pay for shipping from Amazon.

This works on so many levels. You feel like you're getting something for free when you buy something and don't have to pay for shipping when you buy online. When you pay that one time fee, you don't even feel like you're paying for shipping at all. The prices at Amazon are often much less than you could get elsewhere and this is cancelled out by the shipping cost a lot of the time.

Second, you are given a huge incentive to make all of your online purchases at Amazon once you have paid for this membership since you would feel like an asshole if you paid for shipping elsewhere.

This also gives consumers a reason to buy tons and tons of shit from Amazon to make up for the original cost of the membership and, after having done that, to rake in the free shipping. They automatically give you two day shipping which is pretty good too.

Here's the thing, they are going to have to do something to make this a better deal than the already existing super-saver free shipping option. I'm afraid that they are going to eliminate this as an option completely or else make it so that you don't get that stuff for a few weeks after you order it. If they don't do that, then there's no reason at all to sign up for this program.