Canceling Amazon Prime 1 Comments
Amazon workers protest about their ties to ICE and military surveillance
Amazon workers protest about their ties to ICE and military surveillance

Canceling Amazon Prime

When I first signed up for Amazon Prime in 2005 for $70 a year, it was so worth it. I was ordering stuff from them almost weekly. I lived in Arizona, where my only alternative was Wal-Mart which was much worse at the time — and Wal-Mart still fights Amazon for the absolute worst pretty fiercely to this day.

Amazon wasn’t yet (or I wasn’t yet aware):

Amazon Prime is only worth it now if we:

  • have no problem with any of these issues ( 🤨😒😞 ),
  • live in a place with limited local shopping options,
  • use the Prime Video services regularly, and
  • order significant purchases 23 times per year.

If we’re ordering from anywhere that many times in one year, especially imported products, our carbon footprint is catastrophic.

Shopping on Amazon Today

Now, I order from Amazon at most 1-2 times per year. Much like getting off toxic social media apps, it took me a little while to find alternative places to shop locally or order from smaller, minority-owned businesses.

Here’s a quick way to get started. Search engine bookmarks with commands to dodge all the Amazon links while shopping:

But sometimes Amazon is the only option for specific items. How does that experience work now without Amazon Prime?

Screenshot of an Amazon shopping cart without Prime. It shows that Prime can arrive on Sunday, paid shipping for Monday is selected while asking the user to upgrade to Prime, but there is a free option for Wednesday that the user has to select to get free shipping without Prime.

They beg me to sign up for Prime all over the place, but once I get to my cart the only thing it gets me is my items 3 days earlier.

When we arrive in the checkout flow, they auto-select the paid option, even when a free delivery option is available to anyone. (This is called a dark pattern, where a service favors shareholders over customers in their UX design choices)

Do We Even Need Amazon?

Let me speak like a friend at an intervention and assure:

You don’t need anything from Amazon in 2 days.

We can wait a couple extra days. We can think a little farther ahead. And honestly, in the age of Amazon using their own shipping methods and a desire for them to efficiently ship things we’ll probably still get the thing faster than they pretend to estimate.

If we actually need something faster than that, why not go to the pharmacy/hardware store right now and buy it? That will always be faster.

If we’re impulse-buying things so fast and frequently that we receive packages we forgot we ordered, we could probably use a speed bump in our online shopping habits.

And do we really need another imported cheaply-made plastic thing we’re going to throw away and/or replace within a year anyway?

Did we even bother to ask our friends and neighbors if we could borrow something that’d do the job? Take the opportunity to build relationships with humans instead of only emerging from our homes to retrieve boxes, awkwardly nodding at neighbors holding their own boxes.

So cancel Amazon Prime. Stop shopping there whenever possible. Let’s help ourselves and our local economies and feel better about our consumerism. Let’s find more joy in the hunt for bargains and have more unique stuff. Let’s shop motherfuckers.

Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble smile and shout charge! as they run out of frame to go shopping
(but also, use cash when possible)