A Parisian Cancels Amazon Over A $2.99 Optional Fee -- I Can't Make This Stuff Up -- February 6, 2024

Locator: 46747AMZN.

Updates

Later, 1:19 p.m. CT: coincidentally, the following showed up on my doorstop today -- all from Amazon - and each alone in shipping costs would have cost me my Amazon subscription cost had I personally paid for the UPS or FedEx cost of mailing.

Original Post 

Link here. 

Wow, her judgement surprised me. 

Bottom line: the writer, a business writer from The WSJ, sees Amazon as nothing more than an on-line retailer from which she can order books. Wow. 

And the deal breaker? An optional -- an optional -- $2.99 monthly fee for ad-free Amazon Prime Video. By the time I finish this note the writer will have had another $5.99 latte from Starbucks. Wow.

The straw that broke her back? An optional $2.99 fee for ad-free Amazon Prime Video. 

Bundled with my Amazon Prime subscription is my Amazon Prime credit card. At 5% cash-back the card paid me close to 5x the cost of my Prime subscription. That should be enough.

My monthly subscription costs well less than $15 / month but even that much would not bother me. I regularly mail products to my extended family. Two boxes mailed through USPS easily reach $15. Don't even get me started on UPS and FedEx.

FedEx: two-day. LOL. In the DFW area it's two-hour delivery.

Enough of this. We haven't even begun to talk about all the other benefits. 

My subscription to The New York costs more than my Amazon subscription fee -- the latter -- when measured by dollars only -- is paid five times over by cashback from the credit card. 

But at the end of the day, I'm glad that we get stories like this: it makes it more and more difficult for the owner of The Washington Post -- the WSJ's #1 competitor -- to raise prices. 

Later: aha! It makes sense. The writer lives in Paris. That changes everything. I have no idea what the writer's experience with Amazon in Paris is. Having said that, the writer has trouble with a $2.99 optional fee but no problem with buying two multi-thousand-dollar e-bikes from a manufacturer that subsequently went broke. Link here. A VanMoof e-bike starting price, $3,998. And that's a price increase from the pre-order price of $2,998. And only $1,998 in 2020. And this writer breaks off a relationship over a $2.99 optional fee. The subscription for an on-line subscription for The Wall Street Journal? We pay more than this but the best deal I can find on-line: $39 / month or almost $500 / year.

The bike:

The WSJ:

Amazon: the $2.98 option fee that led to the writer's break-up. LOL. 

**************************
Personal Investing

Bought UNP today. The largest one-time purchase of a single stock in a long, long time.  Again, it's in my bucket list and will be held for years, if not decades.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. 

Again, all my posts are done quickly. There will be typographical and content errors in all my posts. If any of my posts are important to you, go to the source.

Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market

***********************
The Book Page

Today, from the library, the three books -- the three British history books. The others from my library.