If you like Amazon Prime, you might start thinking about how much you like it. Do you only like it $79 worth? Or might you still like it at $99 or $119? The Verge reports that on Amazon’s latest earnings call, the company announced it is considering raising the price of Amazon Prime in the US by $20 to $40 per year, due to the higher cost of shipping goods.

The news comes just three months after Amazon bumped the price for free Super Saver shipping for non-Prime customers from $25 to $35. To be fair, the price of Prime has stayed pretty constant since it was introduced nine years ago (was it really that long?) and it’s started providing a lot more services, like streaming movies and e-book lending. Inflation being what it is, you sort of expect the price to go up sooner or later.

Even at $119, for people who order or watch a lot from Amazon it could still be a good deal. But nobody likes it when the prices on things go up. I expect we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Oh well, $79 was too much for my taste, so $119 is way too much. Streaming movies would just waste time.

    Raising that free shipping from $25 to $35 has definitely cut down on my Amazon purchasing. More and more, I’m using Amazon to find and research a product. Then I locate and buy directly from the company’s online store. Since I’m going to be paying shipping anyway, I might as well buy direct, so companies all over the country get all my purchase price. That’s the opposite of shopping in local brick-and-mortar bookstores and then buying from Amazon.

    Even when I lived in Seattle (until last August), I didn’t like the giant sucking sound Amazon was creating as it took money from the rest of the country and spent it in one city. And there was that the good paying jobs were in Seattle, while the barely above minimum wage sweatshop ones were everywhere else.

    I suspect Amazon has decided it has reaped all the competitor-crushing benefits it can out of subsidizing shipping. It’s now shifting its crush-the-enemy resources elsewhere. If the rumors are true, that’ll probably Made in China (not here) digital gadgets such as games and cell phones. In today’s global economy, you don’t have to build a factory to enter a market, you just rent low-wage workers far away.

    I do like that Apple under Tim Cook has begun to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. and spread the good paying jobs around. I’m living now in his old college town and mine, Auburn, AL. He really should locate an Apple store here. The closest one is about two hours away in Atlanta.

  2. Considering that Amazon has been using FedEx Smartpost, the post office, and worst of all courier services that use non-bonded employees for many of their deliveries (to both prime and regular customers, see the Amazon forums), their 2 day delivery policy has flown out the window. Worst of all, many customers do not even get their packages, and Amazon insists they cannot control what delivery company is used to ship the order.

    I gave up on Prime way back in 2008 when suddenly my orders were being delivered by A-1 courier instead of UPS. Depending on the driver, sometimes it was wonderful, but many times packages didn’t arrive for weeks. Amazon refused to fix the issue. I couldn’t believe they would be this foolish with a customer who had spent roughly $10,000 with them. I never looked back, and except for digital material or third party sellers, will never deal with them again.

  3. Smart Post and Sure Post are of concern to me because my local postoffice is really bad. They do not deliver every one of the 6 days they are supposed to. Sometimes they go as many as 4 days with no delivery, and I’m not referring to weather related times. When no one in an entire block gets mail, you know something is wrong. Thus far, however, my Amazon Smart and Sure posts have come when they were supposed to but other packages thru USPS have not, so it’s only a matter of time. Since I have had Prime as long as it’s been available, obviously I signed up for it for delivery benefits. I do not care about streaming video or the poor selection of Kindle books available to lend through Prime. Netflix does a better job with streaming and uses less bandwidth. I would like to keep the delivery part of Prime and perhaps they will spin that off priced separately.

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