After years of having Amazon Prime, I finally cancelled it today. The process was not terribly difficult, but I did have to wade through several “Please don’t go, look at all the stuff you get!” pages to get to the point where I could actually cancel. I’m afraid their plaintive pitch persuaded me not! I did elect to let my current membership expire on renewal, rather than get prorated the few bucks back by cancelling right this moment in a fit of pique.
Here’s why I’m cancelling, in case other Canadians are considering (American Prime is a bit different, so I wouldn’t really compare the two):
- Ordering far less often from Amazon
- Harder to find what I want
- To the point above, there is a vast sea of knock-offs and junk on amazon.ca now
- Pricing is often just so-so
- More stuff not covered by Prime shipping
- That 2-day shipping? lol, nope! (Well, sometimes, but increasingly rare)
- 11% off is not a deal, even if you say it is!
- Everyone else is copying Prime Days now, often with better pricing
- I can count the number of things I’ve watched on Prime Video on one hand. One was the execrable Moonfall, but that one’s more on me than Amazon, to be fair.
- The upcoming move to charge more for “ad-free” Prime Video didn’t exactly make my socks roll up and down in delight, either
- I never listen to Amazon Music, especially after the basic version was turned into a giant shuffle mode. If I want to listen to the radio, I can do that now, for free.
- Never read anything through Prime Reading. My Kindle still doesn’t know that left-handed people exist, and Amazon is making token efforts at best to control the flood of AI-generated garbage sluicing into the Kindle store.
- Took advantage of the Twitch freebies maybe twice? I don’t remember what I got.
- The more information that comes out on how Amazon does business, the more comfortable I am in not sending money to an apparently Very Evil Empire
And that’s it! I look forward to buying local more often! Sort of.