To be fair, they are losing money on Prime. The alternative was likely raising the prices quite a bit.
This. I think of amazon as one of the last relics of the dot-com boom. Their business model never seemed sustainable to me. I would rather they limit the free shipping, force people to "bunch" orders a little to reduce their costs, than see them raise prices on everything to compensate for these losses. Finally, full disclosure, it troubled me for some time that they may have made things "too easy" to order with free shipping. This seemed to be a policy with negative environmental impacts, as well as financial. Even though I have been a prime member for many years, I also have "carbon footprint" guilt and self-imposed some level of delayed gratification when I could even before the add-on program, in order to reduce the number of times that big brown truck has to drive down my cul-de-sac. I even changed to 3-5 day shipping over the default 2 day setting when it really didn't matter to me how soon I got it (weirdly, I found I still usually ended up getting it in a couple days anyway!)
And anyway, it's not like they have only been removing usefulness from Prime. They have just been transforming it, making it more about media (adding free prim videos, kindle lending library) and repeat business (bigger subscribe & save discounts if you order enough). This makes sense given their clear business model to become more of a content delivery provider (compete with apple, netflix, etc). They don't want to raise the price of membership (look what that did to netflix, lol!), so they trim benefits somewhere else where it makes most sense (has biggest positive impact on margins). I'm saying I totally understand what they are doing with Prime, and I don't think it was motivated by desire to "screw" anyone, I think it clear that it is motivated by their long range business plan. A *very* clever one too! I don't think I would have ever signed up for Prime if it was just for media content. But they got me hooked into it with the low prices & free shipping, and, being a captured customer, they've successfully gotten me to buy into their "media ecosystem" (vs apple, google, netflix etc) by giving it to me "free" as part of the Prime membership I already had.
Anyway, all of this is OT to this thread. I actually understand the cancellations a little - it surprised me that they kept taking orders even after the 45-150 lens went out of stock, given that the fine print on that page said that it was limited to stock on hand, it clearly was a mistake in their ordering system. So I think those orders were never meant to be allowed in the first place. What I think is the real issue here is how they have inconsistently handled their response. Some people got total cancellations, others just got the G5 kit at the price they would have paid for it alone, others got the G5 but with $120 additional discount (I guess a proportional amount of the $200 promotion discount?) That's the bizarre part to me.
