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Maybe some of have already seen this, but I hadn't seen it until it bit me in the ass today. Amazon is listing some of its standard products as Prime only, meaning only Prime members are allowed to buy it. Prime is an Amazon subscription service that gives you free 2-day shipping (to your local post office, not to your door), streaming services, and a bunch of other 'benefits'. They have gone to great lengths to push this $99 a year service on people, including delaying normal shipments and preventing you from buying what you want. I no longer qualify to reorder a SSD I bought last week since I'm not willing to become a member (nor can I try the 30 trial as I did that back when Prime was new). All that SSD research time wasted.
We were worried about net neutrality. It seems in the future we'll have to worry about subscribing to every store we want to do business with just to have the privilege of buying from them. I'll bet money within a couple years you won't qualify for sales like Cyber Monday unless you're a subscriber. I can easily see that spreading to every store: "Pay $10 at the door for big savings on all our in-store, on sale items." Stores used to give you discounts for going to them, now you'll have to pay for the honor of shopping there.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday November 14 2016, @12:04PM
The success of Sears and K-Mart right now ought to be sufficient warning to Amazon not to close their doors to anyone but members. If you are not aware, Sears and K-Mart still exist. No, really. But they have built their business right now around people who sign up for their membership program. People are not doing that. The Sears/K-Mart thing is about to collapse.
Honestly, the whole Amazon thing would have collapsed by now if it had not been for the unexpected and unplanned success of cloud computing, which is the only thing they've done that's ever earned money for them.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14 2016, @04:31PM
We buy quite a bit at Sears because it's across the street at the other end of a mall. Recent purchases include appliances (fridge & washer for my mom) and tools (electric lawn mower & recently a string trimmer using same lithium battery).
In our experience the Sears sales people are often well trained and can actually give you useful advice -- a big difference to the sales people at other big box stores in the area who are usually useless. For example, while the string trimmer was recommended as working well, he told us that the snowblower and leaf blower that use the same battery are really too much load, very short run time. So we're keeping the old gas snowblower (even though I would rather stop dealing with small engine maintenance) & the corded leaf blower for now.
No connection to Sears, just a reasonably satisfied customer.