Amazon Price Increase: Is It Worth It?

How important is your Amazon Prime membership? Is it worth an extra $20 a year?

More than 100 million people are Prime members. They get access to two-day shipping, unlimited streaming of music, movies and TV shows, discounts on Amazon Music Unlimited, and cloud storage for photos and more.

The Amazon CFO recently announced, “The value of Prime to customers has never been greater. And the cost is also high…with shipping options and digital benefits, we continue to see rises in costs.”

What costs?

Prime costs are increasing for several reasons: first, so Amazon can build more warehouses and a delivery fleet to supplement the ones currently used. Secondly, the cost to create video content. They spent $4.5 billion on non-sports programming last year, an undisclosed amount for 2 years of Thursday Night Football, and $250 million to buy the rights to produce a show based on The Lord of the Rings. And, our membership fees help fund this stuff!

The #1 reason people want Prime is for free shipping. But in a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. Amazon customers a majority said they won’t renew their Prime membership after it expires.  Why? Because most of their products are shipped free anyway! That’s right! FREE!

Walmart and Target don’t require memberships and they already offer free 2-day shipping for millions of items including groceries on all orders over $35.

Amazon Founder, Jeff Bezos said, “One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static — they go up. It’s human nature.”  

Unfortunately, he’s right. But, Paul said, …godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.

Maybe we just need to buy less, plan ahead, wait patiently for purchases to arrive and save that $119 Prime membership fee!

Are you looking to help a loved one with their finances?  We have lots of resources to help you do that. Learn more on-line at crown.org.