WTF is up with Amazon Prime lately?

Everything else
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New brake rotors
New brake shoes
Venetian masks for a party
A case for a phone
Clock radio
HDMI cables
Part for a refrigerator
Water filter for refrigerator
Heating element for a clothes dryer
Hair-care product
Undershirts
Work shoes

That’s the last 60 day’s worth of stuff. Could I have gotten that stuff cheaper elsewhere? Possibly in some cases, but with shipping thrown in, probably not.

Could I have gotten it faster? Ironically, the parts I needed for the refrigerator and dryer were available at a brick-and-mortar store about 45 minutes away, but the store is closed on weekends - I ordered them on Saturday morning and chose 1-day delivery; they were waiting for me when I got home from work on Monday, AND the cost was $65 cheaper than the store would have charged.

But mostly, it’s about getting what I want. Take the clothes and shoes: I’m an abnormally tall guy and it’s tough to find any shoes or shirts in my size at brick-and-mortar stores. There are big-and-tall-men’s shops here and there, but their selections tend to run towards “big” while I need “tall” so the selection sucks. Shopping on-line, there is plenty of selection and the prices are better.

Take the clock-radio: I wanted one that would (a) charge my phone, (b) have a good enough alarm setting that you can have a different alarm-time for weekends and weekdays, and © not have a display bright enough to keep me up at night. I could have gone to a Best Buy or Radio Shack or whatever and looked at the half-dozen models they might have… and I might have been lucky enough to get two of the three. On Amazon I browsed fifty or more and found one that I really liked.

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I look at all the stuff I have, and sometimes think “I don’t need 95% of this,” but the truth is I like worldly goods and I enjoy shopping for them. Online shopping that is, trying to make the optimal purchase, rather than the gathering-the-berries thing that most women like to do. Sometimes though I end up with information overload, where someone is saying that every item I’m considering will spontaneously combust a month after I buy it.

This. With few exceptions, the choices are always much better online, and there’s a ton more information. Further, when I finally make the decision, it’s a matter of moments to order it, vs. the time of going out and picking it up someplace local, assuming they have it locally, which they almost never do.

I did go to Lowe’s to find something to mount the ceiling lamp, and they didn’t have anything. They had ceiling lamps, and chains, and plates to cover unused ceiling electrical boxes, but no kits to mount a lamp that I already owned. Amazon had a selection of such kits.

I’m not a tall guy, but I’ve got feet like a frog, due to a birth defect - I was born with two club feet. They’re surgically corrected, but they’re flat and triangular. I wear 9 EEE shoes, and no one carries those, so online is usually my only choice for shoes that fit properly.

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You’re Jeff Bezos’ ideal Prime customer. It’s why they’re big on Kindles. Ship a Kindle to someone, and they keep buying tons of digital content. Amazon makes even more money, because they don’t need to ship anything; it’s just some bits over the Internet. Costs them a fraction of a penny to send it. Cha-Ching! Those thin margins look a lot better now!

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The difference for me seems to be,

Radio Shack or the like: Limited choices immediately.

Amazon: Can hardly make up my mind, overabundance of choice. But when I choose, it’s here in a day or two.

185

Oh I agree. It’s just that I don’t need Prime to order ebooks. Prime doesn’t do a lot for me in terms of digital content. If Amazon Prime was as robust as Netflix I could see dropping Netflix and being happy to pay $99 for Prime Instant Video, but our streaming habit seems to be about 95% Netflix and the odd show on Prime.

186

I particularly dislike watching videos on amazon, because there’s no way to tell it I only want the free streaming content. If I want to watch Mythbusters, for example, every listed episode is included in my Netflix subscription. Amazon lists every season but only has a couple seasons for free, and you need to navigate your way to the free stuff. It’s annoying.

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Amazon always streams in HD on my Roku while Netflix usually chokes up and drops to SD. Amazon can have my man-babies.

188

That’s just your ISP.

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Yeah, ISPs have been throttling Netflix. It’s annoying. “We’ll give you great download speeds for your internet usage as long as you don’t use a popular service like Netflix!”

I guess it’s supposed to be like insurance. It’s great until you have to use it a few times…

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Yeah Comcast is the culprit. Still Amazon streams flawlessly (for now).

191

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon will shake things up once again with an ad-supported media service which will stream TV shows and music videos for free. The new service apparently will not require a Prime subscription, but rather takes a page from Hulu, offering original and licensed programming free of charge.

Amazon will reportedly launch free video streaming service.

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Hah! You think you’re fossilized!
I still buy digital media on disks. mp3s are fine for casual use (and have been getting better), but I’m serious when it comes to my music. Even my heavy metal must come in CD format at minimum. I’ve even purchased a couple of metal albums on vinyl to check it out, and while I could discern no real quality difference, my girlfriend claims she can. But I’m not going with more vinyl. Too expensive. CDs are fine for my ears. So, yeah, I buy a few CDs per month.

Then there’s my favorite films and TV shows. I still buy DVDs. That’s right, I’m not even HD on my TV yet. I buy maybe $50/month worth of DVDs. Been cutting back there, though, as I really do want to get on the BD wagon soon. And when I do, there’s a good chance my HD TV will be ordered from Amazon. My first 2560 x 1440 monitor came from them, and with Prime, it arrived in two days, and in mint condition.

Classic games: I prefer my games in physical format. If it requires Steam or other online activation, I generally do not buy it, but if it’s a game I really want to play, and don’t care about actually owning my copy, I just buy direct from Steam. I used to buy a ton of classic boxed PC games from Amazon, but they are getting harder and harder to find there.

Computer parts: Newegg used to be the only game in town for me, but since Amazon got into it, Amazon stole all my business, thanks to a more liberal return policy, Prime two-day shipping, and sending me only new parts, and not open-box items like I’d sometimes get from Newegg.

Books: No Kindle here. I have an actual library. Which has been languishing the last 20 years since I discovered gaming, but I still buy the occasional book.

Reading what I just wrote, I almost feel guilty about abandoning all my other former online sellers, but Amazon is very, very good at what it does. And I’m happy as long as my local grocery stores stay in business. And I still buy all my clothing locally. And cars.
Maybe that stuff will go to Amazon too someday. However, the service industry will always be local.

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Mark, I think you should check out the “Kindle First” program - I just got an email about it recently. It appears this is a program where you can get one free book a month (from a limited number of choices) for your kindle or Kindle Reader. Link is here.

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People who think vinyl is somehow superior to CDs are loons. It’s the other way around by any objective measure. It’s only people who think hiss and noise are part of the music experience who think there’s something positive about vinyl. So, I’m sorry you’re dating a loon.

MP3s are another matter. They do indeed discard some of the information. The question is “how much,” which depends on the bitrate. It turns out in a double-blind test, even highly trained listeners can’t tell the difference at 256 kbps. In comparing the two, they chose CD as the “superior” sound 49% of the time. Of course, audiophiles being a bit snobby and loony, many will swear up and down that CD is better even if they can’t correctly identify which is which in a blind test.

Since iTunes and Amazon are selling stuff mastered at 256 kbps these days, it’s actually kind of likely that it’s now more about prejudice that an actual problem with sound quality. But to learn that for yourself, you’d have to conduct a blind test, where you compare the same material without knowing which is which, and you need to avoid extraneous changes like different volumes.

You can’t really do the same blind test with vinyl vs. CD, since you’d have to add fake noise to the CD to eliminate listener prejudice as to which is “superior.”

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That’s actually the lending library. But yeah, there are some good books in it.

— Alan

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I buy CDs because of the propensity of software to eat and digest my music. I’ve lost half of my digital music into the void just a few months ago, and just tonight, noticed that POS Homeserver started up its music gathering service again, causing every single song in iTunes not stored locally to become duplicated about 6 times in the list, after it took me hours of manually deleting the duplicates a year or so ago. I sound like crotchety old man when it comes to this stuff but for a casual music buyer I’ve had nothing but tears (over a long period of time, over the short time scales digital music is fantastic) when it comes to purely digital formats. You’d think an DRM-less file on a hard drive was as simple and pure as it comes, and so did I, but experience has taught me otherwise. Once you start putting files on NASs or servers or networked locations, bad things inevitably happen to them when you’re using consumer level, flaky POS software. So I have the CD to re-rip when the file meets its (seemingly) inevitable entropic destiny.

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Well Gus, you may be right. It’s been years since I’ve done any actual serious testing between the two, and the stuff I sampled was lower than 256, but I can’t remember how much lower. Also, thanks for that link. I’ll admit that a big part of it at this point is psychologically knowing that mp3s have stuff removed that keep me buying CDs. I have bought some mp3s on Amazon lately that do sound pretty damn good (which is why I wrote “and have been getting better” up above), but for some reason I have not bothered in recent years to do any one-to-one testing of those songs. It’s a little time-consuming to set it up (mostly in getting my girlfriend to administer the tests), but I should try it again sometime to give the better bitrates a fair shake.

Regarding our vinyl vs. CD tests: We did this on exactly one vinyl album, and it was not a blind test by any means. It was Avantasia’s “The Mystery Of Time”, which was supposedly mastered separately for vinyl (whatever that entails, I don’t have any idea, but that’s why I bought that vinyl example) on 180g vinyl (noticeably heavier, but not sure what that has to do with sound quality). The only difference I immediately noticed was that my turntable’s speed was off; it played slightly faster than it should, and for me, that was enough of a distraction to kill the test. My gf, on the other hand, could not sense the speed difference, but immediately exclaimed on how much easier it was to separate the sounds of the different musical instruments being used. Which I would have loved, so I tried it again, but could not hear the difference. I think I need to buy a newer turntable where I can adjust its speed.

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The problem there is it wasn’t an apples-to-apples test. If the vinyl version was mastered differently, it’s not the same source material. Vinyl itself is definitely not going to make it easier to separate instruments, but a different master possibly could, if they made different decisions as to how to mix the original tracks recorded in the studio. Though I’m cynical enough to suspect it’s still prejudice, rather than a real thing, particularly if she couldn’t hear the speed difference that was obvious to you.

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Well, there is the (perhaps) legitimate argument that albums originally recorded and mastered with the intention of being replayed on vinyl may have been mastered in such a way that they sound “better” (truer to the artist’s intent might be a better phrase) in that format than the crummy CD-transfers of the early days. Since there’s a ton of stuff that was never remastered or wasn’t edited well when it was, there’s definitely an argument for buying some albums in that format if you’re into it.

I’m a lot like Giles, though. My new music generally comes on a disc, even if I end up having it on the PC as well. This is less true for my kpop fixation since that’s still a bitch to come by in the US sometimes, but all of my heavy metal is disc-only. I kinda like the experience of physically leafing through the album booklet, checking out the sweet art and the gear the band uses, etc. Just recently picked up Tyr’s latest at a concert and Charlotte and used it to rock out alllll the way home (at 12:30AM; 2.5 hr drive, working at 8 the next day. God I am fucking stupid but it was awesome).

In all fairness, Amazon’s selection of discs is pretty great, but I kinda like rifling through local record store shelves anyway. I found a lot of cool bands back in the day by buying albums based off their covers or names >.>

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Actual selections from Armando’s vinyl collection include:

The always classic…

And “just because”