Frupidity

My relationship with Amazon over the years:

2006: Wow, this site is awesome! I can find anything and get it delivered in two days!

2017: Those stories about people working at Amazon are a downer, but Walmart’s basically the same and now I can get stuff same-day, so Amazon’s still pretty cool. Also, why is the front page so much busier?

2021: Oh, so same day shipping only really works if you live in a city. Otherwise, it’s two days, which is still fast, so whatever, though I’ve definitely been getting my packages later than before. Why is it difficult to avoid drop-shipped remarketed AliExpress stuff? Also, why do I get tired after looking at their front page for five seconds?

2023: This is the third fucking time I’ve been tackled by a HUGE Thursday Night Football™ ad on the front page, I can’t avoid the Dollar General tier drop-shipped shit, half of the reviews are fake, and my wife’s same day delivery got misrouted AGAIN. Fuck this shit, Amazon; I’m done.

I cancelled my Amazon Prime account today. It felt really good.

I’ve been trying to do so for at least a year. Several reasons.

Insanely Thirsty Banner Ads

I really don’t like football. I don’t like most sports¹, but I REALLY don’t like football.

Amazon’s front-page banner ads have been interactive for some time now. They usually auto-play content, though, fortunately, they are mute by default. Sometimes, they’ll minimize into a smaller persistent banner that’s shown as you browse the site.

“Sometimes” only applies to Thursday Night Football.

I REALLY don’t like football.

Ergo prompter hoc, I associate Amazon with football, a thing I spend real, actual effort trying to avoid.²

Come for the ads, stay for the Family Tree tier fake shit

Most of the things I buy these days are either not on Amazon (Good cycling gear, dbrand skins, anything from Patagonia, though this seems to have changed recently) or are cheaper if purchased directly from the vendor (almost all toiletries).

This definitely wasn’t the case in the past, or at least it didn’t feel like it was.

What is on Amazon, in Costco-sized spades, is mountains and mountains of cheap, relabeled, drop-shipped items.

You know the ones: the brands look like callsigns, the items look almost like what you were actually looking for, and when they inevitably break a short while later and you post a bad review in response, they’ll give you the “better one” for free if you delete the review and three more free items if you replace the review with a positive one.

While this isn’t universally the case (Anker batteries and chargers are top-notch and are almost exclusively sold on Amazon), it’s been the default experience for me and many others over the years. I didn’t want to be stuck in a cycle of continuing to buy things from a vendor that disappoints me, so I cancelled.

Subscribe and Save: The Last Straw

Full screen reminders to watch football like a True American™ and hoardes of cheap junk were definitely annoying, but I did usually find what I was looking for and get it quickly.

However, it was the death by a thousand cut that is Amazon’s Subscribe and Save service that finally did me in.

I was a fairly faithful user of Amazon’s Subscribe and Save service for several years. Subscribe and Save enables you to purchase select items at a discount on a recurring schedule so that you don’t have to remember to purchase, say, Listerine mouthwash, every month.

I had 33 or so subscriptions that renewed every 1-6 months. Subscribe and Save does what it says on the till: I get an email when the renewal period arrives, the item ships shortly after that, and I receive it after a few days of waiting.

Unfortunately, “doing what it says on the till” doesn’t tell the full story. In reality, using Subscribe and Save became an extremely frustrating experience.

10% discount now, rand(-100,100)% discount later

Subscribe and Save only guarantees a discount on the first purchase of the subscribed item. How much you pay for every order after that is essentially a gamble. There is also no way to set a ceiling on the price of a subscribed item.

How much did I pay anyway?

Finding out how much you paid for an item purchased via Subscribe and Save is a surprisingly difficult endeavor.

Here’s a real life example. I want to get a report of the amount I’ve spent on a Subscribe and Save item within the last six months.

Let’s start with the list of subscriptions I currently have.³

As we can see, I only have one item: a two-pack of Vaseline (an excellent skin moisturizer for my extremely ashy skin that magically turns into dust the minute it touches water).

Let’s click on it.

Ignoring the distractions below, we see an option to “View Order History”. That’s convenient. Let’s click on it.

To get the actual amount I spent, I’d have to click on the order number here, which will take me to the Order Summary for the order that the Vaseline was shipped with. This order might or might not be just the moisturizer, so now it’s on you to dig into the order, break out the cost of just the vaseline (and taxes, if you need to be that specific).

The actual problem is in the UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH section.

I actually started this subscription back in 2022.

The only way I knew that was by remembering that I had a subscription for this item for much longer than was reported here.

So now the task of creating a report of your spend on this item for the last six months becomes a human data pipeline of searching for all of the orders this subscription might have been a part of, extracting the cost of those items from the rest of the orders from which they originated, recalculating tax and shipping costs (if you care), and, finally, saving them into a spreadsheet, maybe with a total.

But email

“But Amazon sends emails whenever you place an order. Couldn’t you just search for references to Vaseline in your email and get totals that way?”

Great idea! No!

Items purchased via Subscribe and Save look like any other item you purchase. To prevent Google from building a competitor using Amazon’s price data and their world-class data mining expertise, Amazon hides references to items that you purchased in the receipts they send you. They look like this.

If you know the order number of what you’re looking for, this works, but See Also: the last section.

Since I track all of my recurring expenses in my money management spreadsheet, this made simple questions like these nearly impossible to answer.⁴

But Privacy.com

You have dedicated cards for Subscribe and Save? That’s cute. Fuck you.

Amazon

I use Privacy to pay for all of my recurring expenses. Privacy makes it really easy for me to create virtual cards linked to my bank account that I can use online for all sorts of stuff.

A winning feature of these cards is being able to set permanent or periodic spend limits on them. You can set limits as low as $1 and as high as whatever your monthly allowed spend with Privacy is.

There were two scares where Privacy thought I did something nasty and locked my account and all of my cards temporarily, but they were resolved quickly enough and their support is slow, but helpful.

One of those times was because of Subscribe and Save.

Privacy will not allow you to use a single card with multiple vendors. Fortunately for me, the vendor for every Susbscribe and Save purchase is the same: AMAZON.COM/BI. Consequently, you (or Amazon) can totally mix and match these cards as it sees fit.

However, to prevent scammers from trying to fulfill purchases with zero-dollar cards and vendors blocking Privacy’s issuer identification numbers in response, Privacy restricts the number of cards you can create wiht a single vendor.

I had 33 subscriptions. That’s 33 Privacy cards. 32 more than Privacy is comfortable with me having with AMAZON.COM/BI. So they sounded the YOU'RE PROBABLY DOING SOMETHING NASTY⁵ alert and temporarily locked my cards and account.

Ultimately, I had to coalesce all 33 cards into one, which solved the “which card will Amazon charge this time” problem but brought me back to square zero of “how the fuck do I budget Subscribe and Save” problem.

Alternatives

These are the alternatives to Amazon stuff that I’m using or will begin to use.

This doesn’t include AWS and AWS-adjacent services like Alexa, though moving those over to other providers isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

Cheap, Dollar Tree, Disposable Shit

I still shop Amazon when I need cheap Dollar Tree shit, like a snapback hat extender because my head is gigantic⁶. I’ll pay a little more for two-day shipping, but whatever.

Shopping

For regular purchases, I try to buy direct from the vendor or from a small business locally. Shipping speed is slower, but at least I’m more likely to get it. Worst case, I shop at a big-box store like Target (whose online ordering systems are surprisingly good while significantly less frustrating than Amazon’s attention-stealing bazaar, and they do same-day shipping!).

Groceries

HEB or Kroger for life. I never used Amazon Fresh and rarely shop at Whole Foods, so no delta here.

Music

Amazon Music is a pathetic joke. Unless you want to listen to Top 40 or whatever you didn’t ask for. In that case, Amazon Music is brilliant.

I’ll continue using Apple Music.

Subscribe and Save

Ugh. This was the one holdout that prevented me from quitting Amazon cold turkey. As mind-blisteringly annoying as the service is, there aren’t really any alternatives.

So I had to go back in time a little bit. How did I buy stuff on a recurring basis? Reminders and shopping lists!

Apple Reminders makes creating reminders for every subscription period I used to have super easy, so that’s a solved problem.

Now I just needed a service that allowed me to create a list of things to buy during each of those periods in one fell swoop.

Surprisingly, Walmart has this.

I was able to create a list for every renewal period I used to have on Subscribe and Save and add items to those list. Buying everything on that list should be as easy as adding everything to a cart and checking out.

Since Walmart’s logistics is just beneath Amazon’s in scale (acutally better, but also worse, given that you can pick stuff up from their brick and mortar stores), I’m considering this to be a defcent alternative for now.

In a surprise twist, because household goods on Amazon are more expensive than at brick and mortars, I even saved a bunch of money (to the tune of $600/year)!

Footnotes