More specifically, the total revenue of ads + the people willing to pay $3/month is greater than the revenue lost when people cancel their service due to ads
The bundling makes cancellation particularly unlikely: you can't (or at least I don't know how to) cancel the Prime Video part of the Prime package alone, so there's no way to show your dissatisfaction with this short of cancelling the entire Prime membership. Which this latest push, however small on its own, has been enough to get me finally to consider doing, but it's still tough.
The thing is I live less than 3 hours from a big warehouse (people who live in the same ZIP code as one of those warehouses often get 5-day shipping) but it seems that the residents of Upstate New York and New England are frequently treated as unpeople when it comes to facilities and infrastructure.
Why won't I leave Prime (yet)? Because I have an "Amazon" visa credit card, with an admittedly serious 5% permanent discount on all purchases from Amazon (as well as companies they own, such as Whole Foods.) I won't stop purchasing products through Prime just yet; am simply careful to avoid anything that looks problematic, price-gouged, or needing aftersale support, and the discount lock-in is too attractive to me to ignore for now. But video? I can always find it elsewhere. Same goes for "FreeVee" because "Free with ads" isn't free.
So if Prime is failing you in other ways, don't feel like you need to keep it to keep your discount.
However, I'm seriously reconsidering my choices. Almost my entire family is in the Apple ecosystem and we recently purchased an Apple TV device to replace a FireTV, and I must say that it is a much better experience. And iCloud is a better photo/video sharing platform for us than Prime Photos ever was. Really, the only thing keeping me subscribed to Prime is the cash-back program.
As for Prime Video, it has always been the most crappy of the video streaming options. It's always frustrating when the things that I want to watch are not included with Prime and require a purchase or rental. And now that there are ads and lower quality, the chance that I'll watch anything on that platform is steadily declining.
Now it’s generally 4 working days, sometimes more.
Almost all the services I’ve used Amazon for in the past keep getting worse. Prime shipping, video, Amazon music, etc
Their drivers are also the worst. The driver that covers my area tends to throw packages a good 10 feet at my door. Needless to say, Amazon is pretty much my last choice option these days.
You don’t want to know what happens in warehouses…
I could be reading that wrong, but it was sure how it looked with my first few non-Prime orders.
1. In most cases my Amazon orders took about the same amount of time to get to my house as they did with Prime: 3-4 days
2. Amazon has some terrible dark patterns. For example, on the product page you always see the lowest priced shipping option (usually free), but at checkout it defaults to paid shipping. It's really easy to accidentally pay an extra $5.99 for shipping, often with the same estimated arrival it would've had with free shipping.