Amazon adds gasoline discounts for Prime members

techcrunch.com

7 points·geox··6 comments

I wish we'd stop throwing more and more crap into these subscriptions because it just adds more excuses to hike the price up.

Wasn't Prime just a shipping benefit? I don't want any of this extra crap, and now even with Prime I can't even get "two-day" shipping on anything where I live.

And then to add onto this, watching other companies tack subscription services on as "perks" as some kind of katamari hellhole of billing.

It was, then Amazon added streaming and jacked up the price massively. In the past 10 or so years of being a Prime subscriber I've used their streaming services probably less than twenty times. Not a fan of "everything" subscriptions because you inevitably end up paying for services you don't want or need.

Once upon a time, this would have been a decent discount. Of course, I'm referring to the days when it was plausible to get gas for $0.99/gallon. A blanket 10% discount was pretty nice.

Nowadays, with gas routinely pushing $5/gallon, we're down to 2-3%. That's a rounding error. Sure, it adds up, but if I have to do anything new to get the discount at all, then it quickly becomes not worth my time.

I wonder if it's being subsidized by this

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/amazon-prime-video-i...

I highly doubt it. Amazon doesn't need to stuff more ads into its video platform to be able to introduce another feature they can tell people in its promotionals for Prime. More ads are being introduced to Prime for nothing other than increasing the return on a revenue stream. It's not something the company ever needed to do.

I cancelled my Amazon Prime subscription 2 years ago and couldn't be happier. Good riddance.

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