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Comment by cschmidt | Hacker News Reader

You can benefit from the lock in. Amazon pays a fortune on my shipping for Amazon Prime. I ordered about 90 times last year, and got 2 day shipping on all of them. It replaces going to the store for many things, so more important to me is the time I saved shopping.

The upside for them is I spent about $4000 on Amazon last year, which is way more than I would otherwise. I don't know if it is good for them, but it sure seems good for me.

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I'm 100% with you there. I don't even bother price shopping anymore because I know with Amazon it will be close or better than average big city pricing and I get everything in a time period which seems instant.

I prefer to support Newegg when it comes to computer accessories for example because of patent trolls busting, and surely not Amazon who promote DRM. I'd buy on Amazon only as a last resort, if there are no other options.

I don't know if it's just me, but I noticed that the BEST price is not always on amazon. Most of the time, the retail stores' price is equal to what amazon advertises. Some stores (Costco & Sams) offer items at far below what Amazon offers them for. Most of the time, I only save paying the tax...

Does Costco offer free 2-day shipping? (or free shipping, period?)

If you are comparing an in-store price to the amazon Prime one you have to factor in the costs (implicit and explicit) of actually making a trip out for a particular item or waiting for your monthly Costco run to pick-up X rather than having it here by Saturday.

No Costco offers something similar to 'instant shipping', which means you come, you shop, you leave :)

you forgot the step of waiting in line for 20 minutes after collecting your goods for the privilege of giving them your money.

Also the step where you can buy many more things on amazon than you can at Costco. That said, if you want 300oz of peanut butter Costco may ne the winner there

Do they really? At start yes, I felt like it was good. All items, free shipping. It was really a good deal. But these days I ALWAYS see the same item I'm purchasing, much lower, without prime.

Example:

Item A, $100 PRIME

Item A (ie same item..), $80 (no prime available) $8 2d shipping, free super savers shipping.

I'm actually cancelling my prime account because of this. There is none of the last 10 objects i bought over the last 3 month that didn't have this issue.

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