Cancel Amazon Prime: The subscription service is Amazon's greatest--and most terrifying--invention.

[Ms. Toad]

52. Just like anything else - it is a tool. It isn't inherently good or evil.

And - like everything else, in choosing to use this tool I do my research. Nothing in the article surprised me. I pay less for the Prime than the benefits I receive. I would not separately choose to buy a subscription for "first reads" - a book a month. At the right price I might buy a subscription to the video service. We haven't had access to TV since the analog to digital conversion, so we rely on netflix and Prime videos for entertainment. That changed recently, with the advent of Locast.org I now have access to the "local" stations via a streaming service. So the "might buy" video, plus the free shipping covers the cost of membership (including the intangible price in data). (And, I do a check annually when I review annual purchases for sales tax reporting to make sure the balance still holds.)

The ony thing I hate - which is not mentioned expressly in the article (and not directly connected to Prime) - a year-ish a go Amazon redesigned its search tool which makes its "order by" sorting worthless. I always search by price (lowest to highest). When I order my search by lowest to highest 2/3 or more of the "sponsored" products fill the page - so I have to move through page after page after page before I reach any significant quantity of unsponsored products arranged in order from low to high. I've been able to work around it a little bit by choosing anything in the left filters, which seems to override most of "put sponsored items on top" algorithms.