Amazon Prime Perfect for the Impatient

Signing up for Amazon Prime has been a great asset to our company and household. Many times, you think of buying something online and convince yourself that by the time you get it, it will be later than if you went down to the local store and purchased it. Amazon Prime helps with that. Recently, we thought of purchasing some books at our local bookstore. Then the thought hit us...What if they did not have the title? Of course they would offer to order the titles. However, the hassle of organizing the time and the children to visit the store would be daunting, especially if the title was not in stock. Now, if we could look up the title online, pay for it, and have it waiting at the store within the hour...well, that is a different post...

Amazon Prime enters the mix here with product availability and quick shipping. Yes, it takes longer than 1 hour to receive the product (2 days) and does cost a small amount for 1 year ($79), however, you do not pay for shipping on most items within the Amazon inventory for that year. For those two days, you could have saved time and sanity. For those of you saying that you would have just called the store to check the stock...ask yourself how often you get a hold of someone who knows the stock and is helpful...then ask yourself what happens if they do not have the resource...

As we venture back to Amazon Prime...think about how much you would spend on tax and shipping if you ordered one item any way. With rising shipping costs due to rising gas prices, you have just locked in your rate at $79 for all you need to ship regardless of changes within that year. We have ordered about five items within the last 2 months that would have cost about $60 to ship if we shipped them using the 5-day shipping option and about $80-$90 for the 2 day option. That is within the first 2 months. For the rest of the orders that we have this year, shipping has already been paid.

Even though Amazon has many different products, which you will not get just going to a book store, the one thing that we would have liked are the 2-day options for everything on Amazon. Amazon Prime is only available for items sold on Amazon. Vendor products such as those pulled in from Target or their food retailers will still cost you shipping at regular rates.

The interesting thing for us was the 1 month trial. We ordered two items before the five mentioned above. All items were received within 2 days and we were able to track them online. Try it. There are no commitments. You can turn off automatic renewal so that your credit card is not charged if you don't like it and it cancels itself. Good luck and enjoy.