Amazon Prime Idiocy

In case you hadn’t noticed from my posts, I am a voracious reader. The nature of working for a large company is that you spend a lot of time on conference calls, most of it waiting. This is my time for reading blogs, news sites, editorials, etc—usually while babysitting some process or other that actually fits my job description. At home, a significant amount of my downtime is spent reading books, and most of those I buy at Amazon.com. Why Amazon? They have a huge selection and they are prompt and accurate in getting the product shipped.

Despite all the books I order, I have no interest in signing up for Amazon Prime, the service where you pay $80 a year for unlimited shipping. Most of the time I take advantage of “free super saver” shipping by ordering two or more titles at once, which means I never pay shipping anyway. So I tend to ignore the pitches from Amazon trying to get me to sign up.

Therefore, it was with tremendous dismay that I found myself enrolled in Amazon Prime after merely browsing through some titles on the Amazon.com website over the weekend. “Congratulations,” I was told, “You have completed your enrollment in Amazon Prime!”

Wha??

I did some poking around my account on the site, and found that I was indeed enrolled, although I was in a “trial” period for 30 days, after which they would happily charge $79.99 to my credit card on file. I have no idea exactly how this happened. When I queried customer service (very politely, I might add), I was told that this was due to a “combination of technical problems and human error.” The implication was the human error was mine, which I resent. But the important thing is that they were able to yank me from their gilded rolls of Prime Members from On High, and I am now once again a lowly bottom-feeder, super-saving my way to lower costs for me and lower margins for them.

Although they assured me this would not happen again, I am definitely re-thinking my book purchasing strategy. At the very least, I’m going to keep an eye on Amazon (and my credit card statement) to make sure no more of this hilarity ensues.