If you buy a lot of stuff from Amazon over the course of the year, Prime makes sense. The movies and music are an add-on, and if you own a Kindle as I do, there are free books offered each month.
For me, Prime membership makes sense financially - I definitely get a payback, because I order much of the stuff I buy online from them and the shipping is free. The question is whether their new delivery model makes sense socially.
The article I referenced was the second I read in a week about the way Amazon is pushing their delivery services. FedEx has dropped them as a client; except in extremely rural areas where they have to depend on USPS or UPS, almost all of their deliveries are done by Amazon Logistics, which is a network of independent delivery companies. And because they're independent, Amazon is able to deny responsibility when someone is injured or killed by one of those drivers. The drivers are given daily quotas that are almost impossible to fill without driving recklessly. I know that in my apartment complex, some drivers won't even attempt to deliver to individual apartments - they'll just dump it all at the leasing office as if that was a mailroom - they don't have time to work their way through the complex.
And now Amazon is guaranteeing Prime members next day delivery, putting more pressure on the delivery companies and more pressure on the drivers. As we get closer to the Christmas season, this is starting to look like a nightmare - one that Amazon will accept no responsibility for, because the delivery companies in their network are all independent.
So now I'm left with the question of whether the benefits of Prime membership justify the really bad stuff that it creates. At the same time, I realize that canceling Prime is not going to help solve the problem - they will still use the same overworked delivery system to deliver packages. The only real option is to stop shopping on Amazon - and old habits are hard to break.
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