mtbc | Amazon's coercion

Amazon Prime membership offers an increasingly attractive range of streaming video. From my perspective this includes Mr Robot, Preacher, The Man in the High Castle, The Americans, Le Bureau des Légendes and probably more. Under ordinary circumstances I would be seriously considering subscribing.

Unfortunately, further to my previous criticisms of Amazon's website of recent years, on top of my one about the checkout experience making me work ever harder to not join Prime (indeed, I'm still not a student), in recent months they have been listing various products (some previously generally available) as being exclusively for Prime members. This latest instance of obstructive heavy-handedness galls me and I thus do not consider rewarding their crass manipulation as they intend: I instead want their unhelpful money-grubbing behavior to backfire. They don't get to pretend to be a useful online marketplace then sucker me into a membership club: choose one or the other then plainly be that instead of frustrating and disappointing me by straddling the middle with cheap tactics.

Additionally, Amazon's reliability has also been declining for me, perhaps due to sellers for whom they distribute: recent incidents include fresh food that was many weeks out of date and an item that was mailed a week later than claimed and arrived outside the promised delivery window. However, that issue may just be bad luck: I don't order enough to have statistical confidence in that decline. I still use them at all only because they consistently issue a refund when I complain but better for all of us if they get it right first time.

Rather than their site being one that tries hard to sell me things for which I wasn't looking, I want to use an online vendor who makes it easy for me to find and buy the things I want.