While I love real world bookstores, I also love the convenience of buying from Amazon. I can spend countless hours browsing books via the “Customers who bought this also bought …” feature. It’s addictive and time consuming.
In the past, if I wanted a book, I would add it to my cart and keep browsing until I had $25 worth of books to trigger the free shipping. I realize I wasn’t really saving money by doing this - in fact, I was doing exactly what Amazon wanted me to do by purchasing more - but I rationalized it by thinking I’d rather spend my money on more books rather than just shipping. What I didn’t account for was the time I was wasting. Every time I wanted to buy a book, I’d spend another 1/2 hour to an hour browsing other books until I crossed the $25 threshold. At that rate, I might as well go to a real world bookstore and buy the one book I was originally looking for.
Thankfully, Amazon introduced Amazon Prime and solved this problem for me. I pay $80 a year for free 2 day shipping. My average purchase price has dropped from over $25 a purchase to about $10 a purchase and instead of spending an hour on Amazon each time I think of a book I want, search for it, click on the 2 day 1-Click option and go away. I spent less on books and I save time.
The only problem I see with this new system is the wastefulness of shipping one book at a time. If only Amazon offered a feature where they added an option to wait until I had some number of books in my queue before they shipped them. Of course, then I’d have to reconcile my “I want it now” urge with my desire to be friendly to the environment.