Worth it? Amazon Prime

Amazon Prime is one of those things that I’ve been renewing year after year. This year, we’re budgeting $125 for the subscription with taxes and fees. But, we’ve also got Netflix, Hulu, and Disney Plus. Is it worth it?

So What Does Amazon Prime Get Us?

Benefit	Do we use it?	Details
Delivery
Free Same-Day Delivery	X	Qualifying order of $35
Free One-Day Delivery	X	No minimum purchase, but the item must qualify
Free Two-Day Delivery	X	Almost everything that Amazon sells
Free Two Hour Grocery Delivery		Available in Denver – it would replace our Kroger pick up
Free Two Day Delivery of Prescriptions		Could potentially replace Walgreens
Free Release Date Delivery		Get new things the day they release
Free No-Rush Shipping for Rewards
Amazon Day		Get all your orders delivered on one day
Key by Amazon		Let people in to your house digitally! This would be a problem if we had package thieves, or if we ordered a lot of packages, but we’re home now…all the time
Streaming and Digital Benefits
Prime Video	X	We are addicted to The Expanse, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Upload. They are all Prime Originals, which are only available legally with Prime. They aren’t available for purchase individually.
Prime Video like HBO, SHOWTIME, and STARS for $4.99-$14.99/month
Amazon Music Prime		I was using this, but they limited the amount of songs that you can access. Spotify is a much superior product.
Amazon Music Unlimited	$14.99 a month	I believe this is their alternative to Spotify family, but I haven’t tried it out yet.
Prime Gaming		Last year Mr. FIVE spent $388 on games through Steam, but I don’t know if it’s comparable.
Amazon Photos		We store our photos in Google Photos
Amazon Kids		We don’t have kids
Shopping Benefits
Prime Member Deals at Whole Foods		The nearest Whole Food is 20 minutes away. This might have made it worth it for our old housemate, but we don’t see the savings here.
Prime Day		I’ve looked at Prime Day deals the last two years, and haven’t found anything that I’m moved to buy.
Prime Exclusive Deals		I’ve also never gotten in to the Amazon lighting deals
Amazon Prime Rewards Visa		Nope
Amazon Prime Store Card		Nope
Prime Early Access		This is not important to me
Amazon Family
Prime Wardrobe	X	I do like Prime Wardrobe for buying bras in the comfort of my own home, but the Amazon return process isn’t that arduous if I buy things directly from Amazon
Amazon 4-Star and Amazon Books Stores		The nearest physical Amazon Store is 45 minutes away, and the first time I went, I found it overwhelming and unhelpful. It was like a store designed by algorithm. Not cool.
Amazon Reloads – Earn 2% bonus when you reload your Amazon.com Gift Card Balance		This is interesting. If we put $100 on a Gift Card, we’d actually get $102. This might not make much difference, but it would give us more spending power.
Reading Benefits
Prime Reading		I have found one or two titles in Prime Reading that I can’t get from my library. I use Overdrive exclusively for my e-books. I very rarely pay for e-books and when I do, its usually an accident. I also have a widget that connects my Overdrive to my Goodreads, so I can see what’s available at my local library.
Amazon First Reads – One book Free		It’s just not that important for me to have new releases
Discounted Print Magazine Subscriptions		Absolutely not. We do not need more print clutter in this house!

What’s the Value of the Things We Use?

Free Shipping

If we didn’t have Prime shipping, we’d opt for slower shipping. We’d bundle our orders so we hit the $25 minimum. Or we’d pick up things locally at the store (shocking!). There might be one time a year that we’d need to pay for shipping. Let’s put $5.99 in the calculus for that.

Amazon Prime Originals

We love The Expanse, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Upload. The first two are appointment TV in this house. If we didn’t have Prime, we would buy the series – but surprise! Amazon doesn’t let you buy their original series. You HAVE to subscribe to get them. However, we’re talking about 30 episodes of TV here. Imminently bingeable TV, at that. Amazon does let you subscribe to Video only for $8.99 a month. Let’s say these three shows come out at three very different times of year, so we’d need to subscribe for three months. Total value: $26.97

Things worth Paying For	Cost
Free Shipping	$5.99
Amazon Originals	$26.97
Total Value	$32.96

Can Grocery Deliver Make the Difference?

In January, I spent $328.63 on groceries at King Soopers. Fortunately, my King Soopers Card tracks all my purchases, so I was able to “re-buy” all my January groceries at Amazon to see how much it would cost me. There were a bunch of King Soopers Specific things that weren’t available at Amazon. The “eligible” items at King Soopers cost me $255.56.

When I bought them all at Amazon…$270.57

So…no…

I also asked Mr. FIVE if the gaming subscription was good, and he said that he couldn’t see himself using it.

The Bottom Line

AAA isn’t worth it for us right now. It probably isn’t worth it for us in the post-COVID times either. We get the same services for $100 less through our insurance, even though it’s a little bit more inconvenient.

Now to figure out how to stop them from auto-charging our credit card!

Looking at what we actually bought

When I brought this up with Mr. FIVE, I said, “We’re paying $125 a year for $32 of benefits. We’re giving up 8 hours worth of work for the convenience of Amazon Prime.”

Mr. FIVE said “It’s worth it!” I said, “Oh?”

He said, “There’s all these things that I only know to get on Amazon. It’s worth it to not have to go into a store and potentially spend more money, when we can just get it from Amazon and have it show up the next day.”

I said, “But I’m not saying we’ll stop shopping at Amazon. We just won’t get things instantly.”

The conversation continues. We decided to look at our list of Amazon purchases from the past year and see what could’ve waited – this analysis is still in progress. Today, we’re a house divided on whether Amazon Prime is worth it, but we’ll see where we get!