Amazon may have made a mistake offering me a free three month trial of their "Prime" free second day shipping program. If they were hoping to increase unit sales this holiday season, they certainly succeeded. I suspect that next quarter's financial statement will include a line item recognizing all the purchases I've made. But free expedited shipping on $10 orders hardly seems like an economically viable situation.
Normally I don't preorder items, but since there was no longer an extra cost for ordering single items, I went to the music store and put in preorders for a bunch of upcoming CDs. One of these was the new Lindsay Lohan album that was just released yesterday. I went Amazon to check on the status of my order and found that the price had dropped by another dollar since I ordered it. Fortunately, with the exception of the Harry Potter books, I've found that Amazon can take a little time shipping new product on release day, so there was still time to cancel the order and reorder at the lower price.
Why would I buy the new Lindsay Lohan CD? Well, quite simply Lindsay Lohan rocks. If you don't believe me you can just check out the URLs for her website (http://www.llrocks.com) or her MySpace page (http://www.myspace.com/lindsaylohanrocks). I was on the MySpace page this morning as they were updating it. And so I became the very first person to play the newly uploaded track on MySpace. I feel so special.
