Amazon now requires $299 annual membership to use grocery delivery service

Shawn Knight

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Amazon last year promised that customers of its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service would eventually be required to shell out $299 per year for a Prime Fresh membership. That time has finally come and unsurprisingly, people aren’t too thrilled about it.

Amazon first started testing its grocery delivery service some eight years ago in its home town of Seattle. Since that time, the service has expanded to several additional cities as Amazon seemingly toyed with multiple pricing models before selling on the new Prime Fresh membership.

As GeekWire notes, customers in Seattle, New York City and Philadelphia that logged into their account over the weekend would have noticed the change. A link to a page explaining the change says Prime Fresh membership includes free Amazon Fresh delivery on grocery orders over $50 in addition to all of the other benefits of a standard Prime membership.

In other words, if you’re already a Prime member at the $99 rate, you’ll need to dole over an additional $200 to upgrade to a Prime Fresh subscription. Amazon notes that existing customers who upgrade to Prime Fresh will be refunded for their Prime membership on a prorated basis.

Several Amazon Fresh customers took to Twitter to voice their displeasure over the fee with some vowing to take their business elsewhere. Such outcry is understandable considering many have been using the service without a fee for many years now.

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I can't blame people getting upset about the fee hike. At the same time though, $300 a year might not be that bad for having your own grocery delivery person that would be dropping food off, I am assuming on a weekly bases.

You can always still go to the grocery store if you don't like it.
 
Seems pretty cheap to me, $200 extra for groceries delivery compared to the $350 approx. I currently pay Tesco. When are they coming over here?
 
Strongly worded letter has been replaced by...Took to social media....Ha Ha Ha

140 characters of outrage.
You'd be surprised at those with very limited vocabulary skills (like gangbangers for instance) can make themselves very clearly understood with far less than 140 characters. Most normal people understand what muthaf___a, gonna get capped, dog, homie and a few other words mean.
You understand what I'm saying dog? :D
 
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$299 per annum? What a pleasure, if it includes all your groceries of course. Otherwise I'd far sooner go out and buy them myself. Bezos is rich enough, I'm not going to help make him any richer.
 
You know, my local grocer will make a delivery to me for nothing than a hot cup of coffee. I just have to be willing to take delivery at 8 pm when he's on his way home. Certainly not suggesting that it should be totally free, but the fact they won't simply add a fee to each delivery is unfair to the person that may only need the service a few times a year vs. the every week user.

I had several interviews with them about a high level job that I eventually declined because of the extream level of ignorance I encountered with some of their executives. They claim to have invented this service, obviously oblivious to the fact that most turn of the century grocers offered the service free to most of their customers They said, "oh this is different, it's based on cutting edge technology" In case they missed that too, the telephone was cutting edge technology one hundred years ago too.

Poor folks, I wonder if their next big idea will be as redundant as the latest!
 
It works for a number of people, unless Amazon wouldn't run this service. And I think it's ok for their current clients.
 
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