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Have you ever canceled a service or some online business transaction to then be flooded with EMAILs and other assaults through various communications channels from the marketing and/or retention departments of the company begging you to reconsider your decision or haranguing you to recognise the errors of your ways and give them another chance?

It’s been two years since I told Rectum to take a hike and that I’d just as soon never hear from them again to get over the thirty-year long trauma that they called customer service and it’s a rare week that my mailbox doesn’t have one or two pieces of their spam begging me to take advantage of their amazing deals on a bundle that hits the hat-trick of why I’ll never *EVER* get back with them again:

• Rectum’s DOCSIS-based cable internet is way slower (particularly for upload speed which is actually the critical one for someone pushing massive photo and video files up the fibre to Google Drive) than Google Fibre.
• Rectum’s cable internet is way more expensive for much slower performance and worse reliability.
• And then there’s what Rectum laughingly calls “customer service” where you get multiple hour “service windows” and resolution times measured in days compared to Google Fibre rolling a truck within hours of the reported fault with no fuss or fighting or BS “troubleshooting” that arrived *ON-TIME* and fixed the fault straightaway.

But that doesn’t stop Rectum from carpet bombing every communications channel I have with ever more creative begging to get me to reconsider, sometimes with multiple names including my father (been gone for over eight years now!), current resident, my name, and now I’m getting something for some guy I’m presuming is originally from India because someone at a mortgage company fat-fingered my house’s lot information with the one that guy bought in Wendell so I’ve been getting all of the “welcome to your new home” garbage for them as well.

Gee. Thanks.

OK, I get it…corporate marketing will never take the hint when you’re so unimpressed with their product or service that you’d just as soon fire the whole kit and caboodle of them into the heart of the Sun that it includes being happy to never hear from that company again.

That’s what brings me to this missive as I recently canceled my Amazon Prime membership which turned out to be a surprisingly easier process than I had ever dreamed it would be.

After a while, you get so used to spiderweb marketing and complicated procedures and usually multiple phone calls across several departments before they finally let you free knowing that they’re going to assault you with the “come back to us” carpet bombing afterward.

Rectum was the poster child for this byzantine process where actually canceling their service required a trip through front line support to the Retention Department to actually finalise the disconnection where I found the first representatives I’d dealt with at that company who were pleasant, polite, and respectful. Not that it wouldn’t have stopped me switching from Google Fibre but it was so ironic that I finally found customer service agents over there who were actually pleasant to deal with after searching for thirty years.

So imagine my surprise when canceling Amazon Prime required at most three or four clicks of a mouse and it was done.

I’d expected a full-court spam fest begging me to return but other than the confirmation EMAIL, a reminder three days later…all that I’ve seen since was a final EMAIL on the day the Prime membership terminated (thankfully after a last-minute order of hockey tape for Nicholas!) and this is what it had to say:

Das ist alles!

Colour me surprised but I’d have imagined that even if I weren’t all that valuable to them as a customer (and given my previous order volume I’d find that remarkable indeed!), wouldn’t you’d imagine that at some point in the process that they might have asked one simple question as to the termination of my relationship with Prime:

WHY?

Even a novice acolyte would show more of a sense of curiosity than apparently Amazon can be bothered to muster.

That would seem to suggest that Amazon’s customer retention team is utterly incompetent and/or Amazon just doesn’t give a darn about their customers at all because they’re so large a corporation with such an absurd market share and revenue turnover greater than most countries in this world that they don’t have to.

Congratulations! You’ve managed to become the Internet Age variation of bad old AT&T before the forced breakup of the Bell monopoly in 1982. AT&T whose customer service was so dreadfully appalling (and if truth be told even worse than Spectrum’s!) that Lily Tomlin’s “Laugh In” character Ernestine was used to lampoon them with razor-sharp sarcasm with her infamous observation:

We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.

Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the Operator — Saturday Night Live (18 Sep 1976)

You’ve just managed to confirm this customer’s view that Amazon has precisely zero interest in understanding why I’ve taken a hike and I honestly haven’t regretted that decision one iota.

To be fair, perhaps it’s because Amazon might well be as jaded about the value of exit interviews as a career full of of them as I was.

More than a few soon-to-be former employers would actually threaten to withhold my final pay if I didn’t turn up to the meeting with HR (which is actually illegal and there were a couple of them I seriously considered reporting to the Wage and Hour Division to be eviscerated by the NC Department of Revenue were I not so relieved at having moved on to a much better job anyway).

I’d end up attending the exit interview even though it was a complete and utter waste of my time and theirs, more often through a sense of morbid curiosity as to what questions they’d ask and if it they were worth my effort to answer.

After all, if we’re already at the point where I’m leaving the job because you’ve having a lovely layoff so you can make some rich buffoons on the board and Wall Street happy or because I’ve finally been granted parole from my occupational prison cubicle, isn’t it rather too late?

The one question they could never answer properly was “how is it that we’re at this point in a relationship that’s come to an end that my opinions are so much more valuable now than when you could have had them all along for much cheaper than a severance package had you BOTHERED TO ASK?!?”

In this case, it wasn’t for lack of me trying to seek redress from Amazon’s customer service channels which more often than not was a chat bot that would only allow to have the option for a human to ring you when the chat bot would get frustrated when it couldn’t handle more than the simplest of tasks.

Some of the details of Amazon’s forays into creeping suckage have been written here amongst the runes including:

• Dealing with dodgy vendors selling what appeared to be open-box items on Amazon
• Orders that were canceled without any notification even though they spam me mercilessly multiple times for successful orders
• Ever increasingly unreliable shipping estimates when it’s supposed to be guaranteed next-day or two-day shipping
• My personal favourite being the Amazon driver who came very close to killing me and two of my children thanks to music that was so loud and his situational awareness he couldn’t hear me leaning on my horn for over three seconds activating OnStar and Amazon’s customer service alternating between not caring and then lying about escalating the issue to senior management.

You’d think *THOSE EXAMPLES* would be enough for Amazon to dedicate resources to ensuring that “valuable” Prime customers like me never got pissed off or if they did, they’d move heaven and earth to make them happy again.

Apparently not.

And yet the observed trends for the last couple of years have not been at all encouraging for a service that was charging $139/year *EXTRA* on top of the orders themselves.

Before we forget it, notice how the deceptive marketing practise in the one time they mention a price to re-join Prime which works out to $179.88 for the year for essentially a $40 penalty. True, that is the month-to-month price and the $139/year price can be found after some clicking and searching but that a more expensive option was the one offered seems a bit disingenuous.

Every time you turn round, Amazon’s finding another way to degrade perks we once enjoyed with Prime or extracting more money than the bribe we were already paying just to have the same service level.

Take Prime Video which for years was an ad-free experience which changed this year unless you’re willing to fork over another $2.99 nickel-and-dime fee per month to suppress the adverts for an effective price increase of $36/year.

When the interstitial ads started rolling on shows “included with Prime”, they were appallingly long about things I had zero interest in, insufferably frequent, and offered no way to skip them after some amount of time like you can on YouTube and other services.

I get it that the content is always getting more expensive (what isn’t these days with all of the corporate greed making inflation far worse than admitted in the news or government press releases?!?) but there comes a point where paying for the greed just doesn’t make sense anymore and it’s especially true when the service you’re paying for is getting so obviously worse that it’s tantamount to feeling like you’re in an abusive relationship.

I know this will come as a shock to the marketing weenies out there but there are consumers like me who abhor pretty much most forms of advertising. Their profile is pretty easy to identify: they know what they want and when they want it, they’ll do what research is required to find the solution and then they’ll work with the vendor to get it and no amount of advertisements or marketing will influence their purchasing decision or timing.

Now I’ll confess that there are occasionally those adverts that are witty enough to earn a laugh at the cleverness of the creative team that spawned it but seeing it once was more than enough to take from the advert what I wanted out of it which was a brief amount of amusement. I don’t need to see it ever again because I have something called a functional memory and even when I get to the point where my memory isn’t at all reliable, I still don’t need to see your bloody advert.

When the latest “Grand Tour” flick was virtually unwatchable due to massive commercial interruption to the point where it was actively getting in the way of enjoying the antics of Jezza, Captain Slow, and Hamster…that’s the straw that broke this particular camel’s back.

And that’s why I not only haven’t missed Prime since I canceled it almost a month ago, I refused a very kind offer for the year’s Prime fee to be paid on my behalf as surplus to requirement with no regrets whatsoever.

It turns out they were nowhere near as essential to my life as they thought they were.