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For the last month, I've devoted about one Cool Stuff post a week to the topic of "making your life more enjoyable through minor upgrades of mundane household items." Whether it's never having your lunch explode in your bag again because of GlassLock containers or being able to get dressed in the dark thanks to motion activated lights, spending a few bucks in the right place can not only make life much more convenient, but end up saving you a bunch of money in the long term.
From now on—or until I come up with a better name, because I'm writing this on an airplane after four hours of crappy sleep—I'm going to be calling these posts Cool Stuff Upgraded, because I'm here to upgrade your life, inch by inch, lunch container by lunch container.
And the one thing that has upgraded my life most of all is not a physical object, but a service: Amazon Prime. Today, I'm going to explain to you why Amazon Prime is one of the best, easiest investments you can make.
The Basics
Amazon let's you sign up for a free, 30-day trial of Prime whenever you want. Let me skip ahead here for a second: If you haven't done your holiday shopping yet, getting 30 days of Prime for free before Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a really easy way to save possibly hundreds of dollars in the financially tightest time of year, without any other commitment.
After your 30 days is up, Prime costs $99 per year, or $10.99 per month (get the former). If that sounds like a lot of money for free shipping and some random sales, let me explain.
Cheaper Stuff and Free Two Day Shipping
Are at an income level where you are able to regularly buy things that could be construed as luxuries in the broadest, most basest sense? And by luxuries, I mean any kind of non-subsistence good: Books, electronics, paper towels, exercise equipment, whatever.
Do you have paper towel money?
If so, Amazon Prime is, over time, the cheapest and most efficient way of buying pretty much every one of things.
As you're probably well aware, Amazon became the globe-spanning, Seattle-swallowing corporate behemoth it is by selling everything at least slightly cheaper, generally about 5% to 10%, than everyone else. And if you happen to buy stuff regularly, those discounts add up extremely quickly.
So quickly, that Prime can pay for itself in one purchase. We got Prime when we first moved to Portland, and had literally three suitcases of possessions. One of the first things we got was a big boy TV (more on why you should buy one of these at a later date), and the discount we got by buying through Amazon, as opposed to some other big box store, paid for Prime immediately.
Even if you aren't buying TVs, everything else adds up extremely quickly. Want to buy a new video game? It's probably $10 cheaper on Amazon. Hate clothes shopping? Do it for cheaper on Amazon. And when that big upgrade to your apartment or home or whatever does eventually come around, you're up a couple hundred bucks because of Prime.
And that isn't to mention that Prime gives you access to a lot of the mega-bonkers sales that I post about here daily, where you can get investment items (high-end electronics, etc.) for hundreds of dollars off their retail prices.
Plus, Prime gives you get free two day shipping on almost everything of the millions and millions of things on the website.
Included with Prime, for free, is Prime Video, a TV and film streaming service. Like Netflix, Prime Video is a fully fleshed out video-on-demand service with Amazon's own slate of original content, a rotating selection of free-to-stream movies, and a massive library of movies (most movies are around $4 to rent) and tv shows you can rent or buy.
As of now, there isn't really a show on Amazon that matches the best original content that Netflix has to offer. But shows like Red Oaks are as good as Netflix's "pretty good" shows, and Prime Video's selection of movies blows Netflix's out of the fucking water.
And it's essentially FREE once you buy some stuff. Free movies and tv, dude.
All of the Other Random Stuff I Don't Even Use But Is Still Really Good
Those are the two best things that Prime offers, and that's what I use it for 99.9% of the time. But, they throw in a ton of other stuff for free which I'll run through here, quickly:
Prime Music: Amazon's Spotify/Pandora equivalent with a library of 2 million songs that streams on Amazon devices (Echo, Fire tablets, etc.), Android and iPhones and both PCs and Macs.
Amazon Restaurants: Amazon's Uber Eats/Caviar competitor.
Prime Photos: A photo storage and sharing service with unlimited (lol) space that lets you share your photos across devices.
Twitch Prime: An upgrade to the free video game streaming service Twitch, which gives you free in-game items, ad-free streaming, discounts and some exclusive stuff for major titles.
Also, probably some other nice stuff I forgot about.
I'm of the opinion that if you have even the slightest amount of disposable income, you are making an enormous financial mistake by not having an Amazon Prime subscription. It's saved me thousands of bucks and provided me hours of free entertainment over the course of three years, and I don't even use half of the stuff they give me.
If you still aren't convinced—I'll reiterate that it's a really financially savvy decision to utilize their free 30-day trial for holiday shopping—I forgot to mention that Prime makes shopping for people who live out of state or internationally extremely easy, and that you can sign up for that in the link below. But if you're one of the few holdouts that hasn't yet jumped into the 21st century, just let your trial roll on over into the big leagues.
(Cool Stuff is a new feature at Willamette Week where we feature product reviews, roundups, sales and other commerce and shopping-oriented content. All Cool Stuff reviews are editorially independent, meaning we provide honest reviews and aren't paid by the brands we write about. If you do choose to purchase something after following one of our links, Willamette Week may receive a commission, which helps fund our journalism.)