I've been an Amazon Prime Canada member for ages, probably since soon after they expanded to Canada, and I'm a frequent shopper. Until this week, the majority of my items were delivered the day after ordering. Just now, I went to look for an item, and noticed that the delivery date on everything was Wednesday Feb 19th. (Today is Saturday, Feb 15th) Why? What's happened? Why has delivery gone from next day, to 3 business days? Does anyone in Canada have any insight?

Cancelled my prime membership today for various reasons, but I am frankly disgusted with the direction Amazon has taken their business in the past few years. I have been a prime member since 2014, which is almost a decade, so I have a lot of experience with it. I've made thousands of purchases, most of which were great, but the past few years several things have reached the level of unacceptable and I just cancelled my prime service today.

here's what has been bugging me:

More and more items are taking over a week to deliver, despite being prime. I live in a populated city in Canada with a population of a million people, and there is an Amazon warehouse right outside the city. A few years ago when the warehouse was built, Amazon actually started moving towards having more one day guaranteed delivery items, which gave me hope for the future, but somehow things have gotten worse since the warehouse was built. These days when I buy an item, it usually takes 4-5 days to deliver, sometimes a week, even if it is a legit Prime and not a "fulfilled by amazon". A few years ago they also started offering "free delivery for prime members" items, rather than outright prime items, which as you know are items that aren't really prime, and are actually sold by a third party. I am not talking about these items, I am talking about actual prime items. (although I will add that it is a little annoying that Amazon doesn't have a way to filter *actual* prime items from these "free delivery for prime members" items when you search.

Delivery dates on prime items are dishonest on the website, and feel like a bait and switch a lot of the time. You can see this for yourself on many items. Perfect example is one that happened to me today. I'm looking for a certain item and before i actually put in my cart, it says that it will be delivered by "Tuesday March 7". However, when you go through the checkout, the earliest shipping option you can choose is "Wednesday March 8". It really seems like they want to paint a prettier picture about the delivery date before you decide to buy an item, then as you are actually buying it, they do a sleight of hand trick and suddenly change it. Even if you go back and refresh the listing, it still clearly says "Tuesday March 7", it even has the count down of "if you order in the next 6 hours and 32 minutes", but in the actual check out, they add a day. And on top of that, this date can actually change even after you mutter under your breath and begrudgingly agree to buy it. This exact thing happened today, which was actually the straw that finally pushed me to cancel prime. I ordered this item, listing said Tuesday March 7, checkout said earliest is Wednesday March 8. I agreed to buy it. I check the orders page an hour later, and my delivery date was changed from March 8 to "March 28 - April 1". WTF. I guess the item isn't actually in stock or something? I go back to the listing, and it's still being advertised as "get it Tuesday March 7". This incident in particular made me wonder how they can be doing this at all, and what am I even paying for? It's bad enough that prime items went from being delivered in two days to three days, to four, to five, and the fact that they are now being very deceptive about the delivery dates, but adding a whole month to a two day purchase? I feel like I am going crazy. Maybe this was an extreme case, but I just feel completely disrespected by this type of thing, it just feels like they are treating me like a sucker, and it kind of feels like some kind of cheap bait and switch parlor trick.

Customer service has gotten more and more stingy, to the point where now, they have removed almost any possible way for you to contact customer service. Everything is automated options that give you certain options and that's it. Most recently I received a used item, which is clearly used by a previous owner - it's opened, and damaged inside, parts are missing. However this item is not available anymore, so my only option is to return it or to exchange it for a different item. But the thing is, this item is hard to find, and I would actually gladly keep it if they offered me a partial refund. I just feel like a sucker paying full price for a used and damaged item, so I kind of have to either give up on the idea of owning it altogether, or just live with being ripped off. Partial refund is not an option anymore apparently.

I keep getting items that are broken, damaged, or not as described. Being a member for 9 years it's very noticeable how many listings now are just deceptive and dishonest. I recently bought some vacuum cleaner attachments that were listed as fitting the model vacuum cleaner I have, but the item I received is generic and doesn't actually fit my specific vacuum cleaner, despite specifically stating the model in the listing. The item I was sent is actually downright garbage. It legitimately belongs in the trash. It's a product-shaped object rather than a product, just an absolute scam.

Prime fee went up from 7.99 to 9.99 a month, and I wasn't even notified about it. But when I went to cancel my prime membership, they put me through three pages of "are you sure you want to cancel?" I am not kidding. After clicking cancel, they directed me to a page that is basically a sales pitch summarizing all the awesome benefits of prime, and gave me three options - remind me three days before membership renewal, proceed with cancellation, or remain a prime member. I clicked proceed with cancellation, and they took me to ANOTHER page where they AGAIN gave me a sales pitch summarizing all the awesome benefits of prime, and offered the SAME three options. I clicked proceed with cancellation, and they took me to a THIRD PAGE with the SAME same sales pitch, and the SAME three options, but this time they were actually arranged differently (possibly to trick me into clicking the wrong one, kind of like the cups and balls trick). So I had to click on the original cancel prime membership link, then I had to go through THREE "are you sure you REALLY want to cancel?" pages before they finally let me cancel. I swear, this tactic is intended to make people believe that they have cancelled their membership, when in actuality they didn't. After the first "are you sure?", and the second "are you REALLY sure?", some people will probably just assume that after they click "yes, please friggin cancel" the second time that their membership really is cancelled. But no, they make you do it a THIRD time. It's unbelievable how disrespectful and exploitative this kind of tactic is. I wonder how many people have had incidents where they genuinely believed they cancelled prime, only to find it still being charged to their credit card when they get their credit card statement. It really seems like a deliberate tactic to squeeze out some extra payments from people who aren't paying attention.

Also, Prime Video and Prime Music aren't great. Aside from a few good shows on there most of it is crap that you can get for free on apps like Tubi or other free streaming services. It's really not any kind of incentive to be a prime member in my opinion. Although I did watch all of The Mentalist on Prime, which is a great show.

I don't use Amazon very often, but when I have in the last few months, something always goes wrong, and customer support is worse than useless.

I ordered an expensive piece of tech on October 10th with an anticipated delivery date of October 12th. On October 13th I was assured that the package would arrive "today or tomorrow", which felt unlikely. I tried to cancel to buy it locally and it was declined because the item was "about to ship". Clearly, it wasn't because today is the 14th, 2 days past the anticipated delivery date, and the item still hasn't shipped. It probably won't ship today because it's Thanksgiving. And when it ships, it usually takes 2 days to arrive, so best case is probably Thursday on the 17th. It'll take one entire week to send me a box the size of my fist that is definitely in stock in great numbers.

Given that people have been struggling with getting refunds from Amazon, I don't feel confident with buying locally and returning Amazon's package when/if it eventually arrives.

But making it all worse, there's a promotional credit for this order and customer service is completely oblivious and can't tell me if it was correctly applied to my order.

Is this just what the experience is these days with Amazon in Canada? The website lies about when the package will arrive, customer service lies some more, and they don't have information about anything. The only power they have to apologize profusely for something that's not their fault.