The yearly upfront portion works poorly. I think a lot of the issue is the various add-on services are poor -> Amazon Instant Video is not a viable Netflix alternative, I haven't even bothered with the music service, etc.

That being said, the grocery prices average cheaper than Safeway by about $10/week for my household (even better since we actually use Uber to get groceries home for large shipments) and we pay $6/week for delivery so Fresh by itself is a no brainer. They have better selection in a few product areas (though way worse in others) so we can combine grocery + grocery delivery to end up with way more options overall.

One of the sad points here is that savings become less available to lower income people as upfront costs price them out of discounts.. credit cards are a classic example, and now things like this.

> But I don't see why consumers shouldn't augment that signal with plain old English.

There is a big difference between the people who are saying "wait, now it costs this much money? ok, I'm no longer buying this: that is way too much for too little value; there's no way I'd pay more than $X (where X might be 0)... I wonder what Amazon might be thinking here" and the people who are leaning on "it is morally wrong to be charging a fee for something that was free yesterday" (especially given the system-wide workaround these people often don't even notice, which is the company with the too-low pricing goes out of business and gets replaced by a competitor that charged the right amount from the first day of operation) or the people who are pushing at "I am incredibly angry at Amazon for doing this" (seriously? there's no good reason to be angry). I do not think the latter two are appropriate behaviors for consumers, and it is those kinds of responses I think the people you are trying to speak at are taking issue with.

Factual writing has linear reach and exponential decay through networks, such that most people feel it pointless to bother expressing the facts of their problem. Moral-panic propaganda, meanwhile, is an instrument that companies actually fear, because it has viral potential; and so the one people tend to feel will actually get their complaints acknowledged. It's unrealistic to expect people to engage with companies in any other way (at least unless there's some sort of collective-bargaining structure in place; unions and guilds are perfectly fine making factual arguments.)

I agree about the distasteful hyperbole, but that is what the Internet and social media have become in today's outrage culture. Social media is rampant with hyperbolic reactions to the very slightest of offenses. So the tone of the messages cited in the article, from my point of view at least, seem tangential to the matter of Amazon Fresh. The tone is a problem with social media and outrage culture in general.

I believe the other reply by derefr says more or less the same thing but with more thinking behind why it happens. Meanwhile, I'm saying that I have become desensitized to the sensationalism of social media, tweets in particular, though I still recognize the hyperbole and would prefer less of it.

I also had it in LA for $300 (I believe it was $200 on top of my $100 prime?)

It helped a lot when I was stuck at home with my newborn but after that I stopped using it as much. I do like the idea of not having to go to the market but Amazon hasn't nailed it yet.