Agreed. Feels like Amazon outsourcing part of its shipping algorithm to customers.

+1 I've had the same experience trying to get $35 of "qualifying goods" into my cart to only see that they weren't really telling the truth and having to pay for shipping with Prime for next day.

Oh and through some weird ability to rename time "next day" now means 2 days and "2 day" means 3 day delivery. Same day usually does mean same day -- which used to have a lot of items available for that but recently has seemed to have gone down. Still impressed that it can be done.

It sounds to me like the algorithm is deliberately trying to outsource some of the "free" shipping cost to customers.

It's sort of like that bank transaction-ordering scandal from a few years ago, where banks ordered transactions unintuitively to maximize overdraft penalties.

They already outsource fixing the errors made by their algorithms to customers and the businesses that ship for Amazon.

Lol.

"Hey, lets merge these two colors, what could possibly go wrong?" is an algorithmic decision made by Amazon that happens far too frequently after I've gone home or to bed. :p

They could also just tell you "the items you want to buy cost $X for shipping" where X just happens to drop to 0 under certain circumstances. This is what everyone except Amazon does. Charging for shipping is entirely understandable. I too love free shipping, but it's actually us that have been spoiled by Amazon.

And with Amazon's low prices and 5% cashback I'm pretty sure even if they started charging for shipping that it would be still cheaper than anywhere else ...