There's almost no effort. It takes less than five minutes each time, to both order and request a credit. I've wasted a lot more time than that on trying to get them to remove USPS as a shipping option. At this point, it's just a game for me.

A dollar a minute == $60/hr

Or around 120k/yr @ 40hr/wk over 50 weeks, pre-tax.

I'm not sure you'd report that as taxable income, so it would probably be closer to 'post-tax'.

So you're saying this a pretty good investment of my time, right? On top of my salary, I can effectively make an additional $120k/yr? You know the opportunity cost argument you're making is false, don't you? You're arguing that I'm risking doing something else while doing this and there's a cost associated with that risk. In reality, I risk nothing because I'm a salaried employee whose time isn't 100% filled with must-do tasks. If that were true, the time you spent replying would be actually be worth even less than the time I spend getting Amazon credits because it has no return on investment. Or are you saying I should make this my full time job?

It's a different poster, he's agreeing with you by calculating that those 5 minutes are quite lucrative.

Whoops. Misread. Thanks for pointing that out. :)

Or the gas wasted on each trip.

That's covered by Amazon in the shipping cost they pay to move from their warehouse to the USPS sorting facility. USPS isn't making any additional trips to not deliver packages. They drive out to the mailbox cluster every day except Sunday (a day which Amazon also said they'd deliver a package via USPS...) and go no further.

You have a cite for that waste? That's not remotely correct. The marginal cost to ship one package across the world is literally pennies, that's why our junk is so cheap. The cost to drive to one store for one shopping trip is two orders of magnitude higher.

Buy online and save the planet. I'm serious.