Amazon started inserting ads into Prime Video mid-year and now charges $2.99 extra monthly to remove them, sparking a class-action lawsuit. One speaker calls it simple price-gouging; the other says customers can switch services if the deal no longer works.
You tend to be the raise your prices guy. Yeah.
The simplest fix is to raise prices. I raise prices. Raise prices.
Just raise prices. We are gonna raise prices on every single customer. A few years ago, if you paid for Amazon Prime, one of the benefits when you paid for Amazon Prime is that you could watch videos and you would not have ads on them. And then Amazon realized, wait a second, we could probably get people to pay for ads. So in the middle of your Prime subscription, which many people pay for yearly, not monthly, but yearly, In the middle of their subscription, they changed the terms and people started seeing ads in their videos.
At the end of the day, the beautiful thing about capitalism is you don't have to use Amazon. So if the convenience of having 2-day shipping and all the rest of it, it outweighs the, the downsides of like them increasing prices or having extra fees or putting ads on certain products, then you just find an alternative.
Why are there ads in here? If you wanted to opt out of the ads, Amazon would charge you an additional $2.99 per month and a class action lawsuit was filed.
Problem I have is regulatory capture that prevents competition against Amazon. If you have a competitive environment, there'd be people that come along and offer pricing that would be better than Amazon, with better service than Amazon. But right now, that does not exist. And so I would focus much more on being upfront and honest with customers. This is the price. I'm not gonna have hidden fees on the back end. However, if I hit capacity, I'm not like Amazon where I can dump hundreds of millions of dollars and lose money for years and put that on Wall Street. I've got to make money this year. I got to put food on my table today. I've got to pay the paychecks for my employees this week. And if I'm not making money in my business, I've got to raise my prices.
