Ben’s Blog

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve got a few in the works, so stay tuned.

Tonight I was making an order through Amazon, and they offered me a free three-month trial of Amazon Prime. With Prime I get free two-day delivery and overnight delivery for only $3.99. Normally it’s $79 a year to enroll in Prime, and I’ll be “upgraded” for that price if I don’t cancel by the end of the trial. I’ve already put a reminder in my Treo. :) It will be very nice having Prime, but I don’t think it’s going to be worth $79 a year to me. Of course, Amazon is betting otherwise.

In the past, I’ve always waited until I had a least $25 worth of books before making an order (for the free shipping). If I needed something right away, I’d find another item to get the total up to $25. So, Amazon might actually lose money on me by giving me this trial. Doubtful, but possible.

After signing up for the Prime trial, I noticed something odd. If I had the books shipped to my apartment, the projected delivery date was three to four days further out than if I had them shipped to work. My apartment and work are in the same ZIP code, so I’d like to hear an explanation for that one.

Slate has an interesting article on the movie theater business. Theaters are really in three different businesses: showing movies, selling overpriced food, and selling advertisements.

Some interesting tidbits from the article:

• Theaters keep about half of the ticket price. The other half goes to the movie studios. (Better than I expected.)
• Theaters have about 50 cents in a $5 bucket of popcorn.
• Some advertisers will pay theaters up to $50,000 per screen per year to show their ads. That’s pure profit for the theaters.
• Theaters prefer shorter movies. They offer more chances to sell popcorn and show advertising. I’m guessing they don’t like Peter Jackson. :)

Now, I’m off to see King Kong.

Amazon has an unadvertised 30-day price drop policy. In other words, if the price drops on an item you’ve purchased from Amazon within 30 days, they’ll refund the difference. Of course you have to ask for it. The above link tells how to take advantage of it.