So Amazon had this big "Prime Day" thing last Wednesday, the 15th, and I want to talk about it because I think it says something kind of funny about where online shopping is right now.
The pitch was: deals bigger than Black Friday, to celebrate Amazon's 20th birthday, Prime members only. I've had Prime for a few years now (that $99 a year fee stopped feeling optional once you start using two-day shipping for everything from cat litter to phone chargers, you sort of can't go back), so obviously I logged on Wednesday morning ready to be a good consumer.
It was rough. My Twitter feed by lunchtime was just people posting screenshots of the "deals" and going "who is buying this." A lot of it was stuff nobody actually wants on sale, protein powder, random USB cables, a weirdly large selection of Rubbermaid storage bins. Somebody I follow joked that Prime Day should've been called National Buy A Battery Pack Day, and honestly that tracked with what I was seeing in the actual deals feed too.
I did end up buying something, for the record. A pack of AA batteries and a phone case I didn't need. That's it. That's the whole haul. I went in expecting to maybe replace my headphones or grab a cheap external hard drive and left with about $19 of stuff I could've bought at the drugstore down the street.
Part of the problem, I think, is the deals kept rotating by the hour, kind of like a flash sale format, and unless you had the app open and refreshing constantly you just missed things. Which is a weird way to run a sale if the actual goal is to get people to spend money instead of getting frustrated and closing the tab. I did that probably four separate times over the course of the day.
There were also a bunch of complaints going around about the site itself getting slow or throwing errors when the bigger deals dropped. That happens with any big sale, sure, but it didn't help the whole "is this actually worth my time" feeling a lot of people online seemed to land on by the end of the day.
Here's the thing though, I don't think this was actually a failure for Amazon, even though basically everyone I saw online was making fun of it. The whole point wasn't really the deals. It was getting people to open the app on a random Wednesday in July, log in, browse around, maybe sign up for Prime if they hadn't already (there's apparently a free trial angle to the whole thing). That's a cheap win even if nobody buys anything, and if a chunk of people do buy stuff, even junk like my batteries, that's just extra. Companies do this kind of thing all the time, they just don't usually announce it with a press release calling it bigger than Black Friday.
What I keep coming back to is how normal this whole format has gotten without anyone really deciding it should. A company just announces a made-up shopping holiday and apparently millions of people show up, refresh a page for a few hours, and either buy random stuff or complain about not buying random stuff, and then it's over and everyone moves on like it was always a thing. I don't remember anyone doing "made-up shopping holiday" at this scale before, outside of the holidays we already had. Cyber Monday is maybe the closest comparison, and even that one grew out of an actual date on the calendar instead of getting invented from nothing on a Tuesday because a company felt like it.
Anyway. If they do this again next year I'm probably still going to check it out, because apparently I've learned nothing from the batteries. Old habits and all that. If you bought anything good last Wednesday I'd honestly be curious what it was, because from where I was sitting the good stuff either sold out in about four minutes or never existed to begin with.