Amazon Prime

I am a new Amazon Prime customer. What is Amazon Prime? Well, I paid $79 and for a year I get unlimited 2-day shipping. And if I want it overnight, I pay only an extra $3.99. Now, I’ve already placed 7 or 8 orders in the few weeks since I went Prime. So, say $80 divided by 8 orders is $10 per order, so far, to get 2-day shipping. That will continue to be diluted with every order I place in the next year. Last year I placed 20 orders with Amazon. That would have brought the per-order shipping cost down to $4 per order for 2-day shipping. That number, by the way, is unheard of for that kind of expedited shipping. FedEx 2-day shipping is around $12 for a 1 lb. box. So I’m getting a good deal. But how is Amazon going to continue to pull this off? One major difference between last year’s orders and this year’s orders is that last year’s orders required a minimum purchase of $25 to get free shipping. So for all of those orders, I had at least $25 worth of goods in the order. Now that I have unlimited shipping, I just click the “1 Click” button that buys and ships in one click. So I’ve been getting $6 items and $12 items sent to me in separate 2-day shipments. Given the FedEx rate, that would be $12 in shipping costs for a $6 item. Amazon must be getting a huge discount or they have figured out some other interesting arrangement with FedEx. Either that or they didn’t plan on customers like me.