Our Ambiguous Relationship with Amazon’s Subscribe & Save
To entice repeat customers, Amazon needed a hook. But since its Subscribe & Save program relies on home delivery, just how sustainable is this model compared to in-store shopping?
Episode 15
9/5/2024
Businesses have long been using subscriptions as a strategy to keep customers coming back with regularity. Amazon latched onto this notion to compete with its brick-and-mortar competitors, launching its Subscribe & Save program in 2007. Jorden and Kimberly consider how a home delivery business model sustainably stacks up against in-store shopping.
Key Topics
What newspapers, milkmen, and fruit have in common
To what extent Subscribe & Save can be ‘Set and Forget’ and a whole lot of other considerations about using this service
How the packaging and transportation makes or breaks it
The blessing and curse of Subscribe & Save for small businesses
To buy (and possibly return?) or not to buy: The innovative technologies that help customers better decide
How market-based incentives can encourage corporate sustainability practices and induce ‘coercive memetics’ in industry
Whether Amazon’s business model beats the brick-and-mortar stores on the sustainability bottom line
Recommended Resources
MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab 2021 report
Amazon’s 2024 Sustainability Report
For anyone who isn’t aware of the history of the ice industry in the U.S., it’s quite fascinating (to nerds like Kimberly, anyway)
It wasn’t Subscribe & Save, but it was the first Internet sale ever recorded
