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

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