2016 Amazon free crap thread

[pbj]

I used to be interesting and fun.  Now it's all coffee machines and toilet paper.

 

[Generic Eric]

ITT:  PBJ's haberdashery and fine Prison wine.

http://www.amazon.com/Springfield-Leather-Companys-Vintage-Buffalo/dp/B00G6PO1GM/ref=sr_1_6?s=arts-crafts&ie=UTF8&qid=1426520120&sr=1-6&keywords=1+3%2F8%22+leather

[jennifer]

     **Jennifer laughs, and laughs.... I suppose he could try cooking that wine in that coffee pot, and to be really frugal, perhaps use the toilet paper for filters?

[pbj]

This went on sale for $11 shipped in some promotion.  Opted for regular shipping to get a $6 promotional credit.  Oh well, into the drawer it goes.

[pbj]

Remember, no matter how bad your life gets, at least you aren't spending gift cards on this:

[pbj]

Well, all of my passive income grifts are effectively dead now.  Fun ride while that lasted, I suppose.   

Nothing fun lately except Raspberry Pi junk like HDMI->VGA adapter, Micro SD cards, and a composite cable.

Here's to the end of an era.

 

[yotsuya]

Well, all of my passive income grifts are effectively dead now.  Fun ride while that lasted, I suppose.   

Nothing fun lately except Raspberry Pi junk like HDMI->VGA adapter, Micro SD cards, and a composite cable.

Here's to the end of an era.

 

So now that it's over, spill the beans. What did you do to get them?

[pbj]

A large chunk of it came honestly.  I got very efficient at doing low paying tasks online during idle moments.  Probably the "best" one involved doing an ever increasing amount of work reading, summarizing, and interpreting scientific literature for someone's graduate thesis.  At a rate of $1/paper, damned if I didn't do most of their project for ~$75, and I speak fairly expertly about that subject now.    

A low point was doing an hour long survey where I was asked to look at pictures of dead kids and periodically asked trick questions to see if I was still looking at the photos and how upset I was feeling.  Gee... really upset?

But, hey, PS4, four controllers, and Diablo 3.


In terms of the passive income:

Opened bing rewards accounts until I got a few that gave me $1.10 a day.  Slammed them with search scripts.  Microsoft wields the ban hammer pretty viciously these days and ALL accounts have been chopped to 25 cents a day.  And they call you to verify information.  And they love banning you when you're redeeming points.  Not worth the effort on your own time/electricity.

The bigger fish was using a rewards program on a bunch of old Apple devices.  Predictably, it got less and less lucrative and required more user intervention for far fewer rewards.  They finally shut down the really old version of the app I was running on an old Ipad behind a firewall that filtered out their attention check pings.  My wife was conscripted to occasionally thump "Yes" on the screens on the other devices as she walked by.  Anyway, it was sad to see that come to an end because it started around $40 a week and was still a good $20-25 until recently.



In terms of squeezing blood out of Amazon:

Never call.  Never e-mail.  Always chat.  Always click that you want a transcript.  If you don't like what you hear, close the chat and start a new one.

They have a three month return window from Nov 1 - Jan 31.  Buy your video games mid-November, squeeze them for refunds on Black Friday, squeeze them for more refunds mid-Dec, and squeeze again in January when the prices bottom out.  I actually MADE money on Shadow Warrior.  If they refuse, threaten to return and rebuy.  Do so if necessary.

Get Amazon Prime.  Every time they miss the 2 day delivery window, demand your extra free month of Prime.  This is part of the deal.  If you want to be a real ass about it, order from "fulfilled by Amazon" sellers in other parts of the country.  You'll avoid sales tax, they'll miss the 2 day shipping guarantee, and you get a free month.  Amazon's going to get their act together eventually on this one.  Maybe.

Occasionally they'll put a game on sale for less than they'll give you on a trade in.  They've paid me to slap a label they've provided on their envelope and push their same package back at them more than once.

I've got a couple others but the returns are diminishing on those, too.

 

[yotsuya]

 

[Slippyblade]

Crap.  I'm impressed.

[Howard_Casto]

Bing rewards ultra bans you if you have more than one account now, but there are still bots that work so long as you stick to a single account. A few will do mobile searches as well, so that's 26-28 points a day.  I get about 5 bucks every two weeks from them. 

Something else that's good to try is credit cards.  Where I've been I'll I've had nothing but free time this winter so......  Amazon.com store card offered a 40 dollar gift card for signing up... so I did that.  I've yet to use the thing because it isn't a real credit card and it has a ridiculously low limit, but hey, 40 bucks!  Amazon credit card by chase (totally different thing) offered a 50 dollar gift card for signing up, so I did that one as well.  It actually has decent cash-back awards so I actually use that one.  The CB gets converted to more gift cards.  In addition there are amazon credit cards by capital one, citi, and visa and they all offer similar deals at certain times of the year.... so when one comes up, I get a new credit card. 

In addition, buying gift cards with your gift cards is a good idea.  Amazon occasionally puts their gift cards on sale, so use your gift cards to buy the exact same gift cards and make money that way.

[BadMouth]

I tried to do the bing rewards thing on my work computer, but the search results were just unusable.
Even pages I'd been to and remembered exact phrases of text from could not be found through bing.


In other news, I finally ate the last bag of Planters Fruit and Nut trail mix.

[Howard_Casto]

Heh, nobody actually uses bing for searching. 

For the record though it has an excellent image search... probably better than googles. 

[pbj]

In addition, buying gift cards with your gift cards is a good idea.  Amazon occasionally puts their gift cards on sale, so use your gift cards to buy the exact same gift cards and make money that way.

Once you get your money tied up into an Amazon gift card, there is no way to break it back out.   

For the record though it has an excellent image search... probably better than googles. 

Yep.  And it'll bypass filtering.   

[Howard_Casto]

Well I didn't mean spend money.  I meant if you already have amazon gift cards from doing one of the other promotions and gift cards go on sale, buy gift cards with the gift cards.

[pbj]

Unless you've figured out some type of Amazon hack, that I want to hear about in explicit detail, there's no way to buy Amazon gift cards with a gift card balance. 

They do occasionally discount their gift cards, but you've got to use another payment method.

 
 

[Howard_Casto]

Really?   It's been a looong time since I did it, but I did get away with it once.  Maybe they changed their policy or something.  Then again it could be I bought one kind of gift card with another (like say bought Nintendo shop cards with amazon gift cards), it's been too long. 

[pbj]

Not sure if I'm actually keeping these.  Already have a trade in back to Amazon locked in for $6 more than I paid.

They do sound amazing, though.


A few days to decide...

 

[pbj]

Getting down to the bitter end of these gift cards.

Now I own a stupid dust collector statue.

 

[pbj]

Sunday delivery.

 

[Howard_Casto]

My bing rewards account was finally banned last week.  It had been going strong for a couple of years now.  I'm not sure if accounts can be restored or not.  Ah well, it was a good run. 

[Ginsu Victim]

My bing rewards account was finally banned last week.  It had been going strong for a couple of years now.  I'm not sure if accounts can be restored or not.  Ah well, it was a good run. 

All four of mine were banned about a year ago and I just stopped caring at that point. They had really cracked down and my points had all dropped to 15 per day anyway, so I was already tired of it after four years. I managed to get a lot of credit during that time, mostly in Microsoft points/credit, some Amazon.

[pbj]

Yeah, I quit bothering with it when they dropped it to 25 cents a day (15 from PC, 10 from mobile).  I got careless and redeemed rewards from 4 accounts within 5 minutes from the same IP, so that was a pretty obvious ban.

I've got a drawer full of dusty devices ready to grind away more gift cards as soon as the next scheme comes along...

[SlammedNiss]

Anybody else around 3-4 years ago when Live Search Club was a thing? Man, those were some good times.....

[Howard_Casto]

I remember the free ipod and later free zune pyramid schemes.  My ipod finally crapped out on me a couple of years ago.  The zune is still chugging along..... I actually prefer it to the ipod.

I've got to think with the integration of Cortana into windows 10 it'll have some sort of rewards program in the future. 

[dkersten]

My short book "Paradox Cycle" will be free on Amazon from 8/22 to 8/26.  My full novel will be on sale from the 23rd to the 25th as well for 99 cents. 
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U9BGI56
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ROILFFU
Both can be read for free if you are in Kindle Unlimited (and I get paid well for KU reads )

[Howard_Casto]

Good to know.  Thanks for the heads up.

[pbj]

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/28/amazon-prime-not-all-goods/

Told you that loophole would close, but at least the charade is over.

[dkersten]

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/28/amazon-prime-not-all-goods/

Told you that loophole would close, but at least the charade is over.

What some don't see is they have moved the "guaranteed" time to 8 pm.  How many businesses are open after 5 or 6 pm on weekdays?  So basically they can "guarantee" 2 day shipping, but if it doesn't get there, it's because they tried to deliver it after you were closed.

And guaranteed shipping is a joke anyway.. it's free, so what are they going to do, refund your shipping costs?  And even the times I paid for next day shipping in the past, when the package got lost (about 40% of the time), the only guarantee was that they would refund the shipping costs.  What good does it do when you actually NEED something the next day and it doesn't show up?

I got Prime because I needed an in wall AC unit a few years ago, and it was $2.99 to ship it next day air (75 lb package, lol).  Then a month later I bought a 3 lb light fixture that was mislabeled as 85 lbs and they wanted something like $60 to next day it.  The package arrived with about 20 "extremely heavy" 80lb+ stickers from FedEx, but even the driver was laughing at it.  Now if a package is heavy the next day shipping is still expensive.. like upwards of $50.  I still like Prime, but if the shipping goes away then my membership goes away because I could care less about the other addons.  The Video sucks, the music is worthless, the KOLL library is crap (except my books of course), and who cares about "special" deals on stuff nobody wants?

[pbj]

Well, the loophole was getting a free month of Prime for every "prime eligible" item that didn't get delivered in two days.  You could intentionally select "fulfilled by Amazon" sellers that were located across the country to exploit it.  Customer service would give you some guff but it's clearly in the terms of service.  Funny how Amazon didn't automatically do it, though.  Never bothered me doing it because the whole setup was a trick to avoid sales tax anyway.

[BadMouth]

The main reason I have prime is to get free shipping on cheaper items.  First they started converting prime items to "add-on" items.
Now they will have two product listings for the same product, but with different prices.  $2 regular or "add-on" price, but the one listed as prime is $5-6.
So if you filtered for only prime items, you only see the higher price.

I barely use prime video anymore and I don't use any of the other services.
I'm seriously considering dropping it and just not ordering until I want $25 worth of stuff.

[pbj]

I'm seriously considering dropping it and just not ordering until I want $25 worth of stuff.

Pre-order a video game that's not coming out for a year.  They'll sit on your package for a week and then ship it.  Cancel pre-order.

[yotsuya]

I've been a Prime member many years now, and I would never dream of cancelling. I use it so much, its paid for itself by the end of February, usually.

[pbj]

I've been a Prime member many years now, and I would never dream of cancelling. I use it so much, its paid for itself by the end of February, usually.

[yotsuya]

I've been a Prime member many years now, and I would never dream of cancelling. I use it so much, its paid for itself by the end of February, usually.

***Photo of his love***

Well, I don't try to game the system like your cheap-ass does, so that's probably why I don't have any complaints.

[vwalbridge]

I've been a Prime member many years now, and I would never dream of cancelling. I use it so much, its paid for itself by the end of February, usually.

+1  I absolutely love Amazon prime. Easily pays for itself 6 times over in a year. 

[BadMouth]

I order regularly, to the point that the boxes that accumulate are kind of a nuisance.
Still though, $100 is nothing to sneeze at and if the order is over $25 $35 it ships free anyway.

For ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- and giggles, let's compare our compulsive amazon habit.
I'm sure I won't have the most, but I want to see how bad PBJ beats us by. 

I have 89 merchandise orders for 2015 so far, 113 total for 2014. (shipped stuff, no digital orders)

[vwalbridge]

159 orders for 2015 so far, 183 orders for 2014. (shipped stuff, no digital)

[yotsuya]

I order regularly, to the point that the boxes that accumulate are kind of a nuisance.
Still though, $100 is nothing to sneeze at and if the order is over $25 $35 it ships free anyway.

For ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- and giggles, let's compare our compulsive amazon habit.
I'm sure I won't have the most, but I want to see how bad PBJ beats us by. 

I have 89 merchandise orders for 2015 so far, 113 total for 2014. (shipped stuff, no digital orders)

39 orders from me, but my wife uses it as well with her Kindle, and my adult kids also share on the plan, so who knows?

[yotsuya]

Damn,  you guys are orderin' fools! 

Oh, and most of my orders are around $20, so they'd missing the free shipping threshold anyway.