Amazon Adds Gasoline and EV Charging Discounts to Prime

It’s another benefit to keep you from canceling your membership.

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Amazon Prime over the years has expanded to include a hodgepodge of benefits, and starting today members will begin receiving a new one: fuel discounts. Starting with gasoline, Amazon says that Prime members will receive a 10 cents per gallon discount at roughly 7,000 stations across the U.S. under the brands Amoco, AM/PM, and BP stations. The company estimates that members could save about $70 annually on fuel, which is half the price of an annual Prime membership of $139 (it’s a bit more if you pay by the month). Next year, the company will add electric vehicle charging through BP Pulse. Prime launched in 2005 offering free deliveries on Amazon.com, but today the membership program includes additional benefits like free streaming through Amazon Video, unlimited cloud photo storage, and Grubhub+ membership, to name a few. Prime has over 180 million subscribers globally and is estimated to have generated more than $40 billion in revenue for Amazon last year. Bundling has become more common in the subscription business these days as giants like Amazon seek to reduce churn and fend off competition. It’s long been in fierce rivalry against Walmart, which offers its Walmart+ membership program, which also offers similar perks to Amazon as well as free same-day delivery of groceries. By including lots of perks in the membership, Amazon hopes you’ll use a couple of them and decide it’s not worth the hassle to cancel and seek out replacements. Unfortunately, anyone who has tried shopping on Amazon in recent years knows that it’s something of a mess, with sponsored listings taking up much of the page, millions of Chinese knockoff brands of quality that is hard to discern, inconsistent product pages that make it hard to find the information you want, and fake reviews making for an overall poor shopping experience. It’s not far off from Temu or Shein at this point, and not somewhere to search for quality items. But hey, The Boys is a well-liked show, and those new Kindles look nice. Forgetting free shipping, the other perks are kind of the real reason to have a Prime subscription at this point. And if you drive a lot, the new gas discount certainly is a nice addition.

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