I’m in the Amazon Prime of my life, but I won’t get fooled again

In legal proceedings initiated last week, Amazon has been accused by America’s Federal Trade Commission of effectively tricking consumers into signing up for Prime accounts. The regulatory agency argues that Amazon “trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent”. Amazon disputes the contention, naturally.

Now, I like Prime as much as the next 44-year-old who thinks they’re keeping up with the times, and I’ve enjoyed many a decade-old US sitcom thanks to my wife’s subscription.

There was also a time, possibly when I briefly thought it was useful to get anything I ordered on Amazon within 10 minutes of clicking “buy”, that I genuinely thought I needed my own Prime account. But it was a short-lived relationship and I soon realised that the joy of a speedy dispatch was tempered by the knowledge of the monthly fee I was paying. The prudent fenman in me swiftly won out, and I unsubscribed.

That ought to have been that. I still had my standard Amazon account, which was fine except when I forgot that some goods might take a week to arrive and thus caused disappointment on a child’s birthday. But with a bit of advance planning, problems could be avoided, and for last-minute emergencies, my wife’s account was an easy solution.

It therefore came as something of a surprise when I received a Prime delivery, apparently addressed to me, not to Mrs G. I thought for a minute that I’d hit the jackpot – a freebie from the world’s third-richest man. I logged on to my computer to send a thank you email to Jeff Bezos, only to find a thank you from Amazon for my recent Prime order and a reminder of when my free trial would come to an end.

Sure enough, when I logged into my Amazon account, it became clear that I had, in fact, inadvertently resubscribed to Prime. I had, to deploy the language of the Federal Trade Commission been “trapped” by the “dark patterns” of the Amazon purchase process, accidentally clicking on the wrong button on the website when I’d tried to buy without Prime.

Cursing Bezos, I unsubscribed – again – and reflected on how stupid I had been to fall for the cunning efforts of Amazon’s marketeers and UX designers. I may not be a tech head, but nor am I a complete tech tool, so I wondered how many other people had made the same mistake. But at least I had learnt my lesson.

And yet, as it turned out, I had not; because about a month later, possibly on the very next occasion of making an Amazon purchase, I managed to do exactly the same thing once more. This time, I realised what I had done, and immediately cancelled the subscription. I thought of the old saying from Tennessee that, according to George Bush, goes “Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again”. And I felt a fool, just as Bush presumably did when he mangled the aphorism.

To be fair to Amazon, it isn’t alone in having flummoxed me into buying something I don’t really want. I once went into Barclays with a view to cancelling my account because I was fed up with being charged a fee for it – only to come out with a brand spanking new account that carried an even higher monthly charge. And when I last got a new phone, I ended up with a data add-on that I didn’t even understand, let alone want. I also once bought a Mavericks album, which remains a truly inexplicable thing which I’d prefer to pin on someone other than myself.

Part of the trouble is I don’t like people to make a lengthy sales pitch and then to disappoint them; I used to be a chugger’s dream. Now I find it better to avoid the conversation entirely, which is why I no longer answer my phone to any number I don’t recognise.

Will Amazon get its comeuppance in court? Or will those of us who have carelessly – and repeatedly – signed up for Prime accounts be held to account for our own actions? I can’t help but feel that I should have been more observant when I subscribed by mistake: but it’s clear that I’m not alone in being a tad bamboozled.

Legal systems being what they are, I don’t suppose we’ll get a verdict any time soon. Unless the judge has signed up for Prime.