Amazon.com

Ok, I am shamelessly putting a link on my site for people to sign up for a credit card!  I can't believe it! But I will at least give you some honest opinions and stories behind my relationship with Amazon.com.

I started buying stuff from Amazon.com way back.  Maybe it was 1996?  I've almost always had a great experience.  Almost always an item comes before I expect it.  The only times this doesn't happen is when I've requested the free shipping for larger purchases which seems to take an inordinate amount of time.  Amazon is one of our wedding registry vendors because they partner with The I Do Foundation, which passes on part of the profit for an item to a charity of your choice.  In terms of customer support, they have generally been good, but you have to know the trick of how to get hold of them by phone.  I suppose you can communicate via email, but that is always prone to delay and miscommunication.  They used to have their phone number printed on their pages, but it isn't there anymore perhaps because the call volume was so high and the salaries they had to pay all the reps to keep up with it was too much as they were trying to attain overall profitability.  Just call 1-800-555-1212 (that's 800 information) and ask for Amazon.com's number, and you will get right through.

As far as this credit card, I can't vouch too much for it because I don't have it myself.  However, my brother-in-law and sister have had an Amazon.com credit card for many years and haven't seemed to have any problems with it.  Like many other cards, they are offering you a bonus with this one, being credit towards purchases.  Since they sell a huge variety of stuff, this seems to be pretty safe.  Obviously this won't get you free miles for a flight somewhere or money towards a car or free gas, etc., but there are plenty of things to pick from.  It also seems that if you use it to purchase things from Amazon.com itself, you earn 3 times the number of "points" that you would otherwise.

I still will not put something like this as a permanent "ad" on my left or right banner, or on my top banner.  I want to keep this sight generally free of ads like this at least for now.  This site is mainly for talking about stuff that's on my mind and hopefully of interest to some of you out there, so I don't think ads are really that appropriate.  On the other hand, it would be nice to have a little bit of income generated from the site to help me pay for the hosting fees.  Let me know what you think.  Is this really uncouth, or what?

Hopefully this is the last you'll hear of such things for a long time.  And now we return you to your regularly scheduled program...

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