When you place a Prime order, they'll ship it from different warehouses if necessary, each by a method ensured to give 2 day delivery. With a non-Prime order, they appear to do everything possible to minimize the number of boxes (and hence their shipping cost). My guess is that in the latter case they ship pieces of orders from warehouse to warehouse via freight, then consolidate and ship the order from the nearest warehouse. It's not hard to see why that would take several extra days. With simpler orders, say a single item, I think you'll see a difference of at most a day or two, due only to the lower priority given to pulling a non-Prime order.
But they don't do it this way, even for non-Prime orders, they will ship it from multiple warehouses and you will get multiple packages, and they still arrive 2-3 days from when it actually shipped from THEIR warehouses depending where those warehouses are located. It simply costs more for them to 1) differentiate shipping methods and 2) handle a package 2x (once to ship it out a warehouse and another to ship it out their 2nd warehouse) so they just ship it all 1 way, they just don't process the orders for Standard immediately so that there's actually a reason to get Prime.
Again, all of you are Prime members, you still get the option to downgrade your shipping to Free Standard Shipping and you can test this out yourselves at any time.
I think it works like the lines at Disneyland. It takes a while to get on a ride when the VIP members keep skipping to the front. What can you do though? They paid for the right to get on rides as fast as they can walk to the front of the line. You just have to wait until the VIP members get caught up enough for the rest of the line to move. Likewise prime members paid for the right to receive items within 2 days. Amazon is bumping them up in the queue to fulfill their part of that agreement. This causes the non-prime packages to languish in the warehouse until prime shipments are sufficiently caught up to give them some attention. Amazon can't treat them both the same because that would negatively affect prime shipments that they are obligated to ship within a very short time frame. If everyone is first in line, then no one is.
And I honestly would have less of a problem with Prime and it's price increase if they just said that instead of bogus claims about gas prices and shipping costs when in reality, it doesn't cost them any difference on the shipping end. Prime is just a premium to get them off their asses to pull your order, so I won't be rewarding their lazy practices any longer. If they just said it's to compensate for their growing library of digital content (like Netflix did) that would at least make sense.
I seriously think you're just stupid...
Again genius, feel free to test for yourself, until then you're just commenting ignorantly on the matter.
I don't think they'll let you do that. I don't know the specifics of their policy but it's something like you can't get the 30 day free trial if you've had Prime anytime in the last year. The worst part is they won't tell you before you sign up, they'll just bill you right away.
I've done this every year Prime has existed until I joined full-time over a year ago. They don't bill you up front, they spam you with banners saying try for 30 days free and at the end of the 30 days they will charge you automatically. I've even gone past the 30 days and been charged a few times and they reverse the charge immediately as long as you have not used Prime again after the 30 day trial period.