Transplanting a Seattleite

The "free Prime for a month" only adds a few dollars to the cost if you figure it a straight $79/12 -- and reality could raise or lower that cost depending on how you calculate it (someone buys a tablet and then orders a bunch of stuff using 2 day prime shipping all in one month that they otherwise would have paid shipping on and spread out would be about the worst case; best case would be someone switches a whole lot of shopping they would have done elsewhere to Amazon to take advantage of free shipping). I keep joking that Amazon never, ever, ever gives anything away for free, but maybe it's not really a joke.

The Playbook has not moved a lot of product and RIM presumably paid suppliers to be available to them in the event they had a big success on their hands. I wonder if Amazon paid RIM to take over those contracts to get access to the parts stream, and then stripped the Playbook of hardware, pointed their ecosystem at it and called it good. Altho knowing Amazon, Amazon may have charged RIM for taking over that supply stream. I can't figure out quite how to find gossip on that.