Turns out having someone using my debit card fraudulently ended up saving me some money! In my inbox yesterday is an email with the subject line of “Amazon Prime Renewal Alert” and I open it to find Amazon telling me that they’re having trouble charging my renewal fee to the payment card on file — one I’d had to cancel after discovering $500 worth of iTunes charges made on it. Amazon dutifully provided instructions on how I could resolve that membership issue.

Trouble is I was totally blanking on what an Amazon Prime Membership is or that I had even signed up for it. Or that it was costing me money! So I logged on and sure enough I discovered that I’ve been a prime member since 2007, paying $79 a year for the privilege of getting free 2-day shipping and reduced overnight shipping on “millions of items!”

That would be megasuper awesome if I were buying “millions of items,” but looking back at my order histories over these last couple years (19 total)  I’m an occasional  Amazonian at best. I’m not going to do the math, but it’s highly doubtful if my membership paid for itself — or even broke even.

So  I’m left primarily wondering what possessed me to sign up for this program. Certainly I know an under-the-radar “auto renewal” kept it alive in 2008 — and would have done so this year had some bastards not hijacked my account a couple months ago, forcing its untimely demise.

So I guess I have them to thank because otherwise it wouldn’t have been brought to my attention that I was paying Amazon something for nothing.