If Amazon loses money on Prime why does the company keep pushing it?

Ten years ago this month, Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Prime to the world. “It’s simple,” he wrote in a letter posted to Amazon.com. “For a flat annual membership fee, you get unlimited two-day shipping for free.” It’s funny to look back and see how Bezos baked a little marketing sleight-of-hand right into the product launch—the shipping is not really free, after all, if you’re paying a fee. But one piece of what Bezos promised has held true for the past decade: For customers, Prime turns out to be dead simple. But if Prime is simple, it’s also weird. For the first six years, Prime was about shipping. Then, in 2011, Amazon decided to add a service that had nothing whatsoever to do with shipping: unlimited streaming video became another perk of Prime. At least “perk” was how I thought about it at the time, a little bit of icing to make the 2-day-shipping cake taste even better. But it also seemed random—another experiment in Amazon’s workshop of “misfit toys.”