If you have a Roku, Apple TV, or Amazon Firestick, or other Internet television device, you may have come across Amazon Prime Video Channels such as CBS All Access, HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and Starz. And you may have been tempted to try the 7-day free trial of one or the other of these channels, and now you want to know how to cancel that subscription before it actually charges you the $4.99 to $14.99 per month (per channel). Here’s how to cancel that Amazon Prime Channel subscription.

As the holiday season approaches, the low unemployment rate has employers – especially those involved with retail – scrambling to hire workers. Amazon has figured out a novel way to bring in more new employees: pay them more. And so, Amazon announced today that effective November 1, 2018, all U.S.-based Amazon employees, across the board, will be earning a minimum of $15.00 per hour.

In case you were wondering whether Amazon might be slowing down in any way – they’re not. In fact, in addition to their looking for the location for their second headquarters, they have announced that they are opening seven new fulfillment centers in August alone! Salt Lake City, Orlando, Las Vegas, Aberdeen MD, Shelby Township MI, and Troutdale OR are all seeing a new fulfillment center open this month, and Las Vegas has not one, but two new Amazon fulfillment centers opening in August. Separately, Amazon has also announced a new perk for Prime members: you can now place an order with Whole Foods through the Prime app, and it will not only be waiting for you when you arrive, but a Whole Foods team member will bring your order out to your car!

We’ve all done the in-store/Amazon price matching game: perusing the aisles of a nearby retailer and then whipping out our smartphones to see if we can find better online prices at Amazon. Well Target wants everyone to know how to get Amazon prices at Target: just ask. They have announced that they will match prices of Amazon, all year round. And Target is not stopping with Amazon, they will also price match qualifying merchandise to the prices advertised on the websites of Best Buy, Toys R Us {Ed. note: as of March, 2018, Toys R Us is closing for good}, and Walmart!

Last week it was announced that Amazon is acquiring online pharmacy PillPack for just under 1billion (yes, with a ‘b’) dollars. Most online pundits are comparing the Amazon PillPack deal to other players in the pharmaceutical industry. But quick, what other giant retailers offer furniture, clothing, household goods, groceries, and prescriptions? Right, Walmart, Target, and Costco.

Some legal experts are saying that it’s time for Amazon to be broken up into separate entities under antitrust laws, pointing to Amazon’s ripping off of vendors in the Amazon Marketplace as an example of Amazon’s reach having gone too far.

Amazon has just announced that Alexa can now use custom created skills – meaning skills created by you. Not only that, the Amazon Echo team has made it super easy for you to create those Alexa skills by launching Alexa Skill Blueprints (‘Alexa Blueprints’ for short). Alexa Blueprints are fill-in-the-blank templates that you edit online, in your Amazon account, which, once saved, you access through your Echo. It all sounds so peachy keen. But there’s a gotcha.

Remember Zork? Amazon has decided to breathe new life into adventure games by debuting an old-style interactive adventure game on a new-fangled device: the Amazon Echo. Actually, the Alexa adventure game, called The Magic Door, has been around since 2017, however Amazon has started pushing it a bit more recently.

Are Amazon Echo’s Alexa, Google Home’s, er, Google, and the iPhone’s Siri making people less polite in general, and making children less polite in particular? Given that none of these personal assistants require any manners, some fear that they are.

As Amazon continues to cross-pollinate with its new toy, Whole Foods, many have been looking forward to reduced prices at the Whole Foods checkout line, which they have started to see. Now, in addition to reduced prices, Amazon has announced that holders of their Amazon Prime Rewards Visa will get a 5% cash back bonus on all Whole Foods purchases.

Amazon has opened the first of its cashierless stores, Amazon Go, in Seattle. Amazon Go is basically a convenience store offering “grocery essentials” as well as ready to eat meals and, of course, their Amazon Meal Kits.

A little over a year ago we told you how to become an Amazon reviewer that gets free stuff in exchange for writing reviews. Then, in October of 2016 Amazon changed the rules and ever since then reviewers are no longer allowed to receive free or discounted things in exchange for writing a review (with books being the one exception). In fact, if a reviewer is caught receiving products in exchange for a review they can be terminated as a reviewer, with all of their reviews deleted. (That actually happened to their #1 reviewer, without Amazon giving him any explanation at all.)

There is a new condition known as ‘Amazon Guilt’. Oh, it’s not clinically recognized, but it’s starting to be socially recognized. It’s basically the guilt that one feels for buying things online from Amazon rather than from a local provider. Sort of the way some people may feel guilty about shopping at big box stores rather than smaller mom and pop shops.

We just received our Amazon Echo Look (it’s currently by invitation only), and here is our review based on our initial impressions. First and foremost, this thing is much smaller than we ever would have imagined. Second, it is a full-on Amazon Echo, with Alexa and all of her tricks packed into its diminutive body. And third, it’s both more, and less, of a privacy nightmare than we’d initially thought it would be. Lastly, it’s great for selfies!

We’ve talked about DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notices before, both how easy they are to file, and how easy it is to use them to falsify a situation and get content that you don’t like taken down, even if it isn’t actually violating somebody’s intellectual property rights such as copyright or trademark. Now, in a twist on this, it’s been proven that it is very easy to get Amazon to remove a product based only on a fake intellectual property claim from a fake law firm.