Jeff Bezos can eat my shorts — for $51!

I was living in Vermont on Feb. 2, 2005, when Bezos introduced his “Prime” project, promising two-day delivery on certain orders if you paid $79 a year for Amazon Prime. I never signed up for it. I preferred then, as I do now, to buy from a bookstore, so that bookstores might survive, without having to sell vacuum cleaners, “beauty accessories” and so on.

But I did order a book on Amazon that year, as the only bookstores in my neck of the woods didn’t have what I wanted. Probably some subversive leftist tract. Or a good novel. Same thing.

Come the next month, Amazon billed my bank account an extra $79. Bezos got my bank card number from my order for one book.

Now, $79 in Vermont in 2005 equates to $131 today, according to Bezos’s co-conspirator Mark Zuckerberg’s Google, or, excusez-moi,  Meta.

A poor newsie, I could not afford that $79, and did not want to pay for something I did not order. So I called Amazon’s help line, which in those days did not require me to talk to a machine and suffer interminable Muzak before I was connected to a human being in India or the Philippines.

I told the young woman who answered my call, in 2005, that I did not sign up for Amazon Prime and did not wish to be billed for it, and to cancel that charge and refund me the money.

“Yes you did, sir,” she said.

“No I did not,” I said. Then I said — and here is the first part of our lesson — “May I speak to your supervisor?”

She did pass me along, whereupon our conversation was repeated.

“Yes you did.”

“No I did not. May I speak to your supervisor?”

Whereupon our conversation was repeated. With two exceptions.

The third one would not let me speak to her supervisor.

Whereupon I added a new element to our conversation.

“Do you know what a class-action lawsuit is?”

Whereupon the stubborn young woman put me on hold, to be subjected to — I don’t even want to call it music — torture is too strong a word, yet …

When she returned, she told me that the charges would be reversed, and I would no longer be subject to the whips and scorns of Amazon Prime.

That’s not exactly how she said it, but Honi soit qui mal y pense.

So that’s how I escaped Jeff “Chickenfeed” Bezos’ annual thefts via Amazon Prime.

Had I not noticed that greedy little goober rooting around in my wallet 20 years ago, he would have goosed me out of $1,580 by now, at 2005 prices, or $2,085 factoring in inflation.

Why am I telling you this? Because that’s a handy little phrase to remember: “Do you know what a class-action lawsuit is?”

Worked for me, once. Saved me thousands of dollars over the years.

Might work for y’all too, if you’re lucky — if Chickenfeed Bezos’ wage slaves capisce  what a class-action lawsuit is. And alert their supervisors.

Come to think of it, if I had filed that class-action lawsuit 20 years ago, and forced a settlement, it might have saved Chickenfeed Bezos a lot of money too — maybe not $2.5 billion, but purt near, I reckon.

(Courthouse News columnist Robert Kahn doesn’t know what’s good for him.)