There was a time in my life when I would sit at my front window, waiting for the mail truck to creep down my block. A guy in brown shorts past his knees would half-jog up the lawn and set out an array of boxes and gray mailing bags on my porch and then hustle back to his van. As soon as the truck turned off my street, I went to town. Those boxes were sliced up on my kitchen table, and bubble wrap trailed me as I took my new whatever to wherever.
The convenience of buying things and them arriving within a day to my doorstep was just too good to pass up.
But one day in 2021, I changed.
I was fed up. Was it Amazon’s abhorrent labor practices that made me boycott? Was it their terrible quality knockoff goods? Maybe it was just a feeling of losing control of my own free will as a consumer. It was probably a bit of it all. I decided I was done. No more Amazon. In fact, I was going to try to avoid shopping online altogether.
Why was I shipping AA batteries to my doorstep? Is that not insane? Genuinely, what world do I live in where that is ever necessary? I wasn’t living in the damn Alaskan bush. I was in McHenry County, not so far from Chicago.
Is my single action doing anything to hurt the beast that basically runs the online shopping realm?
“No,” said Geoff Durso, an assistant professor of marketing in DePaul’s Driehaus College of Business. “But there are other things that matter.”
On one hand, “You get to feel like you’re more in control of your consumption habits,” Durso said.
But also, my life is so much more peaceful knowing grown adults aren’t peeing in bottles on my dime.
“If you were the 5 billionth customer at Amazon and they lost one, that’s nothing,” Durso said. “But what if it was a billion customers that shared a similar action?”
I am well aware that I am not the standard when it comes to the average college student’s shopping habits. For most people, Amazon is not the greedy behemoth that it is to me.
Senior Mishka Witkin tries to avoid Amazon when she can, but she said the prices and selection are hard to beat on college wages.
“I do find myself occasionally ordering things from Amazon when it’s something that I just cannot find in person,” Witkin said. “I’m balling on a budget, and my family has Amazon Prime.”
With over 300 million active users on the platform, Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world. Google any product, and the first three links will probably lead you to an Amazon listing. But why can’t we just order products directly from vendors? Do we need our AA batteries shipped a day faster? Or, heck, why not just get them from a family-owned hardware store? I swear there is one on each block in Chicago.
The global village of the internet that was promised to my millennial sister was pillaged and left to burn by corporate interests. Amazon has become the face of this, a vacuous force of corporate avarice. I will have no part of it.
Maybe my own actions aren’t doing anything to stop Amazon, but they are meaningful to me. I cannot contribute to mass amounts of plastic bubble wrap in our landfills or the fuel emissions that follow such a large company. If I couldn’t do this one little thing, what would that say about me? This is a personal test of strength, and so far, I’m winning.
If you are in a similar boat as I was when I stopped shopping from Amazon, I will say it gets easier. Maybe go find a local shop to buy your batteries, or hell, make some out of a lemon, idk.
My David-and-Goliath relationship with Amazon is a bust, but what if there were a billion Davids joining me to sling rocks at Amazon? Now we’re talking. I just need to find the others out there, wherever they are hiding.
Join me in my exploits.
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